Then he took her by the shoulders and turned her to face the view.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” A brand-new panorama spread out before them. Lake. Town. Mountains. River. Silas kept his hands where they were and gently dug into the knots he found with his thumbs.
“Oh,” she said again. Only this time, it was a sigh as he kneaded the tension, the muscle, the hurt. “It’s beautiful.”
“And it’s all yours,” he told her.
“For now,” she said bitterly.
The new tension he felt in her shoulders was definitely not in his imagination. “Now is all anyone ever has,” he said, shifting his thumbs lower. Her sweat-slicked skin was soft to the touch, and under that softness was the tense rigidness of anger.
“Said the philosophical landscape architect.”
“I took my share of philosophy classes back in the day.”
She was quiet for a beat before asking, “You ever realize that you don’t know someone as well as you thought you did?”
“Every damn day.”
“I’m serious,” she said dryly.
“So am I. Mags, you’re talking to the man who walked in on his father and stepmom watercoloring some damn duck by video tutorial last weekend.”
“Watercoloring a duck?”
Clearly she didn’t appreciate just how out of character this was for his biology teacher dad and financial planner stepmom. Their hobbies—as far as he’d known—were limited to drinking good wine while watching documentaries about how fucked the earth was. “Trust me,” he promised her. “You’ll understand when you meet them.”
“That’s another thing. How is anyone supposed to trust anyone else if they don’t actually know them? If they just keep on surprising you every time you manage to get comfortable?”
They were digging down to the root issue, and Silas was more than happy to get a little dirty in the process.
“You don’t have to know every single thing about a person to know you can trust them,” he countered.
When his thumbs moved between her shoulder blades, she let out a little moan that had his blood stirring.
“But they can still let you down. They trick you into relying on them, and then just when you get used to the way things are, they change the rules.”
“That’s people for you,” he said. “How long were you and Dean married?”
He felt her tense again before she turned to face him. Genuine surprise was written all over her pretty, sad face. “How the hell did you know that?”
He gave her a shrug, palms up. “I’m a pretty observant, intelligent, good-looking guy. Y’all have a kind of intimacy. Like a language that only you two speak. From the outside, it looks like it runs deeper than just ‘friends from college.’”
She watched him. “And you’re asking me about Dean because you know he’s the one I’m pissed at,” she surmised.
“You’re not mad at Dean,” he countered, stepping up onto a sizable boulder that had tried to take a chunk out of the brush mower. He shielded his eyes from the afternoon sun and drank in the view.
“Oh goodie. We’ve arrived at the part where you tell me not only what the problem is, but you flex your muscles and offer to fix it for me.”
“You’re not mad at me either,” he insisted. Leaning down and taking her hand, he tugged her up on the boulder next to him. “You’re good and pissed at yourself for getting comfortable, letting yourself lean on someone. So you’re mad as hell that you put yourself into a position where you can get hurt, or disappointed, or let down. And judging by that mangled wall in the kitchen, this is a ‘been there, done that, got a souvenir shot glass’ kind of situation.”
Her chin jutted out. “That’s ridiculous,” she snapped. “That’s beyond ridiculous. It’s bullshit. And you know what?”
He looked down at her, trying not to appear too entertained. His mom had always told them, “You can learn a lot more about a person on a bad day than you can on a good day.”
“Dammit. You’re right,” she admitted, her breath coming out in a whoosh.
“Darlin’， I’m Mr. Wright.”
Her lips quirked. “You’re saying your last name, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.”
She shook her head. “Ugh. Does that line actually work?”
“We’re about to find out. Now, if you can get showered and changed in the next hour, we can catch happy hour at Decked Out before all the good tables are taken.”