For a couple of weeks, life was going well. Really well.

It was terrifying, yes. She was falling for Cole and falling hard. When she was with him, she forgot all about her loneliness and her trepidation about the future. She could just sit back and enjoy being with him.

It wasn’t hard to do. The night he’d brought her those spices, he’d taken her back to his place again and rocked her world just as thoroughly as he had that first night, making her come so hard that she went limp in his arms, shattered, again and again. He was so strong, and he fucked so well.

But it was more than that. Lying next to him in the dark, talking quietly into the night, warm in his muscular embrace—it wasn’t something she’d had before, and it came at a time when she’d never needed comfort more. Waking up in his arms felt safe, and real, and right in a way it never had with any other man.

She found it easy to open up to him, about everything.

She talked about Matty, about her regrets about not coming up here when he was still alive, about the pain of those missed chances.

“We didn’t hang out much,” Cole had said. “I don’t really hang out with anyone much. But he helped me build this cabin, and we talked. He talked about you more than a bit. He adored you, Tali. Obviously he did, or he wouldn’t have asked you to take on such a burden. It’s human nature to feel like you’ll have more time. He wouldn’t fault you for it. He wouldn’t want you shedding tears over it. I knew him well enough to know that without a doubt.” Then he’d wiped away her tears with his callused thumbs and kissed them off her cheeks.

She talked about Ella and the eternal struggle to get through to her. He always found something to say to cheer her up. It was a relief to have someone to unload her worries on, and when he called her brave and kind and good and kissed her all over her face, she almost believed it.

He opened up about himself, too, just a little. The first night, in the midst of all that magnetic attraction, she sensed a deep loneliness in him, and it became clear she wasn’t wrong about that. He had no one, that much she knew. He didn’t offer up the circumstances, and she didn’t push him, but she knew he’d arrived in Newcomb at the age of sixteen, on his own. Before that, he’d been raised by an aunt somewhere even more remote than Newcomb.

He’d found work where he could, living in a long-since shut down boarding house, and scraped by on his own. He’d worked for Matty for a summer on the boat, but stopped doing that for reasons he didn’t say. It seemed like he’d gone through a slew of jobs before he’d finally saved up enough to get his pilot’s license and buy his own plane four years back. All his stories were about work it seemed.

He never talked about friends, never talked about a girl. It puzzled her—baffled her, really—that he seemed to be utterly without attachments when he was so warm and so kind, but every time she pushed the subject, he clammed up. This thing between them was fragile and new, and different. She didn’t know what kind of pressures might break it, but she already knew she didn’t want that that to happen, so she backed off.

More than that, she was afraid. Afraid to know why he was so alone. And afraid of what she was starting to mean to him. Because as much as she was starting to care for him, she had a lot of other things that needed her focus.

She had LA with Cass and her friends. She had Mabel, and the people at the tavern, several of whom she could now consider friends. She had Ella, even if that was something stilted and difficult. And, until recently, she’d had Matty, and his love had meant the world. Her life was so full and Cole’s blatantly wasn’t.

Cole had no one. He hadn’t had anyone for a long, long time. But now he had her. Sometimes the weight of that terrified her to the core, but one glance in his eyes and she was lost again.

Overall, life was smooth.

She worked at Mabel’s, often during restaurant hours and a couple of nights a week at the bar. On bar nights, Cole always came in. Ella had taken to staying over at a friend’s at least one, if not two of the weekend nights, which meant Tali was free to work and go home with him at the end of the night.

On weeknights when Hudson was over watching Ella, it was a little more complicated. While she didn’t want to take advantage of his time, Tali could rarely resist slipping away with Cole for a stolen hour after closing to fuck, to talk, and to just be in his arms. He never wanted to let her go, but she always put her foot down, guilty about keeping Hudson too late.

Often, if Cole wasn’t away working, they’d meet in the afternoons after she’d finished out the lunch rush and made her pastries and before Ella got back from school. They were both equally eager to devour each other in whatever time they could spare, and it was exciting. One night when Ella unexpectedly decided to go sleep over at the Callaways’, Tali skipped work and went straight to his place. They’d cooked dinner together, fucked in front of the fireplace, and fallen asleep together on his couch to the crackly sounds of his old radio.

She was still stuck in Newcomb, Alaska, but life was about as perfect as it could get.

Then she got the call from Ella’s school.