Page 114 of Take Me Home

“You’ve been…knitting?”

“Not well,” he said with a grunt.

She surveyed his work in her hands. Some of the lines were wobbly at one end, but by the middle, he’d gotten the hang of it.

“You’ve been knitting,” she repeated.

“Maggie said…” He shook his head, color tingeing his ears. “When she can’t do anything, she knits. You said you needed space. I’m not that great at just sitting around. So, every time I wanted to call you, I just…did that instead.”

“You wanted to call?”

He laughed, and it was tight, a bit incredulous. “Hazel. You came here with something to say, right? Can you please just say it?”

She set his knitting on the coffee table and searched mentally for the loose threads of her speech. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For leaving the way I did and turning off my phone.”

He nodded, face carefully neutral. She recognized the cautious restraint. It was in her, too, insisting she get a peek at his cards before she showed all her own.

But restraint had made them stop talking for a week. Restraint had allowed him to pack up his life and quit his job without her even knowing. If she kept clinging so tightly to caution, what else would she lose?

“I should have stayed. I would have been scared—I don’t know how not to be scared by all of this yet—but I should have been scared there,withyou. I should have slowed down and talked it through like you wanted. I was going to. On the drive back here. But then you made other arrangements, so I assumed…”

“Wait, you thought— No, I just bought a car.”

“What?”

He jutted a thumb over his shoulder, gesturing outside. “I didn’t need a ride because I bought a car.” At her stunned expression, he quickly clarified, “Not because I didn’t want to ride home with you. There was a sale. It happened kind of fast. And when you said you needed space, I wanted to take you seriously. Unless needing space is just something you say when you don’t want to say it’s over.”

“Oh.” This was the problem with gauging someone else’s level of self-disclosure and making sure she didn’t go any deeper herself. It was a game of reverse chicken where instead of sailing headfirst into danger, both parties eased off the gas, slowed to a crawl, fiddled with the radio and their mirrors, and waved the other on.No, you go.

But safetywasthe danger. One of them had to put everything on the table. And this time, it had to be her.

She stood because she felt ridiculous having this conversation eight feet across the room from him and seated when he clearly had no intention of leaving his perch by the door.

“I’m a coward,” she said, letting her hands fall with a slap to her thighs. “But I’m working on it. I talked to my dad. Reallytalked, like you said. It’s still weird, but I think one day it won’t be. Turns out, weird and uncomfortable is still better than nothing.”

His eyes softened, and he looked like he was going to say something gentle and encouraging despite the limbo they were in with each other, like this was what she’d come here to tell him. It wasn’t.

“Which brings me to you.”

“Weird and uncomfortable brings you to me? Notlovingthat segue.”

She huffed a laugh, grateful for the small mercy of his humor. Rounding the coffee table toward him, she ripped off the Band-Aid. “I was afraid to do this. But I’m more afraid not to. Because I already know not talking to you, not seeing you every day isawful. I want to remember the Lovebird Suite or that crazy telephone diner or getting pulled over for having the world’s largest Christmas tree or hooking up in abarnor getting stuck in a dress, and I want to know it allmattered. When I made you promise to give me the café if things changed between us, I didn’t want to lose my one easy, comfortable place in town. But life is unpredictable and weird and messy, and last week,everythingchanged, and now…it’s not theplacethat I need. I needyou.”

His eyes were steady on her, mouth a firm line.

“At the risk of stating the obvious—” She took a deep breath. “Ash, I lo—”

“I love you.”

She released a full chest of air. “You didn’t let me say it.”

He shuffled the last few steps forward so that their toes touched. He slipped one hand around to the small of her back, face finally released from its careful neutral mask. A smile played on his lips. “I knew where you were going with it. Didn’t want to leave you hanging.”

“I can’t believe you interrupted my big declaration. I drove all the way over here. I had a whole speech.”

“Sorry, was there more?”

“I mean…no, that was basically it. Unless you needed convincing.”

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