Page 51 of Crowe
I might have figured out where we were going, but I didn’t have to feign surprise any longer, because I never could’ve dreamed he would do all this. It was absolutely beautiful.
Jackson was watching me.
“Well?” he said.
I turned to look at him. I let myself take a moment with it—the canopy, the lights, the garden, the city—and then I looked at him and said, “Jackson. This is incredible.”
Something in his expression settled. “Good,” he said. “Come sit down.”
He pulled out my chair, and once I was seated, he sat across from me and reached for the bottle of wine that was already open and breathing on the table.
“Did you do all this yourself?” I asked.
He filled my glass. Then his. Then he set the bottle down and looked at me. “No,” he said. “Hawk and Gator helped. I wanted it to be right.” He picked up his wine. “And I knew they’d done it before and knew what they were doing.”
I picked up my own wine and looked at him across the candlelight. The city hummed below us. Somewhere in the container garden, a small wind moved through the basil. “It’s right,” I said. “It’s very right.”
He held my gaze for a moment with that steady, unhurried attention of his. Then he nodded once, satisfied, and reached for the covered dishes.
He’d cooked for me. I didn’t know why that mattered so much, but it did. Pan-seared chicken, roasted vegetables, something with herbs that smelled like the cabin kitchen the night he grilled steaks. He’d brought it all up here and kept it warm somehow,which I chose not to ask about because it felt like the kind of logistical question that would interrupt something special.
“You cooked for me,” I said.
“I did.”
“Up here?” I looked around for some sign he’d been up here cooking.
“No, I cooked in at my place while the group from East Texas got packed up.”
“In a cast-iron skillet?”
“Naturally.”
We talked through dinner. He told me about the training camp, first about the group that was here this week, but then about the ridge where the light came in over the treeline in the early mornings and how much he loved it when he was the only one awake.
“It reminds me of the cabin,” he said. “But that silent moment is my favorite part of my day.”
“I can see why it would be.”
I told him more about my mother and her garden, the language of flowers she’d taught me when I was young enough that Ididn’t even realize I was learning. All those memories came out easily up here under the lights with the city spread out below us and his attention entirely on me.
“She would have liked you,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“She liked people who meant what they said.” I looked at him. “You always mean what you say.”
“I try to,” he said.
The candle nearest me moved in a small current of air off the rooftop. Below us, far down, someone’s car turned a corner and was gone.
He set his wine down and looked at me in that way he had when something was coming that he’d thought about carefully. “I need to say something.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I was going to wait, but Wyatt said something to me out at the camp about how there’s always going to be a reason to wait.” He stopped and blew out a breath and then started again. “What this is—” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “I don’t do things halfway, baby boy. I didn’t set all this up and ask Hawk and Gator to spend their afternoon stringing lights because I’mpassing the time. This is me telling you that I want this. I want you. Now, and whatever comes after all of it.”
The city went on below us, a hundred thousand people entirely indifferent to the two of us on this rooftop.
