Page 42 of Mack

Mallory listened to his boots on the floor, the quiet click of the front door, and then nothing.

The room felt different without him in it. Bigger. She hadn’t noticed how much space he took up until it was empty of him.

She sat there for a moment, her chin still warm where his fingers had been, and tried to decide how she felt about all of it. It was too much to untangle. She didn’t try. She just sat with it how someone sits with something they’re not ready to put a name to yet.

“Please be careful,” she whispered to the empty room.

She got up and moved to the window in time to see his truck back out of the driveway, headlights sweeping across the yard before he pulled onto the road and disappeared. She watched the taillights until they were gone.

Copper Ridge. She knew that road. Everyone around here knew that road. A place that made the scanner light up on a bad night, and tonight the temperature was dropping, a hard freeze threatening the three towns.

“He’s a deputy,” she said quietly. “He does this every day. He knows what he’s doing.”

She said it twice more and went to put the kettle on, because she needed something to do with her hands and because the alternative was standing at that window watching a road that had nothing left on it to see.

Her phone was on the counter. She looked at it but didn’t pick it up.

But she didn’t go far from it either.

The kettle boiled and she made tea she didn’t really want, wrapping both hands around the mug just for the warmth of it. She stood at the kitchen counter and stared at nothing in particular.

She kept thinking about the way he’d tipped up her chin. The deliberateness of it. No urgency, no performance, just that slow press of his lips to her forehead like he had all the time in the world even when he didn’t.

Troy had never done anything slowly. Everything with Troy had been momentum, keeping her off balance, never quite steady enough to think straight. She understood now that it had been intentional. At the time she’d mistaken it for passion.

She set the mug down and pressed her palms flat on the counter.

Mack wasn’t Troy. She knew that. She’d told him as much that her head understood it even when the rest of her hadn’t caught up. But knowing something and feeling it were two different animals entirely, and she’d spent almost four years relearning the difference.

What scared her wasn’t that Mack might hurt her. What scared her was that she was starting to believe he wouldn’t.

Because that meant she had something to lose again. And she’d worked so hard, so deliberately, to make sure she never had anything to lose again.

She picked up her mug, moved to the couch, and tucked her feet under her. The wind had picked up outside, pushing at the glass.

Copper Ridge was ugly on a good night.

She turned the television on for noise, volume low, and waited for a call she wasn’t willing to admit she was waiting for. Her phone sat on the cushion beside her. She looked at it. Left it there.

“Get it together,” she said quietly.

By midnight Mallory gave up pretending she wasn’t watching the clock.

She washed her mug, turned off the television, checked her phone one more time. Nothing. She told herself it didn’t mean anything. He was working. Copper Ridge on a cold night with a bad wreck wasn’t the kind of call that wrapped up quickly. He wasn’t going to stop and text her from the middle of an accident scene.

She knew that but checked her phone again anyway, then set it face down on the nightstand because she was being ridiculous.

She went through the motions, showered, brushed her teeth, pulled on an old T-shirt, and got into bed and stared at the ceiling.

The wind had picked up outside, pushing hard against the windows now. She thought about Copper Ridge, those zigzags in the dark, ice forming on asphalt that was already treacherous on a dry day. She’d driven that road in daylight and gripped the wheel the whole way.

She turned onto her side.

Mack knew what he was doing. This was just another call.

She turned onto her other side and thought about him sitting beside her in the dark, his shoulder against hers, patient, steady and not asking for anything she wasn’t ready to give.

She thought about Troy, as she always did when she caught herself feeling safe. Like a reflex. Like her brain couldn’t let her have something without immediately reminding her what the last something had cost.