“You barely shouted at me. And even if you did, it’s not like I didn’t deserve it. I did a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have. Stuff that shall remain nameless, of course, but that I would very much like to make it up to you for, even if it cannot be named. Like with maybe a free hot chocolate every time you come into the store. Or, you know, if you don’t really want to be in my store again I could just, like, buy you some donuts, and then leave them on your porch. Unless your porch is too close to being in your space again, in which case we could come to some other arrangement. A parcel in a secret place in town that only you and I know about, possibly, or, or—” she said, grasping excitedly for the next potential piece of this excellent plan.
Until she realized that he had gone very, very quiet.
And that she had been talking for a long, long time. Babbling, even, in a way that usually got her into trouble with actually chatty people. But he was not chatty at all. He was taciturn and emotionally closed off, and yet somehow she had still spewed a million words all over him.
No doubt he was on the verge of jumping out of the truck.
At the very least she expected extreme discomfort. Those big hands of his tight on the wheel, his gaze fixed firmly and pointedly on the road, muscle ticking in his jaw. Like that time they had satnext to each other, she thought. Only when she finally dared to shoot a fearful glance at him, she got something even more disturbing.
He was looking right at her.
Fully staring, eyes wide, mouth hanging a little open. Like the road didn’t matter, where they were going didn’t matter,nothingmattered. The only important thing was being baffled by what she had said, and staring at her until it made sense.
She even thought she saw the moment it clicked for him. His gaze slid inward, and then he looked back at the road with a kind of full-bodied weariness, one hand already palming over his face. “Oh man, you’re not even kidding around. You’re actually trying to say sorry to me.Youare trying to say sorry tome,” he said. As if the idea of things running in that direction was so preposterous he didn’t know how to handle it.
Even though it wasn’t preposterous at all.
“Well, yeah. Because that’s how things should be, based on what happened.”
“What happened was I fuck—I fudged up, and you were real nice about it.”
Did he just stop himself cursing in front of me, she thought automatically, wonderingly. She couldn’t focus on that, however. She was too busy trying to grapple with the fact that he didn’t want to murder her for her crimes against his personal space. That maybe he didn’t even think she’d done anything wrong at all.
He thoughthehad.
Even though men never thought that.
“I don’t think that can be true. I mean, I broke into your house,” she said.
But he just shrugged her off. He snorted. “You didn’t break in. I just don’t understand stuff like doors.”
“Okay, but then I dropped your lovely things.”
“Calling my things lovely is a huge and very polite stretch. Not to mention discreet of you, considering we both know what it actually was. We both know it was a crocheted tea cozy. You don’t have to spare me the humiliation of acknowledging that, it’s fine. I’m a grown and very normal man, I can take it.”
“But I don’t want you to take anything. I just want you to be okay.”
She blurted the words out before she even knew she felt them. Then flushed at the way they sounded, and braced for his reaction. She imagined one big fist out, pulverizing such sickly and pitying sentiment into paste.
And sure enough, he shot another look at her.
A very suspicious and scrutinizing look, of the sort that made the skin under her arms prickle and her heart jolt in her chest and her hand want to reach for the door handle.Maybe I can jump out of the car while it’s still moving before the mortification of being so soft with him kills me, she thought frantically. But just as she did, his scowl seemed to soften. His eyes widened.
They even took on a kind of haunted sheen.
Like she’d said something that hit him hard in the heart somehow. Too hard, maybe, because he turned back to the road without saying a thing. He let the truck eat up the feet and then the miles, in complete silence. All the way past Horner’s Grove, the farmers market, the gas station that did the good hot dogs on Highway 72.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, until she was just about bursting to speak.
She even thought he might have sensed it, because that was when he broke.
“Kid, I will be okay when you don’t think you’re at fault here. When you don’t think you made me unhappy.Imade me unhappy, all right? I am always the one who makes myself unhappy, and I know it. Come on, you’ve got to know I do. I screw shit up so badly,all the time, constantly, especially with a girl like you. All nice and soft and sweet like you are, I don’t know what the fuck to do with that. And that’s fine, I’ve made my peace with it, whatever. Just don’t you ever say sorry to me, got it?” he said, slow and rusty sounding at first, as if he had no idea how to talk like this at all. But by the end the words were coming thick and fast, and his voice was so firm she couldn’t mount the denial she wanted to. He’d practically drilled his sincerity into her.
Her heart was hammering under the weight of it.
All she could get out was a soft “Yeah, I got it.” Instead of the ten baffled questions she wanted to ask about why he thought she was sweet and soft now.How has that happened, she thought, as he carried on. He jabbed a finger at himself.
“Isay sorry toyou,” he said, while she trailed in his wake.
