They headed back up Main Street, Gage gallantly carrying the to-go bag from Betty’s. It was Cady’s leftovers and she’d tried to argue that she should thus be responsible for carrying it, but he’d pointed out that his manly man pride had already taken a beating when he’d let her pay for lunch, so she surely couldn’t expect him to have her carry a bag while he was empty-handed.
He’d cheerfully ignored her not-so-quietly muttered comments about male chauvinistic pigs. He’d come to the firm conclusion in the last few weeks that teasing Cady was one of the highlights of his life, and he wasn’t about to give up that pleasure now.
“So, how long have you known Chloe and Dawson?” Cady asked as they walked.
“Only since I moved back to Sawyer myself,” he said, scratching again at the stubble on his jaw. At this point, he wasn’t sure if he was more excited about going back to work tomorrow so he could get back to baking, or so he could shave and not feel like he was giving in.
He hated shaving. He wasn’t going to do it on his days off, dammit.
But he was quickly starting to realize that he might hate stubble even more.
“I didn’t know the story for a long time,” he continued, “and I probably still don’t know most of it, but somehow, Chloe ended up here, pregnant with Tommy, and totally alone.” They paused to look both ways, and then darted across the street back towards their stores. Gage glanced up at the Muffin Man Bakery storefront, automatically noting the smudges in the corner of the far-left window and making a mental note to tell Sugar to clean it up, and then his brain was off to the races and he was wondering how sales were going that day and if the latest teenage hire was actually going to show up or not this afternoon and…
Today is my day off, dammit. I will not worry about the bakery. Sugar has everything under control. The smudge will still be there tomorrow. I can clean it then. If there are any problems, she’ll come find me.
“So anyway,” he said, forcing himself to keep going, “our town vet, Adam Whitaker, helped her give birth on the side of the road in the middle of a blizzard – that’s a story you should hear her tell sometime – and she’s been here ever since. Years later, Tommy’s dad, Dawson, showed up and they patched things up. Dawson started a horse breeding ranch outside of town out at the old Miller place, and they seem plenty happy now.”
Cady nodded thoughtfully as they stopped in front of the smoothie store. Just as she was digging into her purse to pull her keys out, though, she froze, one hand inside of her purse, jerking her head up to stare into the sky, a look of sheer panic on her face.
“What? What?” Gage asked, twisting to look upwards, instinctively readying himself to defend her from whatever would cause her to look like that. But all he could see was a little two-seater plane flying overhead – probably a crop duster on his way to a new field.
Totally confused, he looked back down at Cady, searching for an answer from her on what the hell was going on, but she was shaking, her purse falling off her shoulder, spilling everything out onto the ground but she didn’t notice. She was drawing in on herself, wrapping her arms around herself and rocking, moaning with pain.
Shit, shit, shit.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Gage scooped up the keys off the sidewalk and after only two false tries, he got the right key in the lock and shoved Cady inside. Whatever the hell was going on with her, the last thing she needed was for the whole town to witness it.
She was already the big city girl with more money than sense, who was stupid enough to buy the most beat-up, piece-of-shit real estate in town.
She was already the big city girl who killed the electricity to the whole town by hiring the worst electrician in living memory.
She didn’t also need to be the big city girl who had full-blown panic attacks over nothing at all.
He grabbed her purse, still laying on the ground, and haphazardly shoved the items back in that’d fallen out, and then slipped inside the smoothie store, shutting and flipping the deadbolt behind him before dropping the leftovers from Betty’s, Cady’s purse, and her keys on the floor. He could put them nicely up on the counter later. Right now, he had someone falling to pieces in front of him, and absolutely no idea why.
“Cady?” he said hesitantly. She was shaking harder than ever, her teeth chattering, and she was rubbing her arms incessantly, up and down, up and down, trying to soothe herself, backing towards the wall until her back touched it and then she began sinking, sliding down the wall.
“Hold on there,” Gage said, and pulled her up again, snuggling her against his chest. He didn’t want to see Cady curled up on the floor – it seemed like it was too close to her giving up on the world. He wouldn’t allow her. If she had to borrow some of his strength to make it through…whatever this was, then he had plenty to lend to her.
He stroked his hand down her back, rubbing up and down, just like she had been doing with her own arms, but he added what he hoped were sympathetic noises in concert to his movements. For what would probably be the only time in his life, Gage silently thanked God for “blessing” him with a younger sister who gave into hysterics often as a child, and who only got worse as a teenager. Emma’s tears were usually caused by someone teasing her at school; over a boy who didn’t like her as much as she liked him; or getting into trouble because Chris had done something awful and mean – again – and Emma had exacted revenge – again – and only Emma had gotten in trouble for it – again.
In other words, things that in that moment felt pretty inconsequential, at least compared to whatever the hell it was that Cady was going through.
Eventually, the shaking slowed down to mere shivers and Gage could feel the change wash over Cady as soon as she realized what had happened.
“So sorry,” she muttered, pulling away, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Gage just stood there, watching her, his hands helplessly dangling at his sides. He wanted to pull her back into his arms and soothe her again, but the time for that had passed. If he did it now, Cady would fight him tooth and nail.
“You wanna tell me what’s going on?” he asked quietly.
“No.” But she quirked just a bit of a smile as she said it – the tiniest lifting of the corner of her mouth – and Gage breathed a silent sigh of relief. Whatever had just happened, she wasn’t blaming him for it.
Cady looked around the torn-apart store, clearly wanting something, and then spotted her purse on the floor. Digging a small package of tissues out, she blew her nose loudly. She sounded rather like a goose honking on its way up north in that moment, and Gage couldn’t help the laughing smile that crossed his face. She really was too damn adorable for words.
“My parents are in Boise,” she said so quietly, he had to lean forward to hear her. “That wasn’t a lie.”
She stopped, and Gage just held his breath, waiting for her to continue. His mind bounced around from possibility to possibility, trying to figure out where in the hell she could be going with this, but none of his half-formed guesses turned out to be even vaguely correct.
“More specifically, their cremated ashes are in the Boise River. Their spirits are…well, wherever spirits go after death.” She waved her used tissue through the air dismissively, trying to act casual, as if she was just fine.
“Oh,” he breathed, saying nothing else, waiting as he watched Cady struggle to tell him the story without breaking down again.
“It was their 35th anniversary, and my parents decided to celebrate by doing something they’d always wanted to do – a big trip up to Alaska. They were supposed to spend 10 days up there – bear watching, whale watching, hiking, kayaking, and…and taking an aerial tour of the glaciers.”
“Ohhhh…” he said again.
He could put it together then – he didn’t need to know the gory details of how and why.
But he kept his mouth shut anyway and just listened, because he knew this was a story that Cady needed to tell and if he was the only one she could talk to, well then, by God, he’d listen.
She stared at the far wall behind him as she spoke, though, like she was reciting facts about the 19th President of the United States.
“My parents aren’t – weren’t – rich, so they did the same thing that I did when looking for an electrician: They searched for the cheapest charter plane available. If they didn’t get a bare-bones price, they wouldn’t be able to afford to go, and my mom had always wanted to see the glaciers of Alaska.
“But the company they chose was the cheapest for a reason – the FAA found in their investigation afterwards that the company had been falsifying a lot of their maintenance and training records. My parents were going up in a plane that was being held together by bubblegum and string, and being flown by a guy who shouldn’t have been allowed to pilot a hang glider, let alone a charter plane.
“Weather is unpredictable in Alaska, and partway through their tour, a strong wind came up, gusts blowing them around, and the pilot freaked out – didn’t know how to handle it. Investigators told me that they listened to the black box, and they heard my father trying to tell the pilot to stay calm and think through it, but…I couldn’t listen to the recording myself. They asked me if I wanted to, you know. I could never listen to the last moments of my parent’s lives. Never, never, never.”
She drew in a ragged breath, still staring at the wall, but there was a crack in her façade now – just a tiny one, but there. This was now more than just a recitation of facts that happened to someone else. It had become a little more personal.
“They…well, they hit the side of a mountain, basically. Using GPS, the first responders were able to locate the plane but it was several days before they could pull everyone out. They all died on impact, so at least my parents didn’t lay there for days, slowly freezing to death, right?”
She drew in an unsteady breath, held it for a moment, and then blew it out. “Between the Mayday calls, the black box, the weather satellites, and falsified records, the FAA investigators were able to piece it all together. I…my parents worried about me as an only child, so they’d paid for a large insurance policy on themselves for years, just in case something happened to them. I took some of that payout and I sued the charter company into oblivion, quite literally. My parents’ flight was the last one that charter company ever did. They’re no longer able to save a buck here and fifty cents there, and put the lives of their pilots and customers on the line in the process. Shutting that company down is the one good thing I think I’ve ever done in my life.”
She lifted her chin and looked Gage straight in the eye for the first time since her meltdown began outside the store. “I don’t do planes,” she said bluntly. “Not ever, not for any reason. Just listening to them fly overhead…well, you saw what just happened. It’s ironic – my parents owned a charming, small Craftsman home in Boise – nothing that anyone would take notice of, but for me, it was home. It was the only home I’d ever had until I started at Boise State. I could’ve just stayed living with my parents while going to college – I would’ve been perfectly happy there – but my mom knew me better than I knew myself, and she knew I needed to be out on my own, learning how to navigate the world. I ended up with Hannah as my roommate, but my parents were only twenty minutes away, so I ended up at home quite often, especially when my laundry hamper got full.”
She sent him a grimacing smile, and he smiled in return, trying to mold his features into understanding and kindness, when all he really wanted to do was punch the penny-pinching owner of the charter company into oblivion.
“But the ironic part of it all was that my parents’ home is close to the Boise Airport. I grew up with planes flying overhead. When I was really young, I dreamt of being a pilot, although that dream disappeared as soon as I realized that I got major motion sickness when I was up in the air.” She chuckled humorlessly. “After my parents died, all I wanted to do was sleep – well, sleep and get revenge on the chartering company. But mostly sleep. I retreated to my parents’ house and I probably never would’ve left again – I have enough money that if I lived frugally, I never would’ve had to work again – except day and night, there were planes, flying overhead. It slowly drove me insane. I never knew when they were coming. I didn’t know if they’d fly safely over and keep going or if they’d drop out of the sky and take out the house and me in it. It was horrible – it was my sanctuary and a torture chamber.”
She dabbed at her eyes with her tissue and honked loudly again before continuing.
“It was about six months later that I managed to make myself start participating in life again, even if it was in just little dribs and drabs. I would go for short walks around the yard. I would actually go down to the grocery store and go shopping, rather than have the store deliver the food to me.
“And then…” She drew in a deep breath and sent Gage a forced smile. “One day, I decided to be truly brave and drive all the way up to Long Valley to go hiking in the Goldfork Mountains. I’d gone a few times with Hannah when we were at college together, and had just loved it. So on January 3rd, I hiked and then stopped in town to get a coffee at some bakery called the Muffin Man – you should check it out, it’s pretty great – but found a storefront next door to buy on the way over. Who finds a store on a whim?” She chuckled humorlessly. “It wasn’t part of the plan but honestly, I didn’t have a plan then, unless you could call ‘Putting one foot in front of another’ a plan. Or ‘Getting out of bed every single day before noon’ a plan. Then sure, I had a plan. But this store…it’s given me a reason to get out of bed every single day before eight, and I promise you, in my world, that’s a big deal.”
They lapsed into silence for a minute, until Gage asked quietly, “Did you sell your parents’ house in Boise?”
She nodded slowly. “The house, most of the items and furniture inside, and my parents’ vehicles. I have a storage unit filled to the brim with some sentimental stuff I couldn’t bear to part with, but even that is in Boise. I wanted my move up here to be a clean slate. Nothing holding me back. I was going to be New Cady – better than before. It was only an hour or two after I had that thought that I met this muscular baker who scared me shitless by sneaking up behind me – a real asshole, honestly.”
Gage bust out laughing, laughing louder than he normally would have under different circumstances because Cady was making a joke. Listening to her make a joke just then…it meant everything.
She was stronger than she realized.
“Now hold on a good, long minute,” he protested when his chuckles finally died down. “I didn’t sneak up on anyone! I clomped around noisily in my work boots just like I always do.”
“I wanted you fired for that,” Cady said dryly. “I was just sure that whoever owned the Muffin Man would see that interaction and fire your ass over it. I thought some old grandma owned the place.”
“You thought I should’ve been fired because I recommended brownies to you?” he asked, horrified.
“It was cream puffs,” she corrected him pertly, as if that were a very important fact indeed, “and I mostly just wanted you fired because you scared me, and in my mind at that moment…if you scared me, you were a bad guy and you deserved to be fired. And keep in mind, this was New Cady. Be really, really glad you never met Old Cady.” She sent him a self-deprecating smile as she said it.
It was quiet between them again as Gage struggled to process everything Cady had just told him. Between the attempted rape by the football player and then the death of her parents – her only family…it was a wonder she managed to get out of bed at all. It would’ve been so easy to just hide from the world for the rest of her life, especially because of the large inheritance she’d received.
Speaking of…a part of him understood why her parents chose to keep a large insurance policy on themselves, but a part of him…a part of him did not. They had good intentions, but wasn’t there that saying that the path to hell was paved with good intentions? That large chunk of change enabled their only daughter to withdraw from the world for a while and not have to deal with things like going to work and paying bills and simply being a part of society.
If their house hadn’t been so close to a major airport, Cady would’ve wasted her life hiding in it. And what a waste that would’ve been.
He did it then – what he’d been telling himself he absolutely could not do.
He reached out for Cady, not to scrub dried paint off her nose or to hold her while she cried, but because he wanted to hold her…and kiss her.
Time stopped as she looked at his outstretched hand, trying to decide if she’d take it or if she’d run away, and Gage worried that he’d pushed too hard, too fast, and she’d run now and never come back but before he could drop his hand down by his side and pretend as if he’d simply been wanting to stretch out his arm for no reason at all, she reached out with trembling fingers and clasped his hand in hers. Her fingers were tiny, as was the rest of her, but Gage knew that only a fool would think that her diminutive stature also meant that she wasn’t strong.
Because she was, in every way that counted.
He pulled her towards him slowly, his eyes boring into hers, asking without words, Do you want this? Are you ready?
Biting her bottom lip, she took the last step to close the gap between them, answering his question without words, and the heat off her body was so hot, so delicious, it was hard to contain himself. He made himself move oh-so-slowly, though. He couldn’t startle her. Knowing her now like he did, he realized that she had every reason to be the way she was – to react the way she did – but that also meant that she would always be in the driver’s seat. He had to let her choose to move forward every step of the way, no matter how hard it was.
He pulled her against his thighs, feeling her softness cuddle against him, her curves as perfect as a newly blossomed rose. They fit together, the two of them, despite how big he was and how small she was, or maybe it was because of that…
He slid his hand into the thicket of her curls at the base of her neck, moving her, pulling her up to him as his lips finally met hers. She let out the tiniest of whimpers, her fingers grasping at him, hanging onto him for dear life, and he knew then that he was a goner. He wanted her to want him with all of her soul; he wanted her to want him like she wanted to breathe; he wanted her to want him as much as he wanted her.
He scooped her up, wrapping her legs around his waist and carrying her to the counter, where he set her down on it, finally bringing them eye to eye. Things moved quickly after that, everything a blur of sensations and sounds and he found his fingers trembling as he stroked her soft skin and he didn’t know if he’d be able to contain himself or if he’d unman himself in front of her—
There was something strange happening, though. Somewhere, far away but oh so persistent, there was a sound or a fear or—
Feeling drugged, he forced himself to open up his eyes and pull away from the hollow of her neck where he’d been memorizing every dip and valley, forcing himself to look Cady in the eye.
She was trembling too, but not from lust. Not like Gage was. Her eyes were wide with fear and she was pushing at him, pushing with all her might against his chest, and he realized then that this was what had been bothering him. She was so tiny compared to him, her attempts to push him away had felt like the beating of moth wings against his skin, at least through the haze of lust that had enveloped him. But now…
Now he could see the panic in her eyes.
He stepped back, holding his hands up in surrender, trying to calm his breathing, trying to will his dick back down. It was pushing against the zipper of his jeans and the exquisite pain of it was surely going to drive him insane.
“You gotta go,” Cady said hoarsely, trembling, shrinking in on herself. “You got to…” Her voice broke and she was shaking so hard, he was sure she was going to fall off the counter. Instinctively, he reached out to steady her and she let out a little shriek of terror, batting at his hand, swatting him away.
Like the flick of a light switch, the desire, the lust, the need to become one with Cady disappeared, his dick deflating like a balloon the day after a kid’s party.
Seeing her react like this to him…
Without a word, he spun on his heel and stomped towards his truck, anger radiating off him, hotter than the surface of the sun.
He was done. He was done with Cady Walcott. He was done being dragged around by a ring through his nose. He was done having her look at him like he was just another asshole in the world. He’d given her another chance, another chance, another chance…
Never again. He wasn’t going to deliver his heart to Cady on a platter again. She could take her and her bullshit ideas about men and life and go screw with someone else’s mind.
He was done.