A Second Chance in the Show Me State - Jessie Gussman Page 0,23
said. He’d just texted back ten minutes ago and let Reid know that Emerson was on her way home. He’d seen her going out the drive.
Reid had the feeling he should have gone upstairs as soon as he heard the gravel crunching and knew she was home okay.
She probably wasn’t going to be happy to know he’d waited up.
And that definitely said more about his feelings than what he wanted to show.
It was too late. The door opened, and a beam from the porch light cracked in a wider line across the kitchen floor before narrowing again then going out completely as Emerson hit the switch.
They’d only lived in this old farmhouse three years before she’d left, and it wasn’t exactly rocket science to know where the porch light switch was, but it still made Reid smile to see her hit it the first time.
She froze for just a second with her hand on the switch, as their eyes met across the kitchen, before she killed it.
He could almost see her stiffen and feel her movements slow.
She was angry, no doubt.
The door clicked closed deliberately. And she turned.
He knew he should be bracing for an onslaught, but the way she turned, naturally, the way they’d always done it—without locking the door—made him wonder if she didn’t lock her door in Switzerland.
The thought flashed a pang of fear through his chest.
“I sure hope you use locks in Switzerland,” he said, without meaning to upset anything at all. Once upon a time, he didn’t measure his words with her and told her everything. They’d been best friends before they’d been boyfriend and girlfriend, sharing farm chores and adventures all through their childhood.
Clark had Marlowe who lived right next door, while Reid had to walk over the hill and through the neighbor’s cow pasture to get to Emerson’s house. Often she met him in the middle. And as they got older, they’d had ATVs and they’d gone on trail rides, meeting somewhere other than the cow pasture.
“You know, Reid, it’s funny, but for the last eight years, I’ve been taking care of myself. No one stays up, no one leaves the light on, and no one gives me a hard time if I do or don’t lock my door.”
Her voice had that haughty note in it, and maybe someone who didn’t know her as well as he did would think she was a snob or trying to put him down. But he knew it for what it was—a defense mechanism. He’d seen her do it in school when she’d been teased, and with his brothers. Somehow, Emerson always felt hiding her happy personality under a veneer of intellectual snobbery somehow made her less vulnerable.
Maybe it did. When people made fun of your veneer, it didn’t hurt like it did when they made fun of your soft underside.
She’d never used that mechanism on him, until that last year.
Maybe it was no longer a veneer. Maybe it was the way she truly was now.
His heart rebelled at that thought.
“And there’s nothing wrong with me waiting up. Nothing wrong with me wanting to make sure that someone who’s living in my house right now gets home safely. I’m sorry, but you’ll never convince me that there is.”
She put her purse down on the counter, moving in the dark comfortably. “I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m simply telling you I’m a big girl and I don’t need you to hold my hand. I don’t want you to hold my hand.”
“I’m not even touching you.” Deliberately missing her point, he also didn’t say not that I don’t want to. Despite the hard time that she was giving him and the feeling of his own anger and irritation rising, he would hold her hand. Touch her. Feel the changes—there had to be changes in eight years. There had been in him.
He didn’t go toward her though. Obviously she didn’t want him, and it didn’t matter what he wanted.
He kept his butt in the chair, and his stocking feet propped up on the chair beside him, one elbow on the table, but his eyes tracked her outline as she moved.
“You know exactly what I meant. You don’t have to be technical. I can go out, and you can go to bed, and I don’t need to come into the kitchen to find Daddy Reid with his disapproving glower waiting for me to show up. Next thing you’re gonna tell me is that I missed curfew.”
“You missed curfew.”
Years