Page 37 of Open Road
“Did you mean it?”
Some things you answer without ceremony.
“Yeah.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Not afraid the way she was on the shoulder of I-75 that first night, reading me for exits and calculating distances, but as something different. A womandeciding whether to believe a thing she wants to believe and has been trained, systematically, not to.
Four years of marriage and two years of someone telling her she’s wrong about what she sees.
My hand comes up slowly and deliberately, nothing rushed, nothing she can’t read in advance. The back of my fingers move to her jaw, the unblemished side, the side she doesn’t guard. Her breath catches, but she doesn’t step back. She holds still the way she held still on the bike that first night, not frozen, not afraid, trusting the weight.
“You don’t have to,” she says quietly.
“Know that.”
Her eyes come up to mine.
There’s something in them I’ve been watching arrive for days, not a decision exactly, but more like the last hesitation before a decision already made. She’s been made careful by someone who didn’t deserve the care. Careful is not the same thing as unwilling.
I lean in.
A question first. The half inch of space between us is left open on purpose, enough that she can answer it or not, and what comes next is entirely hers.
She closes it.
The kiss is soft. There’s no urgency or shortage of time, and she needs to feel that. Her hand finds my forearm, and her fingers press in, not pulling me closer, not pushing away, but holding. It’s the particular grip of someone who wants to know the ground is solid before trusting the rest of their weight to it.
When she pulls back, it’s by half an inch, the same measured distance. Her eyes open and find mine.
Nothing to read in her face now but the thing itself, plainly.
“You said permanently,” she says.
“Yeah.”
Her fingers are still on my forearm. She looks down at them as if noticing, then looks back up.
“Okay,” she says.
The word is small, and it carries about a hundred pounds.
Behind us, through the screen door, Rose announces something at high volume regarding the color of a horse. Nerd’s voice answers patiently. The compound hums around it all—the workshop, the gate, Gerald in his sun, and the ordinary sounds of the evening about ready to arrive.
Janie’s hand drops from my forearm.
But she doesn’t step away.
Chapter Thirteen
JANIE
Devil drives a truck. So not what I expected, though I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe something smaller, something more in keeping with the idea of a woman who moves through the world with her particular easy grace. The truck is enormous, dark blue, the kind with the extended cab, a tow hitch, and a dent in the rear quarter panel that nobody has gotten around to fixing. Devil climbs into it the way she does everything, without ceremony, one hand on the roof.
Lucy is already in the back seat when I get in, legs crossed, sunglasses on, coffee in a travel cup she produced from somewhere on her person. She looks like a woman who has done this before and found it excellent. “Buckle up, gorgeous,” she says to me. “Devil drives like she has a personal arrangement with God.”
“I drive fine,” Devil says, and pulls out of the compound before the gate is fully open.
Rose is with Nerd. The handoff took forty-five minutes because Rose had opinions about the order in which things needed to happen before she could be left in anyone’s care. Mr. Rabbit is positioned correctly, the specific episode of her show is to be confirmed available, and a detailed accounting of when I would be back and what I would be bringing her is provided. The last one wasn’t a question. It was a condition.
