Page 40 of The Space Between
Halfway through, she lifts her eyes and says, “You looked him up, didn’t you?”
I meet her gaze. Steady. I reply, “Yup.”
She nods.
Then, quietly, almost to herself, “Good.”
After she leaves,I sit on my porch and repeat the number over and over in my head.
I won’t call him. I won’t give him the satisfaction of hearing my voice, but I want him to know he’s being watched. I want him to feel it the same way she feels it every time she locks a door or flinches when she hears tires on gravel.
I won’t go looking because this isn’t my war.
Not yet.
But if he shows his face on my river again, it’ll be over before it starts.
CHAPTER 8
Blakelyn
I waituntil the sky goes dusky and the heat starts to break before I knock on his door. Again… for the second night in a row.
I tell myself it’s just about dinner. We’re just two neighbors. I’m just making sure he eats more than beef jerky and beer, but I know that’s not true. And I think he does, too.
Something is between us. Something real.
He opens the door like he always does—half a second after I knock, no words, just that stare that makes my lungs forget how to work.
He doesn’t ask what I want. He doesn’t invite me in with words. He just steps aside and I walk in.
He has an old stereo playing low—something bluesy country and slow and raw enough it makes my chest ache. The kind of music you play when you’ve been hurting too long to cry about it.
I turn toward him, but he’s already moving to the kitchen, grabbing a beer from the fridge, popping the top like he’s done it a thousand times and today is just another day.
I want to say something. Thank him, ask if he’s okay. Say the words I’ve been circling since last night, when I saw the curve ofhis spine through his shirt as he stood guard outside my window all night. But I don’t because he wouldn’t answer. And maybe I don’t want him to.
Maybe I just want…this.
I make pasta.
He cuts up smoked sausage and throws it in a cast iron skillet.
We don’t talk. But we move around each other like we’ve done it before—quiet, comfortable, wordless.
I hand him a spoon. He passes me the salt.
It’s nothing and yet, it’severything.
We eat at the little two-top by his window.
I ask about river season—what it’s like in peak July. He tells me about crowds that leave beer cans in the trees and kids who jump from the rocks they’re not supposed to. He calls it the “idiot parade.”
I laugh. He doesn’t, but the corner of his mouth twitches like maybe he meant to. I ask about tubing. He asks about teaching. And when I tell him I’m scared of getting it wrong, he looks at me like I’m the only one in the room and replies, “You won’t.”
Just those two words. Simple. Steady. And it means more than a five-minute speech from anyone else ever could.
I help him clean up.
