Page 59 of The Exit Strategy

“Your plan is to wait.”

“Exactly.”

Let it go, Junie.

A rational, emotionally regulated adult would let this go, would light another candle, pick up a book, and ride out the storm like a person who hasn’t been slow-cooking in unresolved tension for weeks.

Unfortunately for the both of us, I’m not that adult. I never have been. And something about the dark, and the rain, and the way he said “ours” earlier has loosened the fight in my chest that I’ve been keeping in a chokehold.

Too many pictures and memories and half-truths lubricate my inhibitions.

“You know what your problem is?”

“Enlighten me.” He pours himself a bourbon but doesn’t offer me one. No, to him I’m still the kid sister of his best friend.Classic fucking Cole.He’ll make me a grilled cheese unprompted but won’t pour me a drink.

So I take his. He watches. Studies me as I bring the glass to my lips. Heat flares in his features as I remove the glass and lick my bottom lip.ThatI know I’m not imagining, so I do it again just to see his irises dance like the flicker of the candles.

“You think fixing things is the same as dealing with them.” I take another sip. It burns in a way that feels productive. “You fixed the breaker, and Marley’s porchlight, and every goddamn thing in this community that even wiggles funny. Hell, you probably even fixed my stairs, but you won’t?—”

I take another sip. Anchoring myself to the burn so I don’t say something I can’t take back.

“Won’t.” He leans into my space. I’m still standing too close. “What?”

“You won’t handle the actual problem.”

There’s two feet of space between him and the island I’m pressed against, but as he takes a step toward me, that space evaporates.

He hitches at the waist, bringing our eyes in line with each other. “Which is?”

“You.” The word lands between us. I watch it hit him—the recognition that flickers behind his eyes, the way his arms snap out to cage me in on either side. But he doesn’t fire back. He simply…stares and clenches his jaw so hard I can hear his molars grinding.

“You hide behind the repairs and clipboard and the grumpy mayor routine, and it works. It does. On everyone else. But it doesn’t work on me. I stood in your office and saw you light up when speaking about your work for the first time since I’ve been here. That was the Cole I recognized. Then I had the audacity to ask one question about one photo, and you shut down so quickly, I got whiplash.”

Real pain flashes in his expression. “Junie?—”

“Tell me that wasn’t the real you up there. What am I supposed to do, Cole, huh? Stand here and pretend I don’t see it? That I don’t see you?”

My voice cracks on the last word—a despicable weakness. I hate that he can hear the fracture. I hate that I’m standing here, fighting with him while wearing his grandmother’s ring, forcing him into honesty when I can’t be honest with myself about why any of this matters so goddamn much.

“You see what I want you to see,” he says. Low. Rough.The voice he uses when he’s one sentence from walking away or breaking open.

“That’s the problem.” The words rip from my chest with years’ worth of pain. “You decide what I get to know, how I get to feel. What about what I decide? Huh? I’m sick of being managed by a man who can’t even?—”

The world explodes. It ends right here. It must because I sure as fuck know that Cole Whittaker’s lips did not just slam down on top of mine.

He slides his hand into my hair and fists it. Hard. He tugs my head back to angle my face so he can devour me.

Cole Whittaker is kissing me, ruining me, redesigning what it means to be kissed in real time.

He’s not slow. He’s not gentle. It’s not the soft, tentative first kiss of two people testing the water. This is a lifetime of silence touching down like a tornado. He pulls my hair, and my clit vibrates. He cups my face with his other hand—rough and calloused. The dichotomy of hard and soft messes with my equilibrium.

And his mouthison mine. It’s not a question. It’s an answer to something neither of us has been brave enough to ask.

Every self-preservation instinct, every spiteful retaliation I’ve dreamed up since the day he left is screaming at me to stop, step back, find the ice, run.

Instead, I grab his shirt with both fists and pull him closer.

The sound he makes—low, broken, like I’ve knocked the air out of him—undoes some fundamental law of attraction that’s sat unchartered in my chest for a lifetime. Like I bricked it over six years ago and swore I’d never reopen it.