Page 91 of The Fate Factor

“Right.” I clear my throat and step back while she rinses the suds I’ve made in her hair. I’ve never been good at saying the right thing when I start to feel like this. Like I’m on the outside of something. Like I was misunderstanding a thing that everyone got but me.

This feels like one of those moments. I can’t shake the feeling that I earned this with about as much effort as I earned everything else I have. Good fortune. A lucky break I stumbled on. Absolutely nothing to do with me.

But if I’m already down in the count, I can’t risk her rethinking this entire thing because I’m being weird. I need to figure out a way to accept what she told me, because this is exactly where I want to be.

She squeezes water from her ponytail, and I cup her elbow. “Come here.” She does, and I press her bottom lip with my thumb, my other hand slipping around her waist. “When you saw us,” I whisper. “What were we doing?”

“We were in bed.” Pink flushes up her neck, and I press my mouth to it and slide my knee between her legs.

“Was I touching you?”

“I couldn’t see your hands. After they slipped beneath the sheet.”

“I know I was. There’s no way I could keep my hands off you.” I’m impossibly hard for being pissed off and confused about twominutes ago, but I need to feel instead of think. To slip into instinct.

Noel tilts her chin, kissing a drop of water from my jaw, and I notch us closer, my arm contracting around her waist to bring her to her toes. I can feel her melting into what I’m starting here, molding like clay beneath my hands, and it soothes my anxiety. I just need to see her react to me, to us together. Something I can’t misinterpret.

Her bottom lip is pushed out and swollen from how long we kissed last night, sleeping, then waking to her fingers on my stomach. Her leg wrapped around my waist. That was all real.

Now, I scoop my hands beneath her thighs, pressing her back to the shower wall while we kiss so I can make it real again.

“I haven’t ruined it?” she asks, as I fumble between us, centering myself between her legs. “It isn’t weird now?”

“No, baby. It isn’t weird.” I slide in slow, my head falling back at the warmth of her. “It’s fate.”

I just have to trust it’s still on my side.

thirty

Noel

Thenextfewweeksare a blur of soaking up the dying light at the cottage and spending late nights in Jamie’s bed when he gets off work. He hired someone to take a few of his bar shifts, but his schedule at the brewery has ramped up while he gets a new ale ready for a winter release. Most of our time together now comes after dark.

Some nights I sit on a stool at Fortune and watch Jamie work. Some nights I stay in and sketch or watch a movie with Pixie. Jamie lets himself in after I’ve fallen asleep, stripping off his work clothes and curling his body around mine until we inevitably forget that sleep is necessary and stay up touching and talking in a way that feels more intimate than sex. Though,there’s a lot of that too. I think I’ve had more sex in the fall of this year than in all my years combined.

For whatever reason, I opened something in Jamie with my confession at the hotel, and I’ve come to realize this is part of how he sews it back up. Whenever my mind tries to linger on his weird reaction, I force myself to remember that I spent two years telling myself that Jamie Bishop didn’t exist just so I didn’t have to confront the implications of fate on a potential relationship. Even after the universe dropped him on my porch again, I poked a hundred holes in the idea of us, before finally holding this up to the light of what I know to be true—that whoever is in charge of these things got the two of us very right.

The rest of my life is like a garden in the spring, a new bud appearing with each sunrise. It’s safe to say my sabbatical has officially ended. I’ve been working on the designs for Cara’s mural, more inspired than I’ve felt in months, maybe years. I see Kate and Colin for dinner once a week. And I’ve been hanging out with Cara outside of work too.

Last weekend, we met for drinks downtown when Jamie and Em were both working at Fortune. Cara ordered a Corona, begging me not to snitch, and I’d dutifully ordered Jamie’s fall ale because I truly love it and because I swore beverage loyalty. I know he was mostly kidding, but I like the way his face lights up when I drink his beer. I like any time that sweet, handsome grin is aimed at me.

And I like the idea that a friendship with Cara is part of this package delivered straight from the universe. She’s full of stories I don’t think I’d otherwise get to hear, things she heard from Em. When she told me the details of the skylight story Jamie mentioned at the beach, we’d laughed so hard we’d nearly sprayed beer out of our noses, and then she’d grabbed my wrist on the table, a sudden sappy look on her face. “I just love you twotogether. Becca, she was… ” She’d paused, seeming to choose those words carefully. “Well, she was hard on him.”

“You knew her?” I’d asked, equally careful.

“Mmhmm. Weirdly, I knew her before I knew Jamie. From rec camp when we were, like, twelve. And then, you know, from around.”

“Small city.”

“Very. It’s not a judgment on her. Or him. Just… them together.”

I nodded along, pretending not to be wildly jealous at the reminder that there evenwasa them together. Part of my problem is that I’ve been living in the past in a sense. Like Jamie said, settling for old dynamics with my mother. Avoiding Nana’s house because being there alone wouldn’t be the same as it used to be, and it might hurt. But Jamie and I have been about the future since we met, and I don’t like thinking about him and Becca.

So I’d smiled, and sipped my beer, and said, “That’s because he’s supposed to be mine.”

On Fridays, Jamie has at least a twelve hour shift on the brewery floor. Today, he’s been gone since before dawn, and I plan to use the forced separation to work on my watercolors again. The other night while I sat at the bar waiting for him to finish his shift, I’d doodled a few designs for holiday cards that, if I really buckle down, I could have ready by Thanksgiving. Iwantto have them ready.

I pop my headphones in my ears and grab the jar candle Jamie and I used weeks ago to try to read his future. They’ve been part of my regular painting routine now that I’m not blocked often enough to need brain breaks. But when I light the wick, it sparks,then fizzles, and a plume of black smoke signals that it’s just about empty.

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