She didn't stir. She was asleep.
Myself, mostly. For the record. Because the logistics problem was real and I was the one who'd have to work it out, and it helped to get the words out, even if she couldn't hear them.
She made a small noise against my collarbone. The cicadas had finally quit. Somewhere east of the property a horse stamped, and I lay there listening to her breathe and trying to figure out how a man tells a woman he is not going anywhere when she has only known him three days.
Chapter Five
Jules
I WOKE UP AT SEVENin the morning in Dutch’s room with his arm across my waist, and my internal alarm system hadn’t shown up for work.
This was notable. The alarm system was generally reliable: the part of me that activated when I woke somewhere unfamiliar, that ran a rapid inventory of my surroundings and began identifying the exits before I’d finished opening my eyes. It’d been with me since my first solo work trip at twenty-three. It’d never once taken a personal day.
I lay there and waited for it.
It didn’t come.
Dutch was already awake, his breathing too deliberate for sleep, the measured pace of a man who’d been lying there a while and had made a discipline of it. I turned my head. He was on his back, eyes at the ceiling, my name not yet in his mouth. The east window had been cracked all night; morning light was coming through it at a low angle, hitting the far wall in a warm stripe. My camera wasn’t in this room. That was probably fine.
He met my eyes when I turned. The expression said he’d been doing this for some time and saw no particular reason to be embarrassed about it.
“Morning,” he said.
“How long have you been awake?”
“A while,” he said, in the way of a man keeping the specifics to himself.
Huh, I thought.This is different.
He reached across me and picked his white dress shirt off the floor — the Saturday shirt, the one he’d started the evening in before everything changed — and held it out without ceremony.
I took it — the cotton warm from the floor — and put it on. He’d rolled the cuffs twice and I left them that way.
“There,” he said.
“Here,” I said.
He held that look for a beat longer than was strictly informational and then got up to find his own clothes.
DOWNSTAIRS, MEEMAWwas already at the kitchen table with her coffee and her thoughts, in a vintage bluebonnet shirtwaist dress that had been ready for this morning, and every morning, for about thirty years. She looked up when I came in. She took me in: Dutch’s white dress shirt, cuffs rolled twice, bare legs. She took in Dutch, two steps behind me in dark jeans and a chambray work shirt, boots in hand.
She turned back to the window.
She stood up, went to the coffeepot, poured two mugs, set them on the counter, and went back to her chair.
She did not say a word. She did not look at either of us again. She picked up her mug and looked out at the back field with the absorbed attention of a woman with a great deal of interesting business of her own to attend to.
I’d been managed by experts in my career. I’d navigated socialites, their lawyers, their Pomeranians, and one memorable situation involving a trained falcon and a penthouse in Midtown.I’d never in my life been managed this thoroughly by a woman who was technically doing nothing at all.
I picked up my cup. Dutch picked up his. We didn’t look at each other.
MeeMaw took a sip and remained fascinated by the window.
Dutch set his mug down after a while and said: “Come see Pancake before brunch.”
I looked at him.
“The old horse,” he said. “He’s been out in the pasture all weekend. He’ll want to meet you.”
