Page 16 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

I made pasta. Nothing fancy, just garlic, olive oil, cherry tomatoes, fresh basil from the little plant on my windowsill, and enough parmesan to qualify as a health hazard. It was the meal I made when I wanted comfort without effort, the thing I cooked when the day had been long and I needed something that felt like a hug from the inside out.

“Can I help?” he asked.

The question surprised me so much that I almost dropped the colander. I turned to look at him. He was sitting forward in the chair, his forearms on the table, watching me with an expression that was, for once, unguarded. Not smiling, because Sawyer didn’t smile, but not scowling either. Something in between. Something waiting.

“You can chop the tomatoes,” I said, sliding the cutting board and a knife across the counter.

He stood and moved to the counter beside me. In the small kitchen, this meant we were close. Very close. My shoulder was level with his bicep, and every time one of us moved, the space between us shrank and expanded like breathing.

He chopped tomatoes with the precision of a man who used his hands for everything. Clean, even cuts, the knife moving in steady, measured strokes. His hands were large and scarred, callused across the palms and knuckles, and watching them perform this small, domestic task, cutting cherry tomatoes in my tiny kitchen, did something to me that I was absolutely not going to think about right now.

“You’re good at that,” I said.

“I cut wood for a living.”

“Right, but wood doesn’t bleed when you mess up.”

“Neither do these. They’re tomatoes.”

Was that… was that a joke? I looked at him. His face was straight, his eyes on the cutting board, but there was something playing at the corner of his mouth. A twitch. A ghost of something that, on any other person, I would have called amusement.

“Did you just make a joke?” I asked.

“No.”

“You did. You made a joke. I heard it. I was here.”

“Chop your garlic.”

I grinned so hard my cheeks hurt.

We cooked in tandem, moving around each other in the narrow kitchen with the kind of easy coordination that shouldn’t have been possible for two people who barely knew each other. He passed me the tomatoes without being asked. I handed him a glass of water when I noticed he was thirsty. At one point, I reached across him for the olive oil and my hand brushed his arm, and neither of us flinched. Neither of us pulled away.

The pasta came together in twenty minutes. I plated it, carried the bowls to the table, and we sat across from each other in the golden light of the string lights and ate.

He ate the way he did everything: quietly, thoroughly, with a focus that bordered on intensity. I watched him take the first bite, watched his eyes close for half a second, watched his shoulders drop by a fraction.

“Good?” I asked.

“It’s fine.”

“Your face says it’s more than fine.”

“My face doesn’t say anything.”

“Your face says a lot, actually. You just don’t know it.”

He looked at me across the table. Those green eyes, dark and deep in the warm light, studying me with something I couldn’t name. Not suspicion, not annoyance, not the careful blankness he wore like armor. Something rawer than all of that. Something that looked, if I tilted my head and squinted, like gratitude.

We talked while we ate. Not about anything heavy. Not about Jimmy, not about the sidewalk, not about whatever demons lived in the spaces he kept locked. We talked about the sawmill, about the lumber order that had come in wrong and the new blade he’d been considering. I told him about Marcus and the crayon-up-the-nose incident, and he’d shaken his head and said, “Kids are insane,” with such genuine bafflement that I’d laughed until I wheezed.

He asked me how I’d ended up in Pinewood Ridge, and I told him about finishing my teaching degree, seeing the job posting, driving out to the mountains for the interview and falling in love with the town before she’d even finished the tour. He listened the way he always listened, with his whole body, his eyes steady on mine, his hands still on the table.

“You like it here,” he said. Not a question.

“I do. It feels like… I don’t know. Like the place I was always supposed to find.”

He looked at his plate. Pushed a tomato around with his fork. Said nothing. But the silence was full, weighted with something that felt like agreement.