A while later, the tell-tale sound of a skateboard on asphalt filled the air, and Adam watched as Jess came down the road. He kicked his board up and caught it under his arm before coming up the driveway. When he saw Adam sitting on the porch, his face burst into a grin.
“Hey, man.”
Gypsy left Adam’s side and went to greet Jess, who knelt down and let her lick his face while he laughed. Adam’s heart swelled with love for the teen. He didn’t have to come here after school. He probably had friends he’d rather hang out with.
“I’m starving,” he said. “Can I...?”
“Bring me some crackers or whatever my mom put in the cupboards.”
Jess went inside, taking Gypsy with him, the glutton. She knew where to get treats, and it wasn’t from Adam. He returned with two boxes of crackers and a cheese ball. Adam opted for the wheat ones, no cheese ball necessary, and Jess sat in the chair on the other side of the table, Gypsy begging at his feet.
“How’s school?” Adam asked.
“Great. Almost the end of the term.”
“What are you guys doing for Thanksgiving?”
“Going out to your parents. Or Drew’s, I guess. They’re doing dinner out there.”
Adam nodded. He’d been invited to Drew’s too. And while Janey hadn’t stopped coming over, and they texted and talked a lot, Adam felt something different between them.
“How’s your mom?”
“Okay.”
And that about summed it up. Before, things had been going great. Now they were just okay. Adam wasn’t quite sure what was on Janey’s mind, because she hadn’t told him. Their lunches had been quiet affairs, and she rarely came in the evenings, because his parents did.
“She’s been saying some weird stuff.” Jess paused in his rapid consumption of the crackers and dip.
“Like what?” Adam looked at the boy. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me. Probably none of my business.”
Jess shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”
Adam let a beat of silence go by, and then he said, “Hey, remember when you were making the bisque, and I said to listen to your gut? You gotta do that all the time. You say things are nothing a lot, but they rarely are. They’re something.”
Jess looked at him with Matt’s eyes—his best friend’s eyes—and Adam smiled. “Okay?”
He nodded, emotions storming through those eyes. “Okay. So then...I mean, how interested are you in being my dad?”
Adam blinked at the question, not quite prepared for it and not expecting it to come up right now. “I’m totally interested in that,” Adam said, his voice thick and hoarse at the same time. “I love you, Jess. You’re a great kid.” He cleared his throat, glad Jess’s chin had started wobbling a little bit too.
“I’ll tell my mom.”
“Why? She thinks I don’t want to be your dad?”
“She thinks you won’t be around long enough.” Jess went back to his crackers. “Or something. She stays up real late, you know? Thinks I don’t know she’s lying in bed reading. Except this week, she’s been crying.” He glanced at Adam. “She talks to herself when she’s stressed. Did you know that?”
Adam nodded. “It’s hard work being as awesome as she is. Makes sense she’d want to talk some things out with herself.” And a bowl of chocolate chips and pretzels.
“Anyway, she keeps saying she’s not being fair to you, but I don’t know what that means. Last night, she said you probably wouldn’t be around long enough to...do something. I couldn’t quite hear.”
Adam sighed and surveyed the front lawn, the quiet street in front of him. “You probably shouldn’t be eavesdropping on your mom.”
“Yeah, probably not.”
Adam ate a few crackers, trying to think of something to say. He finally came up with, “I can’t control everything, Jess, just because I’m the Chief of Police. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“We don’t have a lot of violence or problems here in Hawthorne Harbor, but my guess is your mom thinks my job is too dangerous for me to be....” He cleared the emotion from his voice. “Her husband and your dad.”
Adam wanted to be both. The possibility of it had been drawing closer and closer, but now it felt distant. A dot on the horizon he couldn’t reach. Would never reach.
“How interested are you in me being your dad?” he asked.
The box of crackers made a crumpling noise as Jess dug into the plastic bag again. “I’m real interested in that.”
“You don’t think it’ll cramp your style?”
“What does that mean?”
“You know, me being the Chief of Police and all that. You think your friends would still want to hang out with you?”
“Maybe not all of them.”
“Maybe not the ones who want you to tag buildings.”
Jess looked away. “Yeah, not them.”
“Maybe they’re not real friends, then.”
“Maybe not.” Jess scooped up more dip and made a sandwich out of two crackers. “But I wouldn’t mind.”
Adam leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I wouldn’t mind either, Jess.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Janey pulled into the driveway at home at the same time Jess opened the garage door, his skateboard tucked under his arm.
She rolled down her window before pulling into the garage. “Hey, bud. How’s Adam today?”
“Went back to work,” he said before walking away.
Janey’s motherly instincts fired, and she eased into the garage and parked. Once inside, she found Jess standing in front of the fridge, looking for something to eat. “Everything okay?”
Jess closed the fridge but wouldn’t look at her. “We have nothing to eat.”
“We could go see Grandma Germaine. She’s been asking about you.” Janey tried to get Jess over to see Matt’s parents as often as possible. They took him on weekends sometimes too, but they hadn’t for a while, not since LouAnn had started having some health problems.
“I already texted her. They’re in Seattle for a couple of days.”
Janey simultaneously loved that Jess had a phone and didn’t. At least he was texting people like the Chief of Police and his grandmother. “Then let’s go get pizza or something.”
“I don’t want pizza.”
Janey knew then that something serious had happened. Was it school? Or Adam? “Hey,” she said, reaching out and touching his shirtsleeve. “What’s going on?”
Jess turned toward her, his face a perfect storm of anger and confusion. “I hear you crying at night, Mom.”
Janey fell back a step. “I’m...fine, Jess.”
“You’re not fine.”
She’d been getting up and going to work every day. Nothing in their routine had changed, except for she’d taken sandwiches and salads to Adam’s house for lunch last week. Jess skated over there after school. That was all.
“Yes, I am.”
“Was this how you were when Dad died?”
She sucked in a breath and held it. “No, because Adam’s not my husband or your dad, and he didn’t pass away.”
“So you were worse. Great.” He opened a cupboard, didn’t find what he wanted, and slammed it shut. “Are you going to break up with him?”
She stared at him, her heart thundering in her chest. He’d just asked the same question she’d been battling for nine days.
“It’s not fair to him or me to keep stringing him along.”
“Stringing him along? Did he tell you that’s what I was doing?” Because if he had.... Janey’s anger kicked into gear, and it took a lot to get her mad.
“He told me not to ignore my gut, and my gut says you’re not sure about him, but you haven’t told him anything.”
How her thirteen-year-old knew so much, Janey couldn’t comprehend. He had no idea what she’d said or not said to Adam. He had no idea what it was like trying to balance a dozen different very
breakable plates, hoping you didn’t drop one that was too valuable, or too important, or that would come back to haunt you later.
“I don’t know what to do,” Janey admitted.
“You can do hard things,” Jess said in a mildly sarcastic tone. “Isn’t that what you’re always telling me?” He gave her a disgruntled look and added, “I’m ordering pizza,” before lifting his phone to his ear.
Helplessness filled her, choked her, made her feel like she was drowning. She sat down at the kitchen table while Jess ordered more pizza than would be possible for the two of them to eat. He asked for cash from her wallet to pay for it, and she gave it to him. She barely noticed when the house filled with the scent of marinara and garlic, or that Jess’s friend Thayne had come over.
She rarely allowed friends over on weeknights, but she didn’t have the energy to bring it up, argue about it, or any of it. She got up and got herself some pizza and then retreated to her bedroom.
The door closed around nine, and she knew Thayne had gone. Jess usually poked his head in her room and said good-night, but tonight his footsteps took him right into his bedroom, where that door closed too.
She cleaned up the kitchen, packed herself a lunch for the following day, and hunted around for her phone. She finally found it in her purse, dead, so she plugged it in and retreated back to her bed.
But she didn’t pull out the e-reader, or open the top drawer of her nightstand to get out her secret stash of treats. She simply stared, trying to sort through all the various thoughts in her head and find a solution to her issues with her relationship with Adam.
Don’t think so hard.
But every time she thought about him, with those crutches and needing help for the most basic of things, all she could see was that he was hurt.
Hurt on the job.
A job he wasn’t going to give up.
She leaned back against the pillows, wondering if she could maybe just see how things went. That had been her plan in the beginning, and it had turned out pretty well.
She wasn’t planning to see Adam again until Monday for lunch, but she decided she didn’t want to wait almost four more days.
The covers got flung to the side relatively easy, and she stuffed her feet into her slippers. She paused at Jess’s door and only heard silence. Rapping lightly with her knuckles, she pushed open the door. He was sitting up in bed, a real book in his hands and his earphones in.
After getting his attention by flipping the lights, she said, “I’m going to go talk to Adam. I’ll be back later.”
Jess just stared, and Janey nodded once before leaving the house. At Adam’s, she sat in the Jeep and stared at the rectangles of light in his house, trying to get up the courage to go in and talk to him. She’d done it before, been here late at night, unannounced.
But it felt different this time, and she wasn’t even sure why.
His front door opened and he filled the doorway with his broad shoulders and those crutches. She had to get out now, so she sighed and unbuckled her seat belt to get out of the Jeep. She tucked her hands in her coat pockets and approached slowly.
“I thought that was you,” he said when she reached the bottom of the steps. “I don’t usually have people sitting outside my house.”
She climbed the stairs and stopped, still trying to figure out what to say or why her heart suddenly wanted to leap from her body and flee.
“You want to talk?” he asked, shifting his weight to make room for her to squeeze by. She started toward him, thinking he’d go in first and she’d follow him. But he didn’t. He stayed right where he was, leaving a small space for her to pass.
As she did, he wrapped his strong fingers around her wrist. “Please don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
She looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“I can tell there’s something different between us,” he said. “I’m not stupid, and you’re not my first girlfriend. If you’re going to break up with me, just say it.”
“I don’t want to break up....” She hung onto the last two words, trying to decide what she did want.
“Then what do you want?”
Her mind spun, and she hated how it wouldn’t stop. “I want things to go back to how they were at the beach house,” she blurted. “Fun, and new, and not too heavy. Light. I can’t do anything heavy right now, and this....” She gestured to his stormy face and cast leg. “This, this feels heavy.”
“This is real life,” he said. “Sometimes it’s beach houses and sometimes it’s broken legs. There’s only one person I want to do all of the above with, and that’s you.”
A flicker of a smile touched her lips, but it was quickly followed by a half-sob. “I’m scared. I think maybe...maybe I just need more time to make sure this is right. For me. For Jess.”
“Don’t bring Jess into it. We talk every day, you know. He tells me stuff, and I tell him stuff.”
Janey narrowed her eyes at him. “What kind of stuff?”
“Guy stuff.”
“Like who he has a crush on?”
“Among other things.” He dropped his hand from hers. “I don’t want you to use him for an excuse. You’re better than that.” He hobbled backward on his crutch. “My door is always open. Come on back when you know how you feel and if you think we could be right for each other.”
He nudged the door with the rubber tip of his crutch and it started to swing closed. Janey wanted to throw her hand out and stop it, but she didn’t. “Are you breaking up with me?” The door snicked closed right as she finished her sentence.
She heard him say, “You know where the key is.”
Janey stared at the closed door just a few inches from her nose, every cell in her body unsure of what to say, what to do, how to react. She turned on wooden legs and took slow steps away from his front door.
At the bottom of the porch, she turned and looked back half-expecting him to have returned, his sexy smile back in place and his leg miraculously healed. The door was still stubbornly shut.
She sat down on the bottom step, unwilling to go home and face her son. Adam was right; she had used her son as an excuse, and she was better than that. She also didn’t want to get into a serious relationship with Adam just because Jess liked him.
A while later, she got up and drove home When she checked in on Jess, she found him asleep, his book nowhere to be seen. His earbuds still trailed from his ears, and she crossed the room and switched off his lamp and pulled the headphones out of Jess’s ears. “Love you, bud,” she whispered.
She went to what comforted her and allowed her to get outside of her own head. Her digital books. Her chocolate chips. And her pretzels.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Adam pulled his new cruiser into his parents’ farm, Janey’s forest green Jeep like a siren’s call to him. He couldn’t look away from it though it made his heart beat snake through his veins in a strange way.
He missed seeing it parked in front of his house at ten o’clock at night. Hated that they weren’t still going to lunch at every restaurant in Hawthorne Harbor until they’d tried them all. Wanted to curl up and cry every time he felt like texting her and then remembering that he couldn’t.
He’d put the ball squarely in her court, and she hadn’t bounced it back yet. Or even picked it up, from what he could tell—and he had spies on the inside.
Jess skated over to the police station after school now, since Adam was working full days again. His leg was getting better and better every day, but he was letting Jess come over on Saturdays and make him lunch and dinner. The kid was a whiz with a knife and a recipe, and Adam was so glad that he hadn’t lost Jess just because Janey needed time to figure things out.
His phone buzzed, and he checked it, half-hoping for a major fire or ten-car pile up that he’d need to leave for immediately. Unfortunately, it was his mother. We can all see your car out there. Are you coming in? Do you need help?
He thought about telling her he was
on a call with dispatch, but the fib felt bigger than he was comfortable telling. Instead of answering, he reached for the door handle.
He technically shouldn’t be driving by himself, but since his injured leg was his non-driving leg, he’d been using the new cruiser for a couple of days now.
Send Jess out to get the pies. He sent the text as he swung his legs out of the car and put all his weight on his good leg and the top of the car. He’d just gotten himself stabilized when the screen door slapped closed and Jess came running down the front sidewalk.
“Hey, man,” he said, coming all the way around the front of the car with a big smile on his face. “Dixie wants to know if you’ll take us out to the wishing well after dinner.”
“You drivin’ the ATV?” Adam knew Janey worried when Jess even rode on the ATV, and he wasn’t sure if the boy even knew how to drive one.
“Yeah.” He spoke without hesitation, and Adam grinned at him.
“Then, sure.” He nodded toward the passenger side. “Pies over there. There are three. Make two trips, okay?”
But Jess balanced the pumpkin pie on his forearm and gripped the pecan and the key lime in his fingers before setting off for the side door.
“Mom!” he yelled, and someone opened the door for him, and Adam caught sight of Janey’s beautiful face and heard her admonish Jess for carrying too much at once before he disappeared inside.
His heart twisted in his chest, and he faced away from the farmhouse and drew in a huge breath. Drew’s back door opened, and he came out with Gretchen. They held hands and talked, their faces the picture of happiness and love.
Adam couldn’t go inside. Not with them there. Not with Janey present. He wanted to hold her hand and kiss her and tell her he loved her. Having her so close and so out of reach was like torture. Torture he’d already endured once and couldn’t do again.
“Hey,” Drew wove through the fence posts that created a gate between the two properties. “You made it.”
“I can’t do it.” Adam shook his head, his jaw clenched.
Drew’s face fell as he frowned. “Do what?”