Dammit, Jackson. I stalk toward the front door and shove my feet into a pair of flip-flops. Who knows what he’s already said to my dad and Gayle. What secrets has he already spilled? I need to stop him before he incriminates me, before he tells the whole world something he shouldn’t.

I hurry down the path toward the main house, still clutching the plaid blanket around my shoulders. The floodlights trip when I approach my dad’s porch, despite the sky’s show-offy display of pink and orange sunset overhead, and the light catches the three of them in the face. Gayle’s mouth twitches into a straight line and then smooths out again. Jackson eyes me like I’m a feral cat. Like he doesn’t know yet if I’ll accept a back rub or if I’ll bite.

To be honest, it could go either way.

“Just who I was looking for,” Jackson says, confirming that this isn’t a social visit to bask in my stepmom’s charming personality. My shoulders tense and I narrow my eyes at him. How can he just show up at my door when I don’t even know where he lives? It’s just like Jackson, too—he decides to do something and he just does it. Without a reason. Just because he wants to. It’s probably why he slept with so many people in college. Act first, think about the repercussions later.

I shake my head. I want to leave him standing on Gayle’s porch, but now that I’ve acknowledged him, I can’t pretend I’m not here. “Come on,” I tell him, turning back toward the guesthouse.

At least it’s halfway amusing that this is our new pattern—me leading Jackson somewhere, expecting that he’ll follow if he wants to. I’m not the girl who used to trail him around town, waiting for him to offer rides, wanting him to be the one to ask.

He follows.

I kick off my flip-flops just inside my front door. “I didn’t know we were all friends,” I tell Jackson, keeping my blanket wrapped firmly around my shoulders.

“Of course we’re all friends.” He waves his hand non-specifically. “I’m the handsome and charming bartender who’s a little over-generous when it comes to their wine pours and Gayle lets me use the porch to stash layers when I go on long runs.”

“Wine pours? At Hooligans?”

He look at me like come on, catch up.

I’m not sure which piece of this news is harder to process—my parents at the damp, dark bar, or Gayle allowing her immaculate porch to be used as a drop station for running clothes, or, once again, Jackson running. Even seeing it in action it’s hard to believe.

Before I can say anything else Jackson steps out of his shoes and glances around the room, his eyes touching on the stack of boxes. His eyebrows acknowledge them, drawing together for a second, before he looks back at my face.

“So, hey,” he says brightly, as if this whole meeting had been my idea instead of his. “I’ve been thinking.” He walks across the room to retrieve a beer from my fridge as if he has some right to be here. As if no time has passed at all.

Jackson holds up two beers, questioning, and I nod before sinking into a kitchen chair. Might as well.

He hands me the second bottle, his fingers brushing mine all warm and calloused. The bottle is so cold it feels wet, and it shocks me out of making a snappy comeback.

Jackson sits across from me at the little table and his long legs bracket mine. Heat radiates through his jeans and I shift. He’s so close.

“Do you need a partner?” Jackson asks.

My mind flies to the bottles of lube on my kitchen counter, the way Jackson’s shirt lifted when he leaned into the refrigerator, revealing a hint of skin just above his jeans.

“Don’t look so horrified, Natalie. I just had some ideas for how to get traffic for your product launch.”

Oh my god. He means a business partner. Of course.

I don’t even know where to start with this, or how to explain my strange disappointment that Jackson’s here for business. Instead I ask the question that’s been weighing on me since I saw him sliding drinks to thirsty customers at the bar. “Aren’t you working at the store?”

Wirth & Sons General Store is the reason his family moved to Swan’s Hollow to begin with. Jackson’s dad inherited the wide green barn from his own father the summer before Jackson’s sophomore year, and he moved the whole family East to carry on the Wirth & Sons tradition.

Long before either of us was born, Jackson’s grandfather had converted the building into a store as famous for its contents as for the fact that one winter fifteen cars slid down the road in front of it and smashed into the low brick wall protecting the property. He’d stuffed the store with everything from overpriced Christmas ornaments and colored pencils hand-carved from foraged branches, to lollipops in a rainbow of colors and the requisite Greetings from Swan’s Hollow postcards. The store had always felt dusty and dry, but when Jackson’s dad took it over from his grandfather, he got rid of the dust and stocked it with a few other items, too. Milk and boxed mac and cheese, wine from a few local vineyards. Things you’d run out for in the middle of the night.

If Jackson felt upset about being displaced from the Golden State to move to the Massachusetts gloom, he didn’t show it. When I asked about it he just shrugged his shoulders and said something like, “All the world’s an oyster and I know how to dive for pearls.” It wasn’t that he was relentlessly optimistic or cheerful or anything; I just don’t know if things got to him. And since I felt everything so sharply, it was at once a sticking point for me and a balm.

Jackson takes a long swallow of his beer. “No.” Something sad flits across his face, something I might not have noticed if I didn’t know him so well. “I’m not working there at the moment.” His lips press into a line.

I assumed Jackson had taken over when his dad passed away last year. His brother Conor had never expressed interest in the store and Jackson had always sort of known he was going to run the place one day. Still, he’d wanted something to do in the in-between. In the stretch of years he’d thought he’d have before he had to head back to Swan’s Hollow.

Marine Biology, he decided one year. Being a professional hackey sack player, he told me another.

We both agreed that leaving town was the only way to follow our dreams and grow. But Mr. Wirth is gone, now, and Jackson is here. So why isn’t he working at the store with his own damn name on it? And if he’s not working there, then why the hell is he still in Swan’s Hollow?

I close my eyes against the sting of it. It’s not my business where Jackson works, but part of me feels bratty about it. He’s not doing what he said he would do. What’s going to happen if I let him into my business and he does the same thing? It’s not like I want a partner either way. I spent too much time relying on Matthew to keep the wheels on my life, and look where that got me. I’m starting this business for myself, by myself. Miss Independent, and all that.

“Why do you even want to do this?” I ask.

Jackson gives a little lift of his shoulders and with that subtle move, all the muscles ripple just below the thin material of his shirt. “Did I ever tell you I changed my major in school?”

After that first year of college, the year I stopped talking to him, I assumed he was still following through with the latest plan: radio broadcasting so one day he could work at a sports network.

I shake my head.

“I switched over to business.” Jackson lets out a low laugh. “Ironic, since I’m not currently running a business.” I think about my expensive, unfinished degree. He’s not the only one doing something other than planned. “It would be nice to use my brain a little,” Jackson continues.

“Right.” I snort. “I would think coming up with creative pickup lines to use on bar patrons is a good mental workout.”

He looks a little wounded at that one, but quickly slides on a grin. “Don’t let me fool you. The pretty face does all the work. Anyway, I was top of my graduating class, Nat. I bring a lot to the table.”

Top of the class, huh? Jackson’s younger brother had always been more into schoolwork while Jackson slid by on everyone’s good graces. So what changed? Was Jackson trying to prove something?

I trail a finger through the condensation on my bottle of beer. “I need to sleep on it.” I don’t want to need anyone. Especially him.

Jackson’s face doesn’t fall but he doesn’t break into the wide grin I expect. “Take as much time as you need” is all he says as he walks to the door.

I never thought I’d call Jackson vulnerable, but something soft and needy slips over his broad shoulders, presses a crease between his eyes. I can’t get the picture of him out of my mind, even later, after he’s gone. Jackson Wirth, stopped halfway between here and there. He rests his hand on the doorframe, looking over his shoulder at me before he steps out into the night.