She paused again.
“Every part of me.”
He smiled a slow smile. “There you go, then,” he murmured. “And I haven’t known a single part of you to lie yet.”
She sighed contentedly and sank back down on her pillow next to him, and stared up at the ceiling of her beloved little cottage. It suddenly seemed brand-new.
He yawned and stretched and slid his arm gently out from beneath her. “I’ll go make coffee. Or do you want tea?”
“Coffee today, I think. It’s in the freezer. I ground up the beans. You’ll see it. French press is on the counter.”
He slid out of bed and utterly unselfconsciously and nudely strode toward the kitchen.
And as she drowsily listened to the homey sounds of him clinking around in the kitchen, she thought about what he’d said about lenses.
She was beginning to understand that J. T. was more like her than she ever dreamed: that his early life may have toughened him up, but it had also sort of shaved a fine layer away from whatever protective coating humans usually wore out into the world. So that he saw everything a little more acutely. Felt things that much more strongly.
This, too, was part of why he was a brilliant actor.
And she was now someone who saw beauty and poignance in beat-up chairs and dying plants. Whophysicallysuffered when she witnessed someone being hurt and bullied. After Jeff, all the painful poignant things were going to hurt a little bit more from now on. Because she’d been extra tenderized. But the good things, the beautiful things, would feel that much better, too.
She had the kind of lens that allowed her to see J. T. as a person—a real person, with hurts and flaws and vulnerabilities—and not just a series of Google results, right from the beginning.
Maybe that’s why she’d been so squirrelly to begin with.
Maybe she’d sensed he’d be able to see her clearly.
When she hadn’t yet been really ready to look at herself. She wasn’t sure how ready she was now.
“I think your mountain lion wants something to eat,” he called.
“His food is in the little cans in the cupboard next to the fridge. His dishes are up next to it.”
She listened, lulled, to cupboard doors opening and closing, then heard the little “pop” of a tin being opened.
“Oh, wow, buddy, this stuff is rank,” he said frankly to her cat. “You really going to eat that?”
She smiled.
And then she luxuriously stretched all of her limbs at once, as if testing to see whether the sides of her box had really been kicked down.
They had toast and coffee and each other for breakfast, all in the kitchen. Britt had never done it in a chair before, but J. T. couldn’t resist untying her robe the same way he’d untied her halter top a few days ago, and he was pleased with the naked woman he found inside, and one thing led to another, and she did get to be on top. Like a cowgirl. Scandalous and thoroughly satisfying.
“Let’s go swimming. I know a place,” J. T. murmured suddenly. Against her sweaty neck.
“You seem to know alotof places.”
He laughed. “Sweetheart, we’ve only just begun. But this one kind of came with my new house.”
So she got into her bikini, a faded red-and-white Hawaiian print number, and they chucked her Kindle and towels and a thermos of iced tea into a big tote, and then he drove them to his new house.
They were quiet on the way. They listened to Wilco on the stereo instead of talking.
He wasn’t quite sure why he’d asked for the truth about her husband, one that he’d already pretty much guessed. Only that he’d somehow known she’d needed to be divested of that secret before she could allow herself to be fully known.
And he wanted to know her. With the same sense of restless hunger and promise he’d felt when he’d looked up at the hills of Hellcat Canyon. The sensation felt oddly like... freedom, maybe? When in his experience women had been anything but.
He knew what it was to have your world shattered. It happened when he was eight, when his mom left and at ten, when she died. And he got used to living out various trials and embarrassments in the public eye. It gave a person a sense of perspective. Acting was how he’d escaped or soothed himself from all of that. Becoming a different person for a time was pretty liberating.
