Page 8 of Resisting the Lumberjack

Selene

He brings the sandwich on Saturday. And Tuesday. And Thursday.

By the second week, I've stopped pretending I'm not hungry when he walks in. By the third, I've stopped pretending I'm not watching for his truck through the front window, listening for the crunch of tires on gravel that means it's him.

This is a problem.

Jake "Kidd" Danvers is twenty-seven years old. Twenty-seven. Did the math after Bev mentioned his age in passing, casual as only small-town women can be with other people's details. She said it like it was nothing. The number landed in my gut like a stone dropped into still water.

Eight years younger. Eight years of difference that shouldn't matter and wouldn't matter if I hadn't spent eight years married to a man who was twelve years older and spent every one of them teaching me that age meant authority. Meant knowing better. Meant his opinion outweighed mine by default because he'd been alive longer, seen more, understood the world in ways I couldn't yet.

Every time I look at Jake, I see a man who hasn't been ground down yet. Whose smile hasn't been trained out of him by someone who found joy inconvenient. Who reaches for happiness like it's his God-given right instead of something to be rationed and earned and carefully controlled.

I was like that once. Before Richard.

It's Tuesday again. Early October now, the third week of sandwiches and counter conversations and the slow, terrifying erosion of every wall I built on the drive from Portland. The mountains have turned. Maples along Main Street burning red and gold and that deep, heartbreaking orange that makes your chest ache with something that isn't sadness but lives right next to it. Morning air bites sharp, softens by noon, carries woodsmoke and decaying leaves and the distant buzz of a chainsaw from the ridge.

Restocking the tack wall when the bell jingles. Don't need to look. Know the sound of his boots on the plank floor. Know the cadence. Left foot slightly heavier than the right, a cowboy walk softened by years in timber.

"Delivery for a Ms. Selene. One turkey club, extra aioli, hold the attitude."

"I don't have attitude. I have standards."

"There she is." That grin in his voice. I can hear the shape of it without turning around. "Sandwich is getting cold. And I brought cider. Anna's been making it from the orchard apples. Pressed it herself. Life-changing stuff, Selene. I'm talking religious experience."

Turn around. He's at the counter with the bag and two mason jars of amber liquid, condensation running down the glass. Canvas work jacket over a thermal that clings to his chest in ways that suggest he either buys them a size too small on purpose or his chest is a size too large for standard retail. A fresh cut on his left forearm, shallow, already scabbed with dried blood. Sawdust in his curls, always sawdust in his curls. He looks like every autumn fantasy I've never admitted to having and don't plan to start admitting now.

"What happened to your arm?"

Glance down, casual. "Branch kickback. Cedar limb whipped around when I was bucking a log. Hazard of the job. Nothing."

"Did you clean it?"

"Selene. It's a scratch."

"Did you clean it."

Something shifts in his expression. Under the grin. Deeper than the grin usually goes. A place where the real Jake lives, the one who watches and waits and reads people with a precision that has nothing to do with being twenty-seven and everything to do with being him.

"Rinsed it at the spigot."

"That's not cleaning it." Around the counter before I've talked myself out of it. First-aid kit from behind the register, the one Bev showed me on day one in case anyone comes in with a wire cut or a kicked shin. "Sit down."

"I'm really fine..."

"Sit. Down."

He sits. On the stool behind the counter, which puts him lower than me for the first time since we met. Looking up with those brown eyes, that dumb gorgeous face, forearm offered like a gift he didn't know he was giving.

"Yes, ma'am."

Alcohol pad first. Then antibiotic ointment. Then a bandage, the good kind, adhesive and waterproof. His forearm in my hand. Warm skin, rougher than expected, calloused at the wrist where the saw vibrates through. Dense muscle underneath, the corded kind that comes from repetitive work, not a gym. The fine hair on his arm golden in the late-morning light.

Quick, careful strokes cleaning the wound. Clinical. Efficient. Professional. This is first aid, not intimacy. This is a woman applying a bandage to a man who was too careless to do it himself.

No flinch. No tension. Just watching me work with those quiet eyes.

"Always this bossy?" Quiet voice. Not teasing. Curious.