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* * *

The thing was... and this was the part he kept arriving at, the part that made the cold feel like a reasonable alternative to the inside of his own head... he hadn’t planned it. He was a man who planned things. He fixed the fence board before it broke, not after. He ordered supplies before he ran out, not when he was empty. He moved deliberately through his days because the alternative was chaos and chaos in his experience led to things breaking that didn’t need to break.

He had not planned to kiss her.

He had planned, in the vague way he’d been allowing himself to plan anything regarding this, to continue existing in her general vicinity, to continue showing up at the same places, to continue the careful calibration of being near her without being reckless about it. To perhaps, at some unspecified future point, do something intentional and considered and properly thought through.

He had not planned to hear I don’t want to keep almost and step toward her in the snow like a man who had run out of reasons not to.

He turned his line slowly in the dark water.

She’d said she didn’t want to keep almost.

She’d been right. He hadn’t wanted to keep almost either. He’d known this about himself, he supposed, for longer than he’d been admitting. But knowing a thing and acting on it before you’d fully examined the consequences were two different things, and he had, last night, skipped directly from the first to the second without stopping in the middle.

The question now was: had that been the right call.

He sat at Clearwater Lake at five in the morning and genuinely did not know.

* * *

He thought about her.

Not the feeling of it. He wasn’t ready to think about the feeling of it, the warmth of her in the cold, the way she’d grabbed the front of his jacket, the quality of her kissing him back, all of that was in a room in his head that he was keeping the door closed on for the moment because if he opened it he was going to lose the thread of the thing he needed to think through clearly.

He thought about her, specifically. About the woman who had arrived in August with paint on her left hand and had spent four months being careful about the city she’d left and the man who hadn’t chosen her and the way she’d described it to him once, not directly but in pieces, the two years of being available to someone who came around when he needed something and disappeared when he didn’t.

She’d been hurt.

Not in a dramatic way, not in the way of someone who announced their wounds, but in the quiet way of someone who had learned to expect less and had built their life around that expectation and was only now, carefully, in a town that had received her like it had been waiting for her, starting to dismantle it.

And he had, without asking, without checking, without the deliberate care he brought to every other thing in his life, kissed her in the snow. He had asked her for exactly one thing first, something warm at The Brook on a Saturday afternoon, and she had said yes to that. He had never asked her to dinner. He had never said plainly I would like to spend time with you in a way that is intentional and clear. He had never asked what she wanted, or given her the chance to say yes to something bigger than a mug of hot chocolate before she found herself in the middle of it.

She’d kissed him back.

He knew this. He was very aware of this.

But what if he’d startled her.

What if he’d taken a thing that was building carefully between them, fragile and new the way new things were fragile, the way anything worth having was fragile before it wasn’t yet, and pushed it before it was ready.

He pressed his line into the dark water and thought about this with the focus of a man who had spent his whole life fixing things and was extremely aware of how much worse you could make something by rushing the repair.

* * *

And then there was the other thing.

The thing underneath all the reasonable worry about her, which was less reasonable and more, honest.

He had kissed Allison Hayes and he was not sorry about it and he wanted to do it again and he wanted to do considerably more than that and he wanted (and this was the part that was actually keeping him at Clearwater Lake at five in the morning in the snow) he wanted this to work. Not just the physical thing, not just the feeling of it. The whole of it. The being known by someone who saw him as a person rather than a function. The warmth of being in a room with her. The way she asked him questions nobody asked and listened to the answers like they mattered.

He wanted it.

He wanted it badly enough that the thought of having rushed it, of having spooked her, of having been too much too fast for a woman who had been not chosen for long enough that being chosen might take some getting used to...

That thought was worse than the cold.

He was a man who was careful about things because the things he cared about were worth being careful with. And he cared about this. He cared about her in the way that had been accumulating since August without his permission, the way you cared about something that had gotten into you before you’d decided to let it.