Page 43 of Open Road

She doesn’t step back.

What she does is look at my mouth, briefly. It’s the kind of look a person gives something they’ve decided they want, even as they are still negotiating with themselves about wanting it. The look itself costs her something, the specific courage of a woman who has been trained out of wanting things and is choosing to want this one anyway.

I wait.

Janie’s hand comes up and finds the front of my shirt. Her fingers close on the fabric the same way they closed on my forearm on the porch yesterday, the anchoring grip, the checking of the ground.

The ground holds.

“Roam…” Her voice is low. “I—” She stops.

“Take your time.”

Her eyes come up to mine. “For four years…” she says, “… I stopped wanting things.” Her fingers press into my shirt. “Things for myself. Things that were…” She finds the word. “Mine. Craig was very good at making wanting things feel dangerous.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.” A breath. “The point is…” Her chin tilts up, the particular angle of a woman choosing her ground. “Standing here right now, in this dress, with you looking at me like—” Janie stops again. Her cheeks are flushed with a warmth she can’t hide. “The way you’re looking at me.”

“How am I looking at you?”

“Like…” She seems to run out of words. Then, quieter, with the precision of someone who has thought about it, “Like you’re grateful.”

The word lands square.

Grateful is right. Grateful is the closest language gets to the thing in my chest that still doesn’t have a full name, standing on a dark highway outside Gainesville at three in the morning and making the decision to turn the bike around without knowing why, without knowing anything except the hazard lights and the woman keeping the car between herself and the road. The days since. Rose on my tank with her arms out. Mr. Rabbit in the doorway at four in the morning. Janie’s hands at my sides, barely touching.

Everything that came after barely touching.

All of it leading here, to this room, to her fingers in my shirt and a word that finally comes close to naming what I’ve been carrying since the night we met.

“Yeah,” I say. “Grateful’s in there.”

Her fingers are still in my shirt.

“For the first time in four years, standing here with you…” a long pause, and I watch her make the decision inside it, “… I want more.”

The words are small, and they carry the weight of everything it cost her to say them. I hear every pound of it.

My hand at her waist pulls her in slowly, a question still, but one with the answer already visible in her face. My forehead drops to hers. The dress is warm under my hand, her breath is warm against my jaw, and she tips her face up in a way that means she’s done waiting for me to close the remaining distance.

So am I.

The kiss is longer than the one on the porch. Deeper, but not frantic, the difference between something beginning and something continuing on from where it already started. Herhand leaves my shirt and finds the back of my neck and stays there, and some last careful fraction of her goes still in the way things go still when they have finally, after a long time, reached the place they were trying to get to.

When she pulls back, she doesn’t go far.

Her forehead is still against mine, her eyes open.

“More,” she says again but quieter this time. She’s not asking but telling me what she’s decided.

“Yeah,” I say. “More.”

In the hall, Rose’s voice is returning from the kitchen, carrying the running commentary of someone who has successfully navigated a cookie situation and wants all relevant parties to know it. The update includes at minimum three cookies, Devil’s confirmation of their status as earnable, and the precise location of Mr. Rabbit during the negotiation.

Janie laughs against my jaw.

The real one. The kind from the truck window that cost me half a conversation with Creed.