Page 17 of Oops I Fell For The Cowboy Next Door

"Rawlins men have one love language, sweetheart. They fix things for the people they can't stop thinking about." She pauses. "Is she staying?"

"She signed a year lease."

"I didn't ask about the lease. I asked if she's staying."

I look toward the cabin. The kitchen light is on. She's awake. Drinking the coffee I made her. Sitting in her kitchen with the fire I built going in the fireplace.

"I don't know yet."

"Then give her a reason to."

We hang up. I finish the barn chores with my mother's words rattling around in my skull. Give her a reason to. Like it's that simple. Like you can just hand someone a reason to uproot their life for a man who eats standing at his kitchen counter and hasn't had a conversation longer than three sentences in a decade.

But I fixed her step. And she gave me her word. And last night she whispered stay, and I stayed, and this morning I built her fire before the cold could touch her.

Maybe reasons aren't always words. Maybe sometimes they're lumber and split firewood and coffee with milk left on a nightstand.

The walk back to her cabin takes five minutes. I knock on the front door instead of just showing up. Seems important. She opens it in my flannel. My actual flannel, the one I left on her bedroom floor last night because it got mixed in with the pile. It's too big on her, sleeves hanging past her fingertips, hem hitting mid-thigh.

"That's mine," I say.

"It is." She holds out a mug. Coffee. With milk already added. "This is yours too."

I take the mug. Step inside. The fire is crackling. Her laptop is open on the kitchen table with something colorful on the screen. The cabin smells like coffee, like warmth, like the particular combination of pine and soap that is specifically, entirely her.

"You built my fire this morning," she says.

"Yeah."

"And made me coffee."

"Yeah."

"And left before I woke up."

"Had to feed the cattle."

"But you came back."

I look at her. Standing in my flannel in her kitchen with bare legs and messy hair, holding a mug she made for me, and the expression on her face is open. Soft. No teasing, no sass. Just a woman asking a man whether he came back.

"I'm always gonna come back."

The words are out before I can stop them. Raw. True. Terrifying in their simplicity.

Her eyes go bright. Wet. She blinks it away fast, takes a sip of her coffee, but the corner of her mouth is trembling.

"You wanna sit down?" She nods at the kitchen table. "I need to finish this logo, but you can stay. If you want."

I sit. At her kitchen table. While she works.

For two hours, I sit in her kitchen drinking coffee while she designs logos on her laptop. She talks while she works. Random, stream-of-consciousness commentary about fonts and color theory and a client in Fort Collins who wants a bear holding a beer stein, which she thinks is overdone but the client loves bears, so bears it is.

I don't understand any of it. I don't need to. Her voice fills the room the way the firelight fills the corners, steady, warm, reaching places that have been dark for a long time.

At one point, she turns her laptop toward me and asks which shade of green I prefer for a label. I point to the darker one. She nods, turns the screen back, and says "Good eye, Rawlins" without looking up.

Nobody has asked my opinion on anything besides cattle feed in years.