Page 61 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"Not the whole thing."

"You should."

"I know."

"Doesn't mean you're wrong to wait a few more days. Just means you know it." He claps a hand on my shoulder, brief and heavy, the closest thing to reassurance Gunny generally allows himself, and heads back toward the bonfire without waiting for anything else, leaving me alone with the fire and the ticket in my pocket and eleven minutes left until the year turns over.

The crowd starts to thicken as the hour gets close, neighbors drifting in from the diner and the church hall and every side street feeding into the square, Dot's clock ticking down toward a midnight that isn't actually midnight yet, and somewhere in the shuffle Jenna's hand finds mine and stays there, easy and unhurried, like it's been doing it for years instead of months. I hold on and try not to think about the version of tonight where I'm standing here with the whole truth already told instead of folded up small in my chest, waiting for a flight that hasn't happened yet.

"Thirty seconds," Josie shouts, materializing out of nowhere with Eli in tow, both of them vibrating with the specific energy only midnight and unsupervised sugar can produce.

Dot's already counting down through a bullhorn she absolutely should not have access to, the whole square picking up the count somewhere around fifteen, and Jenna turns to look at me with the firelight catching gold in her eyes, and for one clean second I stop thinking about Marisol entirely, stop thinking about the flight and the list and everything I still haven't said, and just look at her instead, memorizing this exact version of her face like it might matter more than anything I'm flying out to fix.

"Five," the square says, together, ragged and off-beat and entirely unbothered by it. "Four. Three. Two."

"One," Jenna says, quiet, just for me, and then the fireworks go up over the square in a rush of gold and white that lights the whole crowd from above, and I kiss her the way I've wanted to all night, slow and certain, one hand at the back of her neck and the other pulling her in against me like the noise and the light and the whole loud town around us have gone somewhere else entirely.

She kisses me back like she means it, like there's nowhere else she'd rather be standing at the exact center of a year turning over into another one, and for those few seconds none of the rest of it exists, not the ticket in my jacket pocket, not the six years I've spent avoiding this exact conversation, not the woman three states over who's been waiting longer than anyone should have to wait for the truth.

She still doesn't know where I'm flying in three days, or why it might change everything, or how long I've been carrying this weight. She just knows I asked for a little more time, and she gave it to me without asking for anything back. Standing here with fireworks falling gold and silver over the crowd, I let myself have this one more night before I find out whether that trust survives what I'm bringing home to her.

29

JENNA

Rafe shows up after the twins are already down, later than usual, his bag packed and sitting by the door of his truck where I can see it through the window every time I glance outside, like it might disappear if I stop checking. Neither of us mentions it. He walks in smelling like cold air and the brewery, kisses me hello like it's any other night, and helps me finish the dishes, tomorrow sitting between us the whole time and neither of us naming it once.

"Eli fell asleep mid-sentence again," I tell him, drying a mug and setting it in the cabinet. "Something about aggressive steering strategies. I don't think he even finished the thought."

"He'll pick it back up in the morning. He always does."

"Josie made you a card. It's on the counter. Don't open it until you're actually gone. She made me promise to make you promise."

He picks it up, turns it over once without opening it, and sets it carefully back down exactly where it was, like even that small act of respecting her instructions matters to him more than I'd expect. "I won't."

"I'm not going to push for the rest of it tonight," I say, because I can feel the question sitting in my own chest, the one I've been swallowing for days now, and I want him to know that much at least. "I just want you to know that."

"I know." He sets the last plate in the rack and dries his hands on the towel hanging from the oven door, slow, like he's giving himself a second to find the next thing to say. "It's not that I don't trust you with it."

"I didn't think it was."

"It's that not all of it is mine to tell yet. There's someone else who gets to hear it first." He says it carefully, watching my face for whatever reaction might cross it, and I keep my expression as steady as I can manage, because whatever that means, I don't want him thinking he has to manage my feelings about it on top of everything else he's carrying. "I promise you'll have the whole thing when I'm back."

"I believe you." And I do, mostly, the kind of trust I've built slowly for people who've never given me a reason to doubt them. The part of me that still flinches at unexplained absences stays quiet tonight, because Rafe has earned more patience than my old fears want to give him.

He doesn't say anything else about it, and neither do I, and the silence that settles over the kitchen isn't the bad kind, the kind Derek used to manufacture and leave me stranded inside of. This is just two people standing in a quiet room together, both of us carrying something we're not ready to set down yet, and somehow that feels like enough for tonight.

"Come here," he says, and I do, crossing the few feet of kitchen floor between us and stepping into arms that close around me like they've been waiting all evening for permission. He holds on longer than a normal hello-goodbye hug would call for, his chin resting on top of my head, and I feel something in him that isn't quite steady tonight, a current running just under his skin that wasn't there yesterday.

"You're wound tight," I say against his chest.

"A little."

"Want to talk about it?"

"Not with words." His voice has gone rough and low, and he draws back just far enough to catch my eyes, something raw sitting there tonight that goes deeper than tomorrow's flight. "I want tonight to be about you. About us. I don't want to think about anything else for a few hours."

"Okay," I tell him, and I mean it completely, because I want that too, want to give him one uncomplicated thing before whatever's out there takes the rest of him for a while.