Total pages in book: 62
Estimated words: 61723 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 309(@200wpm)___ 247(@250wpm)___ 206(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61723 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 309(@200wpm)___ 247(@250wpm)___ 206(@300wpm)
She’s a woman with a child and a past full of fear and enough quiet courage to stop running.
And I’m already too far in to pretend this is casual.
Back inside, through the faint curtain shift in the window, I catch one last glimpse of her standing there in the kitchen, fingertips brushing her mouth like she can still feel the kiss.
Something tightens in my chest.
Yeah.
I think she’s falling.
And if I’ve got any damn sense left at all, I’ll make sure there’s something safe for her to fall into.
As for me, I’ve already lost myself to whatever this is between us. I can’t deny it and I don’t want to.
FIFTEEN
LUCY
A few weeks pass, and somewhere in the middle of them, Tucker stops feeling like a disruption and starts feeling like a part of my life.
Not in some dramatic, sweeping way. Not overnight. Just slowly. Steadily. Dependable, like sunrise.
We start each day texting the usual greetings. After a night out, one where he stayed late watching a movie with me long after we came home and got Quinn to bed, I overslept and ran late. The morning text is something that might be alarming to me coming from any other man. From Tucker, though, knowing how he wants to take care of me, it makes sense.
Eat breakfast.
No hello. No punctuation beyond what’s necessary. Just an order because he has learned I skip meals sometimes. A conversation we recently had when he came to the diner and I was a little snippy because I was hangry.
I stare at my phone while Quinn brushes her teeth and laugh under my breath. Then I text back.
This romantic streak of yours is really something.
His reply comes thirty seconds later.
You like it. Now eat.
I do. Which is unfortunate.
Two days later after a morning shift, his text comes in:
Rain coming. Drive careful.
Later:
You home yet?
Another thing I’ve noticed is whenever I’m working and he’s out, stopping at a store, or simply in the area, he sends a text to pick up any slack he can.
Need anything?
He checks in without smothering. Shows up without hovering. Some evenings, I pull into the driveway after work and he’s there on the porch steps, boots planted wide, a takeout bag beside him and that dark, steady gaze lifting the second my car turns in.
Other nights he meets me at the diner or the ice cream shop after my shift and walks me to my car like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Once, he appears at the ice cream shop with a tool kit because my passenger-side back door has been sticking for two weeks and I made the mistake of mentioning it in passing.
“I said it was fine, Quinn and I made due.” I tell him as he leans into the door frame.
He doesn’t look up. “It wasn’t.”
“How do you know?” I challenge.
“It squeaks. And Quinn likes to be independent opening her own door not waiting on you. Needed to oil it.”
“That is not a medical diagnosis.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
And then, somehow, it stops squeaking and it doesn’t stick either. Because of course it does. Because apparently Tucker can fix things with the same competence he uses for everything else.
I get used to him in pieces. The way he always sits facing the door. The way he notices when I’m tired before I say it. The way he asks Quinn questions like her opinions matter. The way he never, ever pushes. That part matters most.
After the kiss in my kitchen, I expected him to lean harder.
Press more.
Assume.
Instead, he continues to show up giving me space and somehow makes that kiss feel more intimate than if he’d backed me against the wall and taken what was easy.
That should not make me want him more. It does.
I learn little things. He hates mayonnaise. Drinks coffee black.
Has traveled enough that he says things like this place has the best shrimp on the Gulf with the authority of a man who has actually tested the claim.
He sleeps lightly. He doesn’t talk about his childhood. He likes old trucks, clean engines, and Quinn’s weird knock-knock jokes even when they make no sense at all.
He laughs more than people would expect. Not often.
But enough.
And every time he does, it feels earned. The age gap still sits in the back of my mind. Twenty-five years doesn’t disappear just because he looks at me like I’m the only thing in the room. It doesn’t vanish because he’s gentle with Quinn or because he texts me good morning or because he kisses me like he means it.
Sometimes I catch us reflected in a diner window or in the shiny glass of the ice cream freezer and it hits me all over again.
He looks like certainty.
I still feel like I’m building myself and somehow he’s become a staple in that.
Quinn asks if Tucker is coming for dinner regularly now, or Marlaina gives me a sly smile during school pickup, or I get one of his short, impossible texts that somehow warms my entire chest, and the doubts quiet for a while.