“Thanks for dinner.” Canaan was smiling as he sank his teeth into a piece of fried chicken later that same night.
“Sorry it’s cold,” I replied, selecting a wing from the stack I’d cooked earlier. “Someone couldn’t wait for dessert.”
“That someone you’re using that disapproving tone on is yourself, right?” His dark brows carved into his forehead. “Because I was not the one who started tearing at articles of clothing like there was a prize for who could get the other undressed first.”
Not wanting to answer that, I took a bite of my chicken.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, sliding the pea salad across the table toward me.
After our garage encounter, I’d texted him to invite him over for dinner when he was done with work. I was going to try my hand at Grandma’s famous fried chicken recipe since I hadn’t eaten a single piece of decent fried chicken since moving to Chicago. Canaan’s reply hadn’t taken a minute to come back.
So after slaving away a couple hours in the kitchen, the moment he stepped through the front door, my mind became a one-lane highway on the fast track to getting him naked and horizontal. Although naked and vertical had followed that after we’d given ourselves a moment to catch our breaths.
Now we were sitting around the table, all the lights out save for the few votives I’d lit so we knew what we were eating, stark naked across from each other. It pretty much took the ribbon for being the most unusual, best meal of my life. Judging from the look on Canaan’s face, same went for him.
“Your grandma would be proud,” he said around a grunt of approval as he tore off the last bite of his drumstick. “This fried chicken is off the charts.”
“Even served lukewarm?”
He reached for a big breast piece. “Off.” He took a big bite, winking. “The charts.”
I realized our glasses were empty and got up to pad over to the fridge.
“Why can’t every day be like this?” Canaan was staring at me leaning inside the fridge, naked as the day I was born, a silly smirk on his face.
“Because no one would get anything done if it was.”
“Oh, believe me, I’d get something done. Over and over again.”
A huff came from me as I pulled out a pitcher of iced tea. “Not the kind of productivity that directly influences the GDP, babe.”
“Not if I make a few dozen strapping young lads while I’m getting ‘something done.’”
“A few dozen?” My eyes rounded as I poured tea into our glasses. “Yeah, good luck with that. My uterus is tapping out at two. Maybe three.”
What I’d said seemed to hit us both at the same time. We were silent for a minute, the room following our lead. We’d never talked much about the miscarriage, Canaan seeming to take the lead from the tone I set after it happened. We didn’t talk about how it had happened barely a week after we’d married, or how Canaan’s drinking and fighting had gone from bad to worse right after. Years later, it seemed we still didn’t talk about the baby we’d lost.
Canaan shifted in his seat, setting down his chicken. “So Chicago. What makes a girl born and raised in Small Town, Missouri, decide to head to one of the biggest cities in the country?”
After setting the pitcher down, I stood there staring at the flame of one of the candles. “A change.”
Canaan took a drink of the tea, shifting in his chair. “And what keeps a girl in Chicago for five years?”
“I don’t know. Why does anyone decide to stay where they are? Live where they do?” I slid into my chair across from him, picking up my fork. “It’s an unconscious decision, I guess.”
“An unconscious decision?” He blinked at me, unconsciously rubbing at the scar cutting through his brow.
“What? Why are you still living here?”
He leaned forward in his seat. “For a very purposeful, conscious reason.”
“That all-important reason being?”
He leaned closer still, the candlelight dancing in his gold eyes. “I’m sitting across from that reason now.”
I picked at my pea salad. “You stayed because you thought I’d come back here one day?”
“I stayed here because I knew you’d come back here one day.”
My shoulders dropped. “Canaan, I didn’t even know I’d come back. How could you be so certain of what someone else was going to do? How could you just stake your life on it?”
His hands thrust across the table at me. “I was right.”
I grumbled under my breath and took my first bite of pea salad.
“Don’t live your life one unconscious decision to another. Don’t become another empty shell moving down the sidewalk, living every damn day on repeat. Don’t settle for good enough. Chase great, Maggie.”
Kicking my leg up beneath me, I looked across the table at him. “Kind of how you chased me the night I left?”
“You are my great. I’ll never stop chasing you.”
After that, a nice long drink of tea was in order. He was throwing so much at me, saying all the right things at what felt like the wrong time. Years had passed. I’d come with divorce papers in hand. My boyfriend of two years had just said, “Sayonara, I’m moving to San Francisco.” My grandma’s funeral was in a few days. I had shows booked in Chicago this fall. This was the definition of the wrong time to rekindle a flame that had been snuffed out forever ago.
“Have you ever been to Chicago?” I picked up my chicken and took another bite, if for nothing more than a distraction.
“Once.”
“When was that?”
His neck rolled before answering. “A few months after you left.”
“And this trip to the same city I’d moved to was a random coincidence?” I said.
Another neck roll. “I might have seen a letter you’d mailed your grandma sitting on the kitchen table one day. I also might have written down the return address before she came back into the room.” Half of his face pulled up when he noticed the look I was giving him.
“You stalked me to Chicago?”
“Stalk is a bit of an overstatement—”
Lifting my index finger, I picked up my phone from the table and punched something into a search engine. “‘To pursue or approach stealthily.’”
“I never approached you,” he answered instantly.
My eyes moved from my phone to him.
An exhale rose from deep in his chest. “I never approached you . . . that you knew of.” Another exhale when I rolled my hand. “Fine. I stalked you.”
“My life’s a soap opera in the making,” I muttered.
“And I’m just the married guy who went without sex for five years waiting for the love of his life to return to him with open arms. Instead I got divorce papers.” His knee bumped mine beneath the table. “Tell me about it.”
When I topped off our drinks, my forehead creased. “If you came all the way there, why didn’t you come up to me? Why didn’t you say whatever it was you wanted to?” I’d never known Canaan to swallow words instead of spew them. He said and did what came to him. It wasn’t in his nature to hold back.
His eyes lost focus, like he was seeing something else. “You seemed happy. And after how unhappy I knew you’d been with me, I left so you could live your life while I worked on mine.”
When I went to swallow, I found I couldn’t. I hadn’t been expecting that kind of an answer. The boy had become a man, learning that sometimes the best way to show one’s love was from afar.
“I ran into Danny McDonald a couple of days ago, in the craft store of all places. We talked about you.”
Across the table, Canaan came back to the present. “All lies.”
“He pretty much swore on the life of his born and unborn children that you were never with another girl when we were together. Or after.” My foot moved beneath the table, sliding up his legs. I didn’t miss the way his skin raised where I touched it or the tremor that ran down his chest. “He said you’re his sponsor. That you saved him.”
Canaan’s hand knotted around my foot when I started to pull away. He planted my foot on the edge of his chair, his powerful legs trapping it between them. “He speaks the truth. Never said an untrue word in his life.”
His answer drew a smile. “I’m not his biggest fan, you might remember.”
He nodded, one of his hands rubbing small circles into the plane of my foot. “We were both a couple of pissed off kids who had more anger than we could keep bottled inside. We found the most constructive outlet we could to vent it. The ring.” His shoulders lifted as he raised his free hand. “Using your fists on someone who volunteered for it and is using their fists on you is a hell of a lot better than what an angry hothead could do.”
The skin between his brows folded into a deep canyon as his eyes darkened. We hadn’t talked much about why he’d been so angry, mainly because we didn’t need to. He knew why. And so did I.
“Asher dying wasn’t your fault,” I whispered.
Canaan didn’t agree or disagree with that. He didn’t say anything. Neither did his expression. After a moment, the void cleared. “Are you ready? For the funeral?” His voice was a few notes deeper than usual, his eyes roaming.
“Yeah, I am. As ready as anyone really could be.”
He nodded absently. “What’s your plan for after?”
I wasn’t sure if he was asking about after the funeral or after our month was up. I didn’t want to know actually. “Isn’t that the point of this month-long experiment? So we don’t have to talk about any of that?”
His fingers stopped moving along my foot. “You still haven’t decided?”
“On what?”
His eyes closed for a moment. When they reopened, they were empty. “Nothing.” He let my foot go before rising out of his chair. “I should get going.”
His plate was still full. There were hours until morning. “You could stay.”
Without my giving it permission, my hand reached for his as he was passing. It was too late. He’d already moved on by the time I got there.
“I’d rather not get used to falling asleep with you again, Maggie.” Behind me, I heard him pulling on his jeans, his shirt being thrown over his head.
My teeth worked at my bottom lip. “Why not?”
He must have had his boots on, because his footsteps were louder as they moved for the door. “Because I don’t want to get used to falling asleep without you again if you leave.”
The door had closed behind him, his footsteps drumming down the porch steps, when I replied to the empty seat across from me. “I don’t want to either.”