Page 53

Eden

T he next day, Rhys brings me lunch.

The door of the shop chimes, and he’s standing there, two paper bags from Spa Day Sandwiches in his hand.

He hands me mine. “I had to guess,” he says. “I went with ham and brie, but?—”

“That’s perfect.”

“You can tell me to leave you alone. I can go eat mine on a bench on the green. Or—anywhere else.”

I shake my head. “You don’t have to leave.”

His eyes flash to mine.

“Today,” I clarify and bite my lip.

The corner of his mouth twitches.

We eat our lunches standing up at the front counter, me on one side, him on the other. I’m the only one in the shop, and even though I could sit in the back and ask people to ring a bell for service, I don’t like doing that. This is better.

It’s comfortable. It’s companionable. We talk about a vision I have for redesigning the shop and the interview he had with Matias’s law firm.

We don’t talk about us or the future.

He brings me lunch every day after that. Every day, he says, “You can tell me to leave you alone.”

Every day I say, “You don’t have to leave,” and he waits, and I add, “Today.”

I look forward to those lunches more than anything else in my life.

One day, he asks if I can leave the shop for a little while. I say yes. He hustles me to the car and drives us toward Bend. I can’t figure out where we’re going until he pulls up in front of Five Rivers Arts and Crafts.

“I haven’t seen your show yet,” he says.

He sets the pace as we walk among the quilts and their admirers.

He asks me questions about how they’re put together.

Good questions. Thoughtful questions. When we’re done, he tells me that my show is way better than the one we saw on the road, and that every minute of our trip was worth it, just to make this show happen.

“And for a hell of a lot of other reasons.” His eyes are steady on mine. “Happy to list them for you, when you’re ready.”

He drives me back to the store. At the door he says, “I’ve taken up a lot of your time already today. You probably don’t want me to come in for lunch.” He shows me the sandwiches in the cooler in his back seat.

“Don’t leave,” I say.

I almost forget to add, “Today.”

Move-in day comes for my new apartment. Mari and Kane help me move. Rhys shows up at nine with a box of doughnuts and a flat of coffees in hand. “I heard a rumor that you were moving today,” he says. “I came to see if I could help. You can tell me to leave you alone.”

“Don’t leave,” I say.

He waits.

I don’t say Today .

He fights back a smile. I do, too.

He’s good at moving furniture. For one thing, he’s extremely strong. But he’s also excellent at figuring out how to maneuver big things through small doorways and stairwells. He can rotate objects in his mind. He also goes out and gets us sandwiches at lunch and pizza and beer for dinner.

Over dinner, Kane wants to know what’s going to happen with Rhys’s granddad’s will.

Rhys sighs. “We’ve got till the end of the month. Most likely, we’re going to end up contesting. Hanna gets a call almost every day from a bride who wants to get married ‘as soon as possible’ but ‘not that soon.’”

“I guess that’s not super surprising,” Mari says. “No one wants to be rushed into marriage.”

“And no one should be,” Rhys says. “The last thing any of us wants is to give guys like me more work.”

But his tone is teasing, and I love how relaxed he seems as he moves toward his less-sharky life.

After dinner, Mari and Kane leave, but Rhys stays. He helps me make the bed and unpack enough kitchen things that I can muddle through breakfast tomorrow morning.

When he says he should go, I say, “Hug?” and he hugs me.

He’s warm and muscular and I missed everything about him—the smell of soap and deodorant and his musky sweat, the hardness of every plane of his body, the small exhalation he permits himself when I’m in his arms, like finally, finally, he can relax.

I remember how much I loved being the place he felt safe enough to lose control, and my whole body goes molten as those memories flood me.

I don’t want him to leave, but he does, and I don’t try to stop him.

He skips several days of lunch—he’s warned me this will happen, because he has to go back to New York to take care of some things—and I miss him.

When he comes back to town, he tells me he’ll pick me up at store-closing time and that I should have a change of clothes that can get dirty.

I try to figure out where we’re going. A hike? Canoeing?

“And Milo’s invited,” he says.

I wear jeans and an old T-shirt and climb into his new rental. He drives me to the outskirts of the town, to a low building in an industrial park, with an incongruous patch of grass planted in front of it.

Rush Creek Animal Shelter.

My heartbeat picks up. “Rhys?”

“No pressure,” he says. “But Natalie mentioned that there was a dog here she thought you were interested in adopting…”

I bite my lip.

“She’s still here. I checked. She’s a little older, so she’s the last one who hasn’t been adopted from the firefighter campaign. Now that Milo’s with you year-round— Are you crying?”

He wipes a tear from each of my cheeks with his thumbs.

We go inside and meet Cressie. She’s every bit as adorable in person as she is in her photos—a little smaller than Milo, ears akimbo, eager and panting as the woman working the shelter front desk lets her into one of the meet-and-greet rooms. She comes straight to me, puts her paws on my knees, and looks into my eyes with her big, soulful brown ones.

I’m smitten.

We bring Cressie outside to meet Milo. He comes cautiously out of the car and trots over to her.

She preens a bit. He sniffs around her face, then all around her entire body, then comes back and licks her snout.

She licks back, then ducks her head in the universal puppy sign for Let’s play .

And they do, on the grass outside the shelter, while Rhys keeps an eye on them and I finish up the adoption paperwork.

“Thank you,” I say when we get back into the car, Milo and Cressie on the back seat in a puppy pile.

“Making the world right, one dog at a time,” he says, grinning.

“Dissolving marriages and uniting dogs with their people since twenty-whatever.”

“I mean, there are worse job descriptions.”

A few nights later, he texts to asks how Cressie is settling in and if I think the dogs will be okay on their own for an evening.

Cressie has spent most of the day trotting around after Milo while he introduces her to all his favorite things—the faintly peanut-butter laced Kong he willingly shares with her, the smelliest part of the apartment’s small dog yard where the squirrels like to hang out, the spot in the fence where you can bark at the dog in the next complex’s dog yard till someone makes you stop.

When they tire themselves out, they plop down together on the rug and curl into nestling commas around each other.

I snap a photo and text it to him.

The dogs will be fine.

The phone rings a moment later. “Can I take you to dinner?” he asks.

“Is this a date?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“I think so,” I tell him.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s try it, then.”

We go to Jane’s Bistro, and he gets beef bourguignon and I get ahi tuna over jasmine rice and seaweed salad. Afterward he drives me back to my new place. He walks me to the door.

“You can come in,” I say.

He says, “When you invite me in, I want you to mean it.”

I can tell he reads my hesitation, and I read his disappointment, but it’s okay.

I think we both understand now about being patient.

And this slow trickle of pleasure is not so terrible.

It’s delicious, especially when he leans down and kisses me good night.

It’s a first-date kiss—a good one—sure and confident but also respectful, his mouth slanted perfectly, certainly over mine, his lips sealing the kiss off with a greedy nip that makes me gasp before he draws back and strides away.

I watch him go and want to call, Come back!

I want to invite him inside, and inside me, and I want it to mean what we both need it to mean.

A week after that, Sonya and Quinn have a long-overdue afternoon housewarming barbecue, and I go. I don’t know if Rhys’ll be there, but I hope he will.

It’s a great party. The house is packed to the gills—Hotts and their friends, Wilders and their friends.

Nan the baker is there, but Arthur Weggers isn’t, even though Sonya invited him.

Food and drink cover every surface in the house, and children run amok in the best possible way.

It’s noisy and fun, and I have to go out on the back deck to catch my breath because it’s so much.

“Hey,” a deep voice says.

I know exactly who it is, not only because I’d know that voice anywhere but because the feel of my pulse picking up and my skin tightening all over is just as familiar.

“Hey,” I say.

He comes up behind me. Close. Crowding me to the rail.

“You can tell me to leave,” he murmurs.

“Please don’t leave,” I say.

Rhys sets a line of kisses down the side of my neck, and I shiver and back myself up against him. He’s hard. Aroused. I wiggle against him. He turns me in his arms. Sets his mouth to mine. It’s not a first-date kiss. It’s hungry and needy. My whole body lights up; I’m completely here for it.

The door opens behind us, and we jump apart. “Cake time!” Hanna cries, and we follow her inside for dessert.

What I want is for us to leave, to leave this party and maybe the whole world behind, to go where it’s quiet and just us.

It hasn’t been long, but I’m starting to see what Mari meant. That forever is actually a string of today s. That no one can promise forever, but one today after another is a start.

That trusting when you have no reason to isn’t stupid—it’s brave.

It might hurt again someday, but it might be worth it in the meantime.