Page 68 of Tinsel & Tools
I’m so sorry
I thought he knew. Please call me
Checking the time stamp, I realized she’d sent the messages before Cole had come home. I’d had my phone on silent while working and hadn’t heard them come through.
I typed out a response:
It’s not your fault. I should have told him
I’m at Ryan’s but I can come to you if you don’t want to be alone
Did she know I wouldn’t be staying at Cole’s tonight? Had he been so mad when she’d told him that she knew he’d want me to leave?
I didn’t have the energy to think about any of it. Instead, I sent:
It’s okay. Heading to the city tonight. I’ll call you when I get in
Her reply was fast:
Do you want me to ride with you?
Stay. We’ll talk tomorrow
I set my phone in the holder and put my car into gear. At the end of the driveway, I turned onto Aspen Street, leading away from Brookhaven.
I wrote happily ever afters for a living, but tonight mine was slipping away.
25
Cole
The house was quiet when I woke Monday morning. Too quiet. It had been that way all weekend and I hated it. Everywhere I looked, I saw Gavin: at my kitchen table, on my couch, in my shower. Every twinkle from the tree reminded me of him, and every night when I climbed into bed and his side stayed cold brought him to mind. Thinking of it that way made my chest hurt, but that’s what it was to me now: his.
After getting dressed, I pulled on my boots, grabbed my keys, and left. I didn’t grab coffee or pack a lunch. I just walked to my truck and cranked the engine. While it warmed slowly, I scraped frost from the windshield and then headed to the empty, chilly bed and breakfast to get a head start on the day.
Inside, I walked the length of the hall, marked the boxes I hadn’t finished, and set the reel I was carrying against the wall. The drill whined as the bit chewed through the stud, the sound reverberating in the bare room. When the bit punched through, I pulled it free and started feeding the line.
The routine work should have helped, but it didn’t. Every pull circled me back to the same thought: He was gone. Not just absent from the house but away from me, and I didn’t know how to put losing him into words that made sense because I’d never planned on feeling this way about anyone again, least of all Gavin.
He’d strolled into town looking for someone to fix up the inn. I was just supposed to do my job. I was supposed to handle the remodel, keep the work moving, and leave him to whatever life he lived outside of mine.
That was the plan.
But somewhere between him sitting across from me at the diner and the way his mouth could undo me, I’d stopped keeping it simple. Because it hadn’t been just sex. It was grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup at my table, secret touches under the table at The Tap, and him cooking me a hot dinner after a long, cold day. It was standing next to him in front of a Christmas tree I’d never planned to put up, then kissing him and knowing it wasn’t about the ridiculous, messy tinsel at all. It was him all along, and he was gone, and I didn’t know what to do with everything I felt.
Now I stood in a half-finished room with a drill in my hand, wondering why the hell it felt like my chest was caving in over a man I wasn’t supposed to want in the first place.
I’d gone thirty years without thinking about men the way I had Gavin. I had married Whitney and moved to Boston. We’d tried to build a life there. It hadn’t worked. After the divorce I’d come back to Brookhaven and resumed working with my dad, taking jobs around town and keeping my head down. That’s what people do. They find their lane and stay in it. Even after Whitney tore my life apart, I never questioned that the next time I tried with someone, it would be a woman. That was who I thought I was. That was what everyone in town thought I was.
Then Gavin showed up.
He wasn’t part of my life plan, but every time he leaned close, every time he smiled across a table, every time he looked at me like I was more than the guy swinging a hammer for him, something inside me cracked. I told myself it was nothing, that it would pass, but it didn’t.
What broke me open was how easy it felt with him. I didn’t have to explain myself, didn’t have to pretend. He came into my house and filled the spaces I hadn’t realized were empty. And I hated how much that scared me. Because if I cared for him, it meant I wasn’t who I thought I was. It meant everyone in town would look at me differently if they found out. It meant admitting that the man I’d let into my bed wasn’t just a complication, but someone I still wanted, even after he’d left.
That was what I couldn’t get past. It wasn’t about Gavin writing us into his pages. It was about realizing those pages existed in the first place, that I’d been living them without meaning to, and now I had to face what that said about me.
I stared at the wiring, my gloves stiff in the cold, and remembered I was going to call my father about hiring more guys on after the holidays. At least then I could hurry and get the job done and get out of Gavin’s space for good.
