Where Still Waters Ignite

The carburetor on the John Deere was finally back together. I had spent most of the afternoon with it laid out across a shop rag in the barn, and my brother Clay's stepdaughter, Maisie, had spent most of the afternoon on the floor beside me, handing me sockets she had organized by size on a second shop rag of her own. She was six years old and practically ran this ranch from the moment she stepped foot on it.

She was a talker, and I wasn't, so naturally she'd scented me out like a bloodhound and decided I would be the person who had to listen to her never-ending train of thought. Most of it was nonsense, except for the story she'd told me earlier about catching Clay and Callie fooling around and they told her he was teaching Callie bear safety. I'd laughed so hard I couldn't breathe for about ten minutes, and Maisie had looked at me like I was having a stroke. But I fully intended on weaponizing it across the dinner table the moment I got the chance tonight.

Mom appeared in the barn doorway just after five in the blue dress. It was her favorite dress. Cornflower blue with buttons down the front. She wore it for birthdays and holidays and, on one memorable afternoon, the day the county commissioner came out to look at the easement. She'd never worn it for a regular Sunday dinner. Not in the twenty-seven years I'd been alive.

I thought about asking her why she was wearing it — if something special was happening — but thought better of it.

"You two get cleaned up for dinner," she said.

Maisie grabbed her horse off the workbench and ran across the yard to the main house. Mom followed after her, laughing.

I cleaned up at the barn sink like always. Scrubbing grease off my hands and forearms before running my wet fingers through my hair. I grabbed the clean shirt Mom had left for me on the hook by the barn door earlier. She'd been leaving one there every Sunday morning for three years. I never asked her to, and she never mentioned it.

I crossed the yard to the main house. The kitchen was loud the way it always was on Sundays because all seven Blackwood kids living on the ranch and most of us working here wasn't enough — we have to get together every Sunday for dinner, too. My oldest brother, Wyatt, was at the counter carving the roast, and his wife, Ivy, was beside him, handing him the platter. Our sister, Maggie, was in the hall arguing with Sophia about something that involved a lot of hand gestures. Maggie's fiancé, Jack, was setting the table. Liam and his fiancée, Stephanie, were uncorking wine together even though it was a one-person job. Jack's dog, Sully, had already taken up his station under the table because he'd figured out where the scraps fell and hadn't moved since. Dad was in his chair at the head of the table with a beer and the settled expression of a man who had long ago accepted that his house would be full and noisy and that this was the price of everything he had built.

I walked past Clay toward the table. I didn't look at him as I said, "Heard you've been teaching Callie bear safety."

It was a drive-by tease. An art I'd perfected over the course of my life.

The silence that followed was beautiful.

I glanced back, and Callie's face had gone beet red. Her mouth opened. Her mouth closed. She pressed both hands over her eyes and made a sound like she was trying to disappear through the kitchen floor.

Clay, the shameless flirt he was, had the smuggest grin I'd ever seen as he said, "Someone's got to keep the family safe."

I arched a brow. "From bears."

"From bears."

Callie grabbed a dish towel and threw it at Clay's head without looking. It hit Maisie instead, which turned into an ordeal that involved her asking about bear safety again. I could barely hold it together by the time I got to my spot at the end of the table and leaned my hand on the back of the chair while I waited for Mom to come take her seat.

There was an extra place setting. It was directly across from mine. The napkin was folded with a precision that meant Mom had folded it herself. I looked up. She was at the stove with her back to me, humming. And likely scheming, too, if I knew my mother at all. And I did.

The blue dress. The extra place. Someone was coming over.

"Mom, whose spot is that?"

"Everyone, sit down," Mom called, ignoring me. "It's ready."

Chairs scraped across the floor, and the table filled. Maisie wedged herself between Clay and Dad, which was her spot nobody else was allowed to sit in. She enforced it with such ferocity that she'd made Liam — my Texas Ranger brother, Liam — relocate. He hadn't even put up a fight.

I pulled out my chair at the far end and was about to sit down when the front door opened.

I heard her before I saw her. It came through the hallway — loud, warm, a laugh already woven through it before the first word landed. A voice I hadn't heard in ten years. A voice my body recognized before my brain caught up. The back of my neck prickled. My hand froze on the back of the chair.

"Louisa Blackwood, this house smells exactly the same. Like heaven decided to open a restaurant."

Mom was out of her seat and across the kitchen so fast her napkin was still settling on her chair. I heard the embrace — the particular sound of joy Mom reserved for people she loved fiercely and hadn't seen in too long.

Then she walked into the kitchen, and the floor dropped out from under me.

Jessica Williams. Here. In the flesh. In my house.

She was smaller than I had been holding her in my head, barely reaching my shoulder, even in the heels. The heels were red and ridiculous. Completely wrong for a ranch house, but so right for a woman who had never once in her life dressed for the room she was in. She'd kept her hair long and dark. But what really caught my attention was the ruby-red lipstick. It was the kind that was deliberate, that told you she knew exactly what she was doing. A dress that belonged on a Manhattan rooftop clung to curves she didn't have when I saw her last. But the part that caught me off guard the most was the smile she wore that belonged everywhere.

Jessica had always been pretty. She wasn't pretty anymore. She was something else. Something that made my brain go blank and my hands forget what they were doing and my jaw lock down on whatever I had been about to say at the exact moment she walked in.

She went around, hugging everyone like it'd only been days, not years since we'd last seen her. The smile she was already wearing was enormous. When her eyes found me it went nuclear.

"Hi, Hunter."

She planted herself in the kitchen doorway with one hip cocked and her arms crossed, and she looked me up and down with the complete absence of subtlety that had been getting her into trouble since the fifth grade.

The table went quiet. Every Blackwood eye in the room moved to me.

"What the fuck?" I said under my breath. She hadn't even told me she was coming.

"Language, Hunter," Mom scolded.

Not under enough apparently.

Jessica was beaming. Actually beaming. I looked at her across the kitchen, and she didn't look away. I knew then I'd have to have a conversation with my mother about boundaries, and that she was going to listen to the conversation with great patience, while we both knew that she was going to do exactly as she pleased regardless, because that's what she'd been doing since before I was born.

Jessica moved further into the room, and it rearranged itself around her the way rooms always had — people shifting, energy lifting, the volume going up just because she was in it. She moved past me to Dad, and I watched, vaguely horrified as he took her hand in both of his — the two-handed hold, the one he reserved for people he was genuinely glad to see. His eyes went soft, and his voice dropped low, and he said, "Good to have you home, Jessica," and he meant every syllable.

Then Maisie abandoned her chair and crossed the kitchen at speed to plant herself directly in front of Jessica with her hands on her hips and her chin up and the stance of a person who expected the world to account for itself.

"I'm Maisie Grace Blackwood." She said the whole thing. Every syllable. The way she said it every time she introduced herself to anyone, because the name was still new enough to matter, and she was going to make sure everybody knew it. "These are my boots." She pointed at her own feet. "They're pink."

Jessica crouched down to Maisie's height without hesitating, heels and dress and all, and her face broke wide open. "Well, Maisie Grace Blackwood." She extended her hand the way you extend a hand to the CEO of a company you desperately want to work for. "I'm Jessica Lee Williams. And those are the most spectacular boots I have ever seen in my entire life. And I have seen a lot of boots."

Maisie looked at Jessica's hand, then her face. She shook her hand once, firm and decisive, the way Dad had taught her to. "Your shoes are shiny," Maisie said. "Are they hard to run in?"

Jessica laughed, and I felt it right in my sternum. "No clue. I don't run. I walk fast and look important; it's a lot more fun than running."

Maisie seemed to like that answer, given the determined gleam in her eye. "I can do that."

"I bet you can."

Jessica straightened up. Then she turned to me.

The dining room was still moving around us — I had my hand on the back of the chair, and my mouth wasn't working because Jessica Williams was walking toward me. She stopped closer than required. Close enough that her perfume cut through the pot roast and the bread and the gravy and hit me — something expensive, something that had no business smelling that good in my mother's house.

Her eyes came up to mine. Brown. Bright. Sharp. The same eyes that used to watch me from my workbench. The same eyes that had been daring me to react since we were twelve years old. They were daring me now, and I was standing there with my hand strangling the back of a chair and nothing in my head except the fact that she was right there and she smelled like that and she looked like that.

My mouth needed to produce a word. Any word. One word. Nothing came.

She tilted her head. The smile shifted to something softer, more familiar. "You going to say hello, cowboy," she said, "or just stand there looking like someone hit you with a shovel?"

"Jessica."

"Jessica." She repeated it back to me slowly, shaping the syllables like she was tasting them for the first time. A laugh slipped out under her breath — low, amused, entirely at my expense. "Ten years, and that's all you've got for me? My government name?"

Like always, I could never resist her and gave her what she wanted. "Jess."

It'd been ten years since I uttered that word — her name. The one I'd been calling her since we were kids. It should've surprised me how natural it felt to say it again after all this time, but it didn't. In fact, it scared me. A lot about what I'd been feeling tonight scared me.

Her eyebrows lifted. Delighted. "Better."

I hated the satisfaction I felt for pleasing her. Or the fact that I wanted to more so I said, "Hi."

"He speaks!" she laughed. Her eyes were shining and she was looking at me like I was the funniest thing she'd seen all week. "You're going to make me work for every syllable just like old times, aren't you?"

She came just half a step closer. The kind of half-step that shouldn't have mattered, but it was the only thing I was aware of. I didn't know what was happening to me, why I was reacting like this.

Her chin tipped up and her smile softened. Her eyes moved across my face the way they used to move across an engine I was taking apart on the workbench. Slow. Thorough. Looking for the part she wanted to touch. And apparently, I was the part she wanted to touch this time. She reached for my collar and took her sweet time straightening it. I didn't breathe through any of it. When she was done, her knuckle dragged across the skin at the base of my throat on the way down.

The back of my neck went hot. Let's face it, my everything went hot. Jessica had touched me before, but it'd never felt like that. Like every nerve ending in my body woke up at once. My hand tightened on the back of the chair so hard the wood creaked.

She heard it. She had to have heard it. Her eyes flicked up to mine, her lips parting a fraction on a quick inhale. She covered it fast. The corner of her mouth hitched back up. But the flush had already crept under her collarbone and was climbing into her throat. She didn't even try to hide it. Not that she could. I knew every shade that skin had ever gone, and that one was new.

"You look good, Hunt." Her voice had dropped. So had her face — closer now, close enough that I could feel her breath on my jaw when she said it. "Really good. It's actually annoying." Her thumb gave my collar one last press. Then her hand fell away.

She called me Hunt. She'd always called me Hunt — since we were twelve years old and she'd found me behind the school gym, taking apart a broken sprinkler head with a flathead screwdriver I kept in my backpack. Everyone else was at lunch. I was crouched in the dirt with the sprinkler in pieces around me because the groundskeeper had been complaining about it for a week, and nobody had fixed it, and the not-fixing was bothering me enough that missing lunch was worth it.

I had the valve assembly in one hand and the screwdriver in my teeth when a shadow fell across the parts. "What are you doing?"

I looked up. A girl I'd never seen before. Hands on her hips. Dark hair. A milk mustache she had no idea was there.

Wasn't it obvious? "Fixing the sprinkler."

"Did anyone ask you to?"

"No."

"So you're just... fixing things? For fun? At lunch?"

"Yep." I went back to the valve assembly. She didn't leave. She sat down cross-legged in the dirt beside me in what looked like new jeans. "I'm Jessica," she said, and picked up the sprinkler cap. She turned it over in her hands like it was something fascinating instead of a three-dollar piece of plastic.

"Hunter."

"I know."

She asked me eleven questions in two minutes. I answered maybe four. The bell rang, and she stood up, brushed the dirt off her knees, and looked down at me with the expression of a person who had just made a decision that the other party wasn't being consulted on. "Same time tomorrow, Hunt. I'll bring you half my sandwich since you skipped lunch to fix a sprinkler like a weirdo."

She was gone before I could tell her my name was Hunter. But I had a feeling she knew and just didn't care.

Jessica grinned — the one I'd been following into trouble since middle school — and turned away to say something to Callie that made Callie laugh, and I stood there, feeling like I was going to crawl out of my skin, drowning in these confusing thoughts.

"Sit down, everyone," Mom said. "The food's getting cold."

Mom had set Jessica's place across from mine. Directly in my line of sight for the next two hours. Fantastic.

The dinner unfolded the way Blackwood dinners always did — loud, overlapping, Clay saying something that made Maggie throw a roll at him, Liam and Wyatt debating cattle futures that nobody else cared about, Stephanie telling a story that kept getting interrupted by her own laughter. Except now there was a new frequency in the room sitting across from me, joining in on the conversation as if she'd never left.

Jessica caught my eye over the bread basket, and winked. My stomach flipped — hard, sudden, unexpectedly terrifying — and my knife accidentally scraped against my plate ugly and loud.

"Sorry," I murmured. I kept my head down for the rest of the dinner.

Somewhere between the main course and dessert, Maggie asked the question that had been stirring around in my head since Jessica had walked through the door.

"So what brings you back, Jessica? Ed and Evelyn finally guilt you into it?"

Jessica leaned back in her chair. Easy, confident, like the question weighed nothing. "My firm won the bid to manage all the events in the county this year. Galas, festivals, the fair, all of it." She shrugged one shoulder. "So you're stuck with me for a year."

The table erupted. Mom's hand went to her chest with an expression of delighted surprise she had absolutely rehearsed. Clay was already asking about the rodeo. Maisie announced that Jessica could come to her birthday party. Dad caught my eye from the head of the table, and the look he gave me was brief and knowing, and I looked away from it because I absolutely didn't need my father reading me right now.

Twelve months. Her laugh in this kitchen. Her perfume in this air. Her eyes finding mine across the table every Sunday until next year.

Fuck. Me.

The house was winding down. Maggie and Jack were on the porch, Sully at their feet. Clay carried a sleeping Maisie to the truck, and Callie followed with her boots dangling from one hand. Liam and Stephanie had already left for their cabin. Inside, Mom and Dad cleaned the kitchen in that silence they had — two people who'd been moving around each other for decades and had turned it into choreography.

I was outside by the tree swing when she found me.

Jessica dropped into it without asking. The way she used to drop onto the workbench when we were teenagers — no permission, no hesitation. She kicked the red heels off into the grass, and curled her bare toes against the dirt. She tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and took a breath so deep her whole body moved with it. Like she had just been given permission to let go.

Her lipstick was faded now, hours and dinner wearing it down to something softer. She looked less like Manhattan and more like the girl I remembered, and the combination was doing something behind my ribs I was choosing not to investigate.

She opened her eyes. Looked at me. The grin was easy. Warm.

"So, Hunt." She pulled her feet up underneath her on the swing. "Your family is exactly the same. Just bigger. And impossibly louder. I didn't think that was physically possible, but you Blackwoods found a way. My ears are still ringing."

"It's good to have you back in the chaos." The words came out before I'd cleared them. True. Simple. More than I'd meant to offer. "You haven't changed much either. Didn't shut up since you walked through the door."

She gasped. "Excuse me?" Her bare foot swung over and nudged my boot — a push, playful, deliberate. She left it there, her toes resting against the leather. "I am a delight, and you missed me."

My only answer was a small smile, but that was enough for her to know the truth.

The silence settled over us. The old kind — the kind that doesn't itch, doesn't need filling. We'd had this before. The ability to sit in the same space and let the quiet be the conversation. Didn't know that we'd ever have it again. But I was glad we did.

She took another breath. Slower this time. Deeper. Like she was pulling the whole night into her lungs to savor it. Her eyes drifted upward, and her face changed. The performance fell away. The armor fell away. Something underneath the facade opened up, and she was just a woman on a swing looking at the sky like she was seeing it for the first time.

"I forgot what they looked like," she said quietly. A different voice from the one that had commanded the kitchen.

"What?"

"The stars. You can't see them in New York. There's too much…everything. Light, noise, people. The sky just glows, and you forget the real one is behind it, doing all of this." She swept a hand upward. "The quiet here used to make me restless, and I couldn't wait to get somewhere loud. You know that." Her hand dropped back to the rope. "But now it feels like water. Like I've been thirsty for ten years and didn't know it."

She didn't say she missed it. Or me. But she didn't have to.

The main house was dark except for the kitchen light Mom always left on. I crossed the yard toward the workshop, the night air carrying the last of the day's heat and something floral that might have been the jasmine on the fence or might have been Jessica's perfume still sitting on my skin.

The apartment above the workshop was exactly as I had left it. The single coffee cup drying on the rack by the sink. My other pair of boots lined up by the door so I didn't track dirt in. I stood at the counter in the dark and drank a glass of water with the moon laying its stripe across the floor.

My hand came up without asking. Two fingers touched the skin above my collar, the exact inch where Jessica's knuckles had grazed me. The warmth was gone, but the memory of her skin on mine wasn't. I held my hand there for a long time.

I set the glass down, showered, and got ready for bed. I laid on my back with my hands flat on my stomach and looked at the ceiling.

She was home for a year. That was the facts of it. Jessica Williams. My oldest, closest friend. The girl who used to eat half my sandwich at lunch, steal the last piece of bacon off my plate, and lie on her back in the creek bed while telling me about the life she'd build once she left Copper Creek. Best friend. Ten years of that word. Ten years of knowing exactly what she was to me and exactly what I was to her, and the whole thing sitting in a clean, settled place that had never once moved.

Except nothing about it was clean anymore.

My body had a different opinion now. My body had been having a different opinion since the second she walked into Mom's kitchen in those red heels, and the opinion wasn't a best-friend opinion. The opinion was low and hot and spreading through the rest of me. It had arrived without my permission and hadn't left yet. My pulse had been running ten beats above resting from the moment she got there to the second she left. And the spot on my neck was still burning where the nerve endings had decided her knuckles were the only thing that had ever happened to them. In all the years we'd spent together, not once had her touch done anything like that to me.

I turned my head on the pillow, trying to think of something else. Anything. But I couldn't. I lay there in the dark with my whole body running a program it had never run before, and no file anywhere in my head that told me what to do with it.

I didn't sleep for a while, but when exhaustion finally did take over, I dreamt of brown eyes and red lips.

— End of Chapter One · Hunter —