He steps back then, like he’s reached the edge of his courage for the day. He lingers for half a second, like hewants to say something else, then turns and walks back toward the entrance.
I watch him go.
Because for the first time since I met him, it feels like he didn’t run away from me.
It feels like he walked toward something.
Toward me.
Chapter 3
Phil
“Iam an idiot.”
The words leave my mouth before I’ve even fully stepped into Alex’s workshop, carried on the smell of sawdust and varnish and the steady hum of tools that never seem to stop moving. The space is familiar. Safe. Predictable. Everything my brain needs right now and absolutely none of what it deserves.
Alex’s apprentice looks up from the workbench with poorly disguised interest, clearly hoping this will be more entertaining than sanding cabinet doors. Alex himself doesn’t turn immediately. He finishes measuring a length of oak, makes a small pencil mark, and only then looks over his shoulder at me.
“That’s a broad statement,” he says calmly. “Care to narrow it down?”
I drop onto one of the stools along the wall and drag both hands through my hair. My head feels tight. Not painful. Just crowded, like too many thoughts are trying to occupy the same space at once.
“I asked Christina out.”
The words hang there.
Alex straightens slowly.
“You what?”
“I asked her to dinner.”
He blinks.
“Christina?”
“Yes.”
“TheChristina?”
I close my eyes briefly. “Yes.”
“The woman who makes you panic and flee like prey?”
I let out a quiet, miserable sound. “Yes.”
He stares at me for exactly two seconds before laughter explodes out of him. Not polite laughter. Not sympathetic laughter. The full-body kind that forces him to brace himself against the workbench.
“It’s not funny,” I say, which only makes it worse.
“What,” he manages between breaths, “possessed you?”
That’s the problem. I don’t know.
I try to replay the moment outside the retirement home, to find the exact point where my brain failed me so completely. I remember the way she’d been standing there, rain in her hair, calm and steady and entirely herself in a place I had always thought of as separate from the rest of my life. She hadn’t been teasing me. Hadn’t been pushing. She’d just been there.
And I’d wanted more of that.