Page 27 of Devoured

"Chase doesn't carry a knife."

"He borrowed one. For the occasion." She shook her head. "This is why I had to leave, Dean. You understand that, right? Four of you. Four. A girl couldn't get near a man in this county without one of you materializing out of a hedge. I had to drive to Lubbock to get my heart broken in peace like a normal person."

"We were looking out for you."

"You were running off everybody who ever looked at me twice, and then you stand around wondering why your sister's twenty-three and single and quit another job in another town." But there was no heat in it; it was an old fight, worn smooth, the kind a family kept around for comfort. "It's fine. I'm not mad. I'm just saying — I know what it is, is all. To want to get clear of a thing for once. To go somewhere nobody's already decided who you are." She tipped her head at the track where the tail-lights had gone. "Which is maybe why your office girl and I are going to get along just fine. She drove a lot further than Lubbock to get out from under it. Takes one to know one."

Dean said nothing. He was thinking about what it was, what she'd driven that far to get out from under, who'd made her want the distance, and that he didn't know, and that he wanted to, and that it bothered him more than it should.

"Anyway." Remi finished her beer and stood and stretched until her spine cracked. "I'm taking your truck. Elena texted the minute she heard I was back, we're getting one drink, and don't make that face, I've been in a cab for ten hours and I need exactly one beer and one person at the end of it who isn't related to me. Don't wait up. And don't —" she pointed the empty bottle at him "— think I didn't notice you've still got Mom's good coffee in the cabinet and you make it when you can't sleep. I always notice. Goodnight, you old wreck."

She kissed the top of his head, which she'd been doing since she was tall enough to reach it standing on a chair, and went to find her keys, and a few minutes later his own truck went back down the track toward town with the radio up, and Dean sat on the porch a while longer in the dark with the bottle going warm in his hand, and did not examine why his sister saying don't fuck it up had landed in him like a thing he already knew.

The kitchen got him about an hour after that.

Remi was gone, off to town in his truck, and she'd looked so much like a photograph of their mother going out the door — hair loose, lipstick on — that Dean had had to find something else to look at. The kids were down, really down, Levi out mid-sentence the way he went, Giana with her light off for once without a negotiation. The house had gone quiet around him in the particular way it did when everyone in it that he was responsible for was breathing slow upstairs, and he should have gone to bed, and he didn't, because Lara was still in the kitchen.

She had no reason to be. The workday was long over. But John would be home before too long, and she'd started getting the downstairs room ready the way Helen wanted it — moved a chair, cleared a shelf, the kind of thing she did now without being asked, weeks early because it was the sort of job that sat better done than waiting. Then she'd ended up at the sink with the last of the supper dishes, because there were dishes and she was the kind of person who couldn't stand next to dishes and not deal with them. Dean had come down for water and found her there, dish towel over her shoulder, sleeves pushed up, hair coming loose from where she'd put it up that morning. And he hadn't gone back upstairs.

He put coffee on instead. The good coffee, in the old percolator, because Remi was right, he made it when he couldn't sleep, and he wasn't going to sleep, and a man had to do something with his hands.

"You don't have to stay for that," he said. "It's late. Go on home."

"It's four plates." She didn't turn around. "I'm not driving forty minutes to leave Helen four plates. How's the coffee at this hour a good idea?"

"It isn't."

"Hm." And there it was, the dry note in it, the thing that had started happening between them in the last week or two when they were alone and neither of them was braced for a fight — a kind of ease, dangerous and easy at once, two tired people at the end of a long day finding the same wavelength. "You know there's such a thing as sleep. People do it. I've read about it."

"I'll sleep when he's home and back in his own bed and I can hear him cussing about the stairs."

She did turn around then. Towel over her shoulder, a plate in her hand, and she looked at him across the kitchen like she'd heard every word he hadn't said — I haven't slept right since the south pasture, I've been lying awake listening for a phone, I'm so tired of being the one who holds it all up — and she didn't try to fix it or soften it or tell him it'd be fine.

"Loudly," she agreed. "And you're going to be so relieved to hear it you'll join him."

That landed somewhere in his chest. She'd taken the thing he was scared of and made it the thing he was waiting for, and he found himself talking before he meant to. "Helen's already moved the good chair down so he doesn't have to do the stairs at all. He's going to cuss at her about that."

"And then sit in it every single day," Lara said, and her mouth tipped, and held, and went all the way — and there it was.

The dimple.

For him.

He'd never once gotten that from her. Weeks of polite and level, every smile sliding right past him, and now her whole face open at something he'd said. Not Levi. Not Giana. Not Remi. Him.

Fuck, he thought, with no warning at all. She's beautiful.

Dean Royston stood at his own stove and felt it go through him like the first warm day after a long winter, stupid and total, and understood with a calm that frightened him that he was in very serious trouble.

He turned to the cabinet over the counter to get down two mugs, because his hands needed a job and his face needed a second.

She reached for the same cabinet.

Their hands hit the handle at the same time, his coming down over the back of hers, and Dean's whole body went still.

He knew this. He'd done this before. Weeks ago, the night of the stroke, in this exact kitchen, their hands had landed together on a coffee pot and they'd both jumped back, shocked apart, two people slamming a door at the same instant. He remembered it. He remembered the recoil, the fast clean retreat, the relief of it.

This was not that.