"Morning." That smile. Jesus Christ, that smile. Like the sun personally showed up to ruin me.
"Coffee's ready."
She takes her mug. Two sugars. Sits on the counter because she refuses to use a chair when a counter is available. Swinging her bare legs, she watches me over the rim.
"You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The jaw thing. Where you clench it and stare at the tree line when you're thinking too hard." She takes a sip. "What's wrong?"
Everything. Nothing. You. This. The fact that I woke up this morning without the nightmare for the first time in fourteen months and the only thing that changed is you sleeping next to me.
"Nothing."
Her eyes narrow. She clearly doesn't believe me. "Beck."
"What are you doing here, Jada?"
The question comes out harder than I meant it to. She sets the mug down. The swing of her legs stops.
"What do you mean?"
"You've been here a week. Your car has gas. The road is clear. Your road trip, your soul cleansing summer, whatever this is. It's out there." Waving toward the window. "Not here."
Quiet. Long. The coffee maker drips.
"Are you asking me to leave?"
Yes. Because if you stay longer, I'm going to need you. And need is how I destroy things.
"I'm asking what the plan is."
She hops off the counter. The t-shirt rides up. Brown thighs, the curve of her ass peeking out. She crosses her arms and the warmth in her eyes cools by a few degrees.
"The plan was no plan. That's the whole point. The whole point of this trip was to stop living by other people's schedules and deadlines and expectations."
"So what, you just stay here indefinitely? On my mountain?"
"Your mountain." She laughs, but there's no joy in it. "I didn't realize I needed a permit."
"That's not what I said."
"It's what you meant." She grabs her shorts from the chair where she left them last night. Pulls them on under my shirt. The intimacy of watching her get dressed in my clothes while we argue makes my chest ache. "You wanna know the truth? Fine. I stayed because I like it here. I like the quiet. I like the coffee on the porch. I like your dog, who has more emotional intelligence than you do."
Duke lifts his head from the porch. Looks through the open door at both of us. Puts it back down.
"And I stayed because of you, Beck. Because you read poetry to me on the porch. Because when I cook, you eat standing at the counter with this expression on your face that says you haven't had a meal made for you in years. Because last night you held me after sex and your heartbeat slowed down under my cheek. And I thought, maybe this man doesn't actually want to be alone. Maybe he's just scared."
My hands grip the counter behind me. "You don't know what I am."
"Then tell me. Tell me why you quit. Tell me what happened that put you up on this mountain with canned soup and a dog you pretend you don't love."
No.
Because if I tell her, she'll look at me differently. She'll see the architect whose building killed people. She'll see the headlines, the lawsuits, the careful language of investigators saying "cleared" while the families of three dead people sat in the back of the room and wept.
She'll see what I see every night at three in the morning. And she'll either pity me or she'll leave. Both options are unbearable.
