Page 13 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Lumberjack

Hattie doesn't flinch. Doesn't do the face, the one where people's eyes go soft and pitying and you can see them mentally constructing a sympathy card. She sits on my counter in her rumpled sundress with her bare feet swinging and says, "Tell me about her."

So I do.

Not the dying part. The living part. How Cora read three books a week, stacked them on the nightstand until the pile threatened structural collapse. How she sang off key in the shower every single morning and never once cared. How she picked Maple out of a litter at the shelter because Maple was the only puppy who didn't try to lick her face. Cora liked things that didn't try too hard.

"She sounds wonderful," Hattie says when I stop.

"She was."

"And you think wanting something again means losing her."

My jaw tightens. She's a kindergarten teacher with green eyes and too much warmth, and she just walked into the center of my chest and turned on the lights.

"Yeah," I say. "Something like that."

Hattie slides off the counter. Bare feet on my kitchen floor. Five three, maybe. Comes up to my collarbone.

"Wal." She's standing close enough that I can see the individual freckles on her nose. "Can I tell you something I never said in the texts?"

"Yeah."

"I've been falling for you since the needy letter Q."

The laugh that comes out of me is rough. Broken at the edges. I lift my hand, and my fingers are in her hair before I've made the conscious decision to touch her. Her ponytail is half undone, the elastic barely holding. I pull it free. Brown and gold waves spill over my hand.

Her breath catches.

"I'm forty years old," I tell her. "I've got a missing fingertip, gray in my beard, and a closet full of my dead wife's clothes I haven't touched."

"Okay."

"I haven't been with anyone in over two years."

"Okay."

"I saved your number the first morning. Before you'd even finished texting. I saved it and I looked at it every day. Every single day, Hattie."

Her hands fist in the front of my henley. She rises on her toes. My other hand finds her waist, the soft curve of her hip through the thin cotton of her sundress, and I hold her there.

"Kiss me," she whispers.

I kiss her.

Three months of texts, of wanting, of reading her words at 2 AM and pressing my phone against my chest. My mouth covers hers, tongue sliding past her lips, and she makes a sound against me that vibrates through my whole body. Her fingers climb from my shirt to my jaw, pulling me closer. Sweet, warm, alive. That's what she tastes like.

My hands grip her hips, lift her back onto the counter. She wraps her legs around me, ankles locked at my lower back, hersundress riding up to her thighs. Soft, full thighs. My palms slide up the outside of them and she gasps into my mouth.

"Bedroom," she says against my lips.

I carry her. Hands under her ass, her legs around me, her mouth on my neck doing things that make my vision blur. Down the hallway, past the closed door to Cora's side of the closet, into the spare room where I put her bag an hour ago.

I lay her on the bed. She reaches for me, fingers working at the buttons on my henley, but I catch her wrists. Press them gently onto the mattress above her head.

"Slow down."

"I don't want to slow down."

"I've been thinking about this for three months." My mouth finds the curve of her jaw. The hinge below her ear. The soft spot where her neck meets her shoulder. She shivers under me. "I'm not rushing it."