Page 32 of The Exit Strategy
“I should go,” she murmurs, but she doesn’t stand. The fabric of her sweatshirt grazes more of my skin, as though we’re both pressing to the other millimeter by millimeter.
“Yeah,” I agree, but slide my elbow closer by half an inch.
Our breathing syncs. The wind picks up, and she shivers once—an involuntary shudder that presses her elbow into my bicep, and that’s what finally breaks us.
She stands.
I follow.
The distance between us returns like a tide rushing back in.
“Good night, Cole.”
Not Mr. Whittaker.
Cole.
It’s just my fucking name. But she says it in the voice she used to use—soft and unguarded. It lands right behind my ribs where I can’t reach to pull it out.
It’s lodged there now. A cramp that reminds me she’ll never be out of my system, no matter how noble I try to be.
“Good night, Junie.” It’s hoarse, deep, wrecked.
She pauses on the first stair at my words but doesn’t turn around. Then she’s gone, swallowed by the dark stairwell to her apartment, and I’m alone on my porch with lanterns and the quiet devastation of a woman who just looked at my work and saw the man I’ve tried to shield her from.
Tomorrow I’ll add lighting to her stairs while she’s working.
Tonight, I’ll fix the garden pathway. Something that took her three seconds to spot while I’ve missed it for six months.
In my office, I sit at my drafting table and stare at the other set of blueprints—the ones I can never show her—and for the first time, the walls of her dream house feel less like a monument to what I lost and more like a confession I don’t know how to make.
Her bedroom light turns on, and my gaze flies to the source as though I have no control.
I’m in so much fucking trouble.
The thought arrives with the weight of everything I’ve been outrunning for almost a decade. It’s not new. It’s not even surprising. It’s just finally, devastatingly honest.
She’s building something here.
Something stable.
Something I already almost took from her once.
Tonight, when her shoulder touched mine, it grew rootsso deep I can feel them wrapping around the foundation of every wall I’ve built.
So I turn off my drafting lamp, but I don’t leave. I sit here, staring across the driveway, because her light is still on, beckoning me with whispers of what could have been if only the choice had been mine to make.
7
HIS KITCHEN, MY RULES
JUNIE
Routines,I’m finding out, have a way of forming in The Haven whether you want them to or not.
Every morning now, I enter Cole’s home and make coffee in his kitchen because the machine in my apartment produces something that tastes like mold and his kitchen has the good stuff—a French press, whole beans that wake you up with their scent alone, and a grinder that makes so much noise an aircraft carrier could take off next to me and I wouldn’t hear it.
Do I also enjoy the possibility of waking Cole up before he’s ready? Yes. Yes, I do.
