Chapter Three
~ Carter ~
Macon didn’t say a word. He just reached out—slow and deliberate, telegraphing the move like you would with a half-wild animal—and took my elbow. The grip was light, but I could feel his pulse in the way his thumb twitched, even through the layers of sweater and denim.
I braced for him to snap, to say something cutting or mean or even just final, but instead he steered me around the pickup and toward the battered farmhouse, where the porch lights still burned yellow against the encroaching dark.
The air was sharp and tasted like last year’s pine needles and distant hay. My chest hurt so bad I thought I’d throw up, or maybe that was just the heartburn again.
When we hit the porch steps, he let go. The separation left me colder than the wind ever could, but I followed him up, both hands dug deep into the kangaroo pouch of my too-big sweater. There was no way to hide the curve of my belly, not anymore, so I just curled around it and tried to look smaller.
He leaned against the porch railing, both palms splayed flat and white-knuckled on either side of his thighs. For a long minute, he didn’t look at me. Just stared out at the field, where the sun was bleeding away behind the fence posts and the only movement came from the silhouettes of goats head butting each other for fun.
“Are you going to yell at me?” I said, voice high and thin.
I hated how brittle it sounded.
He shook his head, jaw clenched so tight the muscle twitched under the stubble. “You think I’d ever yell at you?”
“You left before I woke up,” I said. “Most people yell at least once before they bail.”
He grunted, but his gaze didn’t waver from the horizon. “Wouldn’t have made it easier. For either of us.”
I hugged my middle and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “You want to get it over with? Say whatever you’re gonna say? I don’t think there’s a punch line I haven’t already run through in my head.”
He went silent again. The porch boards creaked when I leaned on the post for support. There was a spider spinning a frantic web in the eave above us, and I watched it to avoid looking at his face.
Finally, Macon said, “Why’d you come back?”
“Why’d you leave?” I shot back, the retort automatic, but it felt like lobbing a pebble at a brick wall.
He flinched anyway, and something ugly twisted in my gut.
I let the silence stretch until it felt like a bad prank, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to see if you’d actually stand in front of me and say you didn’t care. Maybe I’m just bad at taking hints.” I forced a laugh, but it didn’t sound right, even to me. “I’m not good at closure. Or beginnings. Or the stuff in between.”
His head bowed, chin almost touching his chest. “Didn’t think I was worth the effort.”
I looked at him, really looked. There was a tiredness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, a hint of gray in the stubble, and his hands on the railing were trembling.
“Are you okay?” I asked, softer now.
He barked a sound, halfway between a laugh and a cough. “Yeah. Sure. Peachy.” The knuckles of his right hand blanched as he tightened his grip on the rail. “Saw you out in the yard and thought I’d finally cracked. Hallucinated you, maybe. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Guess you’re not the only one,” I said, and for once, there was no bitterness.
He finally turned to look at me, and the weight of that stare knocked the wind out of my lungs. There was too much in it: anger, hunger, longing, a regret so deep it looked like it hurt to carry.
“I thought you hated me,” he said.
“I did. For about five minutes.” My arms loosened around my stomach, and I blinked hard. “Then I got busy. Turns out, having a baby takes up a lot of your time.”
His breath caught, a tiny hitch that wouldn’t register to anyone who didn’t know him as well as I did. “How far along?”
“Seventeen weeks. Give or take.” I shrugged. “I didn’t do it on purpose, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He nodded, eyes shuttered.
I rubbed a palm over the bump. “It’s okay if you don’t want—”
