Page 114
The call ends, but I keep holding the phone for another few seconds before setting it beside the report I haven’t been reading. This is exactly the problem.
Kell having his own life should make the situation clearer. It should draw a clean line between what he needs from me and what he chooses for himself. Instead, he goes out into the world, makes his own decisions, solves his own problems, and then calls because he wants to tell me about all of it.
Watching him build a life of his own shouldn’t make me feel closer to him. It does.
I leave my desk and walk to the window. Four years ago, I knew what my life was supposed to look like because I’d already built it. Dave and I had routines shaped by decades together. We knew how weekends worked, which bills each of us handled, who remembered birthdays, who bought toothpaste before we ran out.
After he died, I had to learn how to occupy all that space alone, and I did. I became good at it.
Then Kell arrived with paint on his fingers and boots by the door and questions about everything, and somehow I started making room without deciding to. That’s what scares me. Not because he’s doing anything wrong, but because it feels too easy.
I return to my desk and sit down. Amazing sex isn’t a life plan. Neither is feeling happy when his name appears on my phone. Dave and I built something steady over years, learning each other’s habits, limits, tempers, and silences. Kell and I have known each other for less than a month.
Whatever this is, intensity isn’t the same thing as permanence.
I can put the boundaries back where they belong. Tonight, Kell can sleep in the guest room again. Not as punishment and not because I regret last night. I don’t. But sleeping together changed the shape of things in a way sex never did. Waking up with his hand under mine made everything feel too much like a life instead of an arrangement we’re still figuring out.
The guest room was working. We had boundaries.
And boundaries feel safer than admitting I might be building something I could lose. I buried Dave after twenty-five years of knowing exactly what he meant to me. Then Megan died with plans for Saturday still sitting in front of her as if later were guaranteed.
Maybe that’s the part I don’t want to examine. Letting someone matter this much means accepting that there may never be enough time. The guest room can’t fix that. But for tonight, I can still put some distance back between us.
I pick up the report and make it through two pages before my mind wanders back to his voice saying, I signed the lease. His name in his own hand for the first time, learned because he wanted something for himself.
I’m proud of Kell. I can care about him. I can want him. None of that has to become love.
I loved Dave. I know what love feels like.
I lower my eyes to the report and make myself read the next sentence.
I’m never going to love him.
Chapter Eighteen
Laura
By early October, Hollis Springs has started to change color around us. The maples along the streets are showing red and gold now, enough that I notice them on the drive home from work.
Wednesday night, I make it all the way through dinner before proving to myself that sex is still the easy part.
Kell is rinsing his plate when I come up behind him and put my hands on his waist. He pauses for half a second, then turns.
“Hi,” he says.
I almost laugh. “Hi.”
He sets his hands on my hips, but he waits for me to decide what happens next. I like that more than I should.
So I kiss him.
Kell answers immediately. His mouth opens under mine, one hand moving up my back while the other stays at my hip. A rough sound leaves him when I press closer, completely unguarded, and heat moves through me before I can do anything sensible with it.
This I understand. Wanting him. Being wanted. Bodies are considerably easier than feelings and thoughts.
I take his hand and lead him upstairs.
Fresh green has pushed through the brown willow along his wrists, and his resonance is already pulsing low in his chest, strong enough that I feel it when I put my hand there.
