Page 24 of Desired

The talk moved on to the wedding after that, and somewhere in the logistics the bride's face clouded for the first time all night.

"The flowers, though." Lara turned her glass. "The Midland shop can't promise anything I actually want by the twelfth. They offered me carnations in wedding white and a delivery window. I built a spreadsheet about driving to Lubbock for peonies, which is a sentence I need this table to forget."

The booth commiserated. And Lauren heard herself say it before her head could talk her out of it.

"I'll do your flowers."

The table went quiet. Lara looked at her.

"Lauren."

"I know what I just told you about the shop. This is different." She turned her own glass once, and made herself finish. "I want to. It's my gift. I can order wholesale out of Dallas, two weeks is plenty of time, and nobody is getting carnations at the first Texas wedding I ever go to."

Lara's eyes went bright, fast, and Addi seized her sister's face in both hands.

"Do not," Addi said. "I just fixed this face."

"Done," Lara said anyway, wet and laughing over her sister's thumbs. "Yes. Done. Thank you."

Two miles west, the bucks party was a bonfire, a poker table dragged out of the Royston barn, a wall of brisket Helen swore she hadn't made, and every man in two families who could still sit a tailgate, and Mason lost forty dollars of it in the first hour without noticing it go.

"He's doing it again," Knox announced, raking the pot. "Look at him. Fourth hand he's folded looking at his phone like it owes him money. Somebody check if the Merritt place has a webcam."

"Leave him be," Chase said, dealing. "Man's spoken for."

"I'm at the table," Mason said.

"Your chips are at the table," Jett said. "The rest of you's been down the seam road since dark."

The fire cracked and threw sparks at a sky full of stars, and Dean sat in the middle of it all in a lawn chair somebody had tied a ribbon to, three toasts deep and wearing the loose, undefended grin of a man two weeks out from the thing he'd quit believing he'd get. His brothers and his cousins orbited him as they always had, John's sons and Clay's sons around one fire, the feud left up at the houses with the fathers where it belonged, and Mason folded another hand he should have played and watched his cousin be happy, and there was an ache in the watching he couldn't put down and didn't fully understand yet.

The toasts had gone around after supper. Jett had gone long and loud and mostly libelous, ending in the bull story over a chorus of objections that it hadn't happened that way, which it hadn't, which had never once stopped him. Knox had gone louder, gotten unexpectedly sentimental in the middle, denied it immediately, and sat down to applause he pretended not to want. Chase had stood up with his cup and said, "Three months ago he wouldn't come off that porch. Look at him now," and sat back down, five seconds, and half the fire had to look away into the dark for a minute.

And Jace, when the noise had settled and everybody had forgotten there was one toast left, had raised his cup off the arm of his chair without standing up at all.

"To Lara," he said. "God help her."

It landed harder than everything before it put together, Jace's one line doing what it always did, a man who listened all night and spent one bullet. Dean laughed until he had to put his own cup down. The fire burned. The poker went on. Mason checked his phone.

Nothing. There was going to be nothing, that was the whole arrangement, she was at Harvey's under all that glitter getting claimed by every woman in the county and he was here, and this was how a hen night and a bucks night worked, and knowing all that did exactly nothing about the way the seam road kept pulling at him from the dark like a current.

"So." Dean dropped into the empty chair beside him with two beers and handed one over, the groom making his rounds. His face was fire-lit and easy and happier than Mason had ever seen it, and it occurred to Mason, taking the beer, that he'd known this man his whole life and had never once seen him look unguarded until this fall. "Lauren."

"Don't start."

"She works in the office," Dean said, into his beer, to nobody, in a flat wondering voice, like a man reading an old headline. "That's what I told this exact fire pit, eight weeks ago and now Lara and I are getting married. 'She works in the office.' Knox has never let me forget it and now I don't want him to." He tipped the bottle at Mason. "Your turn. Go on. Tell me she's just the neighbor."

"Fuck off, Dean."

"There it is." Dean settled back, deeply satisfied, a man collecting on a long debt. "That's the whole test. A man with nothing going on answers the question."

They sat with the fire a minute. Out past the light the land ran black to the horizon with the stars coming down to meet it, and behind them Knox was accusing Jett of dealing off the bottom with no evidence and total conviction, and it was the kind of night Mason had sat through a hundred times in his life and never once from inside this exact skin, wanting a woman two miles east so hard it had a pulse.

"I'll tell you the thing nobody told me," Dean said, quieter, and the ease in his voice had shifted into something with weight under it. He was watching the fire. "I spent four years building a wall and calling it being honest with myself. Smartest thing I ever did, I thought. Protecting everybody." He turned the bottle slowly in his hands. "It was fear with a coat of paint on it. And the only thing that ever got me one single good thing, the only thing, was the day I quit managing the truth and just handed it to her. All of it. Ugly parts first." He shrugged, like it was simple, now, from the far side of it. "Scared me worse than the bull ever did. Best thing I ever did in my life. There's no third option, is what I found out. You either hand it over or you lose her slow."

He wasn't aiming it. That was the worst part. He was a happy man two weeks from his wedding saying the true thing to the dark as happy men do, generous with it, no idea in the world that every word was going into his cousin an inch deep. Hand it over or lose her slow. Mason drank his beer and looked at the fire and thought about a kitchen order three weeks buried, a no he'd said once to one man in an empty room and never once out loud where it counted.

Sunday. The word arrived flat and final, the way a post sets. Not at the wedding, not around the family, not in the dark half-asleep. Sunday, daylight, her kitchen table, boots on, the whole of it, ugly parts first. He'd tell her Sunday, and whatever it cost, it would cost less than it was going to cost every day after Sunday, because that number only ever climbed.