Page 162 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

He's not wrong…I guess.

That's the trouble with Sawyer — he's rarely wrong, and he says the true thing at the exact moment you'd built a whole evening around not saying it.

"That's a lot of diagnosis for a man drinking my friend's beer," I say.

"It's Beckett's beer." He grins. The firelight catches the edge of it. "And I've had one. I make my living reading a room in the four seconds before the bride's mother starts crying. You"—the bottle points at me again—"read like large print."

"That's a generous way to call a man predictable."

"Predictable's not the word. Predictable men put me straight to sleep." He turns the bottle in his fingers, watching the firelight slide down the glass. "You're the reverse. You spend so much effort staying a step ahead of everybody else's needs that nobody ever gets a look at yours. That's not a predictable man. That's a locked door with the key taped to the back of it, praying the right person's patient enough to check."

"Flattering."

"Wasn't trying to flatter you." He sets the bottle down in the grass. Stands. Stretches until something in his spine pops, unbothered, taking up the whole night while he does it. "If I wanted to flatter you, I'd have told you what your face did when Beckett said the thing earlier."

Don't ask.

"What thing?"

Fucking hell…

"You know the thing."

I do. My face is doing it again right now. I can feel the heat climb up my throat. Earlier tonight, before the Twinkies and the confessions and all of it, Beckett had leaned into me by the cooler, breath warm with whiskey, and said it plain as weather.

Quit circling the man and go fuck Sawyer already. You've been orbiting him since the roadside. It's exhausting to watch.

I'd turned the color of a stop sign and mumbled something about the fire needing another log.

"See," Sawyer says, delighted, reading every degree of it off my skin. "Large print."

Every man builds his own courthouse.

Mine's been in session five years. I know its rules. I manage, I smooth, I hand people the thing they need before they've finished asking, then I go home to the shop, and I do not, under any circumstances, reach for the thing I want.

Reaching is how you end up standing at the front of the Lantern House with a boutonnière wilting in your fist and a woman's whole future collapsing in your hands.

Sawyer walks around the fire. Not fast. He takes the long way, past the abandoned s'more, past the empty chairs, and every step of it the magnolia gets thicker, the pepper sharper, until he's standing over me where I sit. The heat of the coals is at my back, and the heat of him is everywhere else.

"Get up," he says.

"I'm comfortable."

"You're hiding. There's a difference." He doesn't wait.

He reaches down, hooks two fingers under my chin, and tips my face up to his — not rough, not gentle either, just certain, the way you'd steady a fence post you already knew would hold.

"I'm not the kind of man who lets you run away from what makes you uncomfortable, Bellamy. Ask anybody who's ever tried to leave one of my rehearsal dinners early."

His fingers are warm. Callused across the pads from twenty years of tying knots nobody sees. My pulse goes stupid and loud. I could pull back. It would be the easy thing, the managed thing, the thing that keeps the courthouse quiet.

I don't pull back.

"You've been circling," he says, softer now, close enough that I can smell the bourbon under the magnolia and something warmer beneath even that — skin, sweat, the day baked into his collar. "Since the roadside. Since I put my hands on your truck and you looked at me like I'd read your diary. I told you then I'd give you the opportunity you were yearning for." His thumb drags along the line of my jaw, slow, deliberate, taking its time about it. "This is me giving it to you. You want it, you take it. You don't, I go sleep on the couch, and we never speak of it. Either way you stop pretending you don't know your own mind."

The roadside comes back to me whole — the busted radiator hissing, the heat shimmer rising off the asphalt in sheets, Sawyer crouched at my ribs with grease on his knuckles, thumbing the unfinished rose inked over my side like he was reading a sentence nobody had ever let me finish.

Who's this for?he'd asked.Nobody, I'd said, too fast, the lie loud as a confession.