Page 28 of Devoured

Neither of them jumped. His hand was over hers on the cabinet handle, his palm against the back of her fingers, warm, and the recoil didn't come — not from him, not from her. One second. Two. He could feel her pulse where his fingers crossed her wrist, quick, his own climbing to match it, the worn ridges of her knuckles under his palm. And she wasn't pulling away.

She was holding still on purpose. Letting him.

All these weeks he'd told himself the distance between them was hers too, that she was being just as careful, that as long as she held her side of it, so could he. And here was her hand under his and not moving, the woman who never gave anything away giving him this, looking up at him with the dimple gone and something darker in its place, and Dean understood she'd quit being careful. That she was done protecting him from what he wanted, and was going to stand here and let him be the one to decide.

Three seconds. The longest he had touched another person in four years.

It was him who moved.

He almost said something. She saw it, saw him get right to the edge of a word and stop, jaw tight, whatever it was shoved back down before it could get out. Then he did the only thing four years had left him able to do.

He took his hand back.

Not fast. He didn't jump. He just lifted his palm off the back of her hand, slow, like setting down something he wasn't allowed to keep, and stepped back, and the cool air came in between them where the warmth had been, and he got the two mugs down out of the cabinet she'd opened and set them on the counter with a care that was completely unnecessary, because his hands were not entirely his at the moment.

The percolator ticked. The house held still around them.

Lara picked up her dish towel. She folded it once, set it on the counter, and reached for her bag, and when she spoke her voice was level, the kind of level that costs something to hold.

"Goodnight, Dean."

"Lara."

Just her name. It was all he had. It carried everything he couldn't, and he watched her hear that too, watched her go still one half-second longer at the door with her back to him before she pulled it open and stepped out into the dark.

He didn't follow her to the porch to watch her go. He'd done that before, stood in the yard and watched her tail-lights shrink and hated himself for the thing he hadn't said, and he didn't have it in him to do it twice. He stayed in the kitchen instead, both hands flat on the counter, head down, and listened — the screen door, the engine, the long diminishing crunch of gravel — until the night took the sound of her and there was nothing left in the house but him and the ticking percolator and the warmth already going cold on the back of his hand.

Dean stood in his kitchen with two mugs and a pot of coffee he no longer wanted and his hand still curled, stupidly, around the warmth that wasn't there anymore.

He could still feel her skin on his palm.

He poured the coffee down the sink, both cups' worth and the whole pot besides, and he went up the stairs to bed, and he lay there in the dark, and he did not sleep for a long time.

He went up to the rise the next evening, at dusk, the way he did when there was something in him he couldn't set down anywhere else.

The Royston graves sat under the one big live oak on the south rise, the tree his mother had picked out herself the last spring she could still walk that far, when she'd known where the year was going and had gone up and chosen her own shade with a clear eye, because that was the kind of woman she'd been. Dallas girl who'd married a cattleman and come out to the hard flat end of the world and chosen it, every day, for the rest of her life. There was a bench up there now. He and Mack had built it the winter after she died, two men who didn't have words for the thing they were doing, just lumber and a level and a long cold afternoon, and Dean came and sat on it sometimes the way other men went to church.

He sat on it now. The sun was going down red and enormous over the basin, the whole western sky lit up like the inside of a furnace, and the cattle were settling, and somewhere down at the house a light came on in the kitchen and he made himself not think about whose hand had reached the same cabinet as his.

He didn't talk. He never did. His father talked to her, Dean had seen him up here, lips moving, a private thing Dean had the sense to leave alone, but Dean had never had it in him, the talking-out-loud-to-a-stone of it. He just came and sat where she was and let her be the one person he didn't have to hold anything up in front of.

She'd have liked Lara. That was the thought that came, unbidden, with the last of the light. His mother, who'd chosen this land off a man and never once let on it cost her anything, who'd raised five kids a hundred miles from a hospital and run a household like a clean machine and laughed — she'd laughed, his mother, she'd had a laugh you could hear across the yard — she'd have taken one look at the woman who'd come all that way to this same hard country and gone good at it, and she'd have known. She'd have known before any of them.

And then his eye went, the way it always did up here in the end, to the other stone. A few feet over. Newer than his mother's, the granite still sharp at the edges where hers had started to soften. He didn't get up. He never got up for that one. He just looked at it for a second too long, and the warmth that had been in him since the kitchen — since the dimple, since her hand under his and not moving — went cold and hard in his chest where it sat, because there was the proof of it, cut in stone four feet away. What it cost. What he'd done to the last woman who'd tried to live a life with him. He made himself look back at his mother.

I built the thing so I'd never have to do this again, Mom, he didn't say, because saying it out loud, even up here, even to her, even with nobody but the cattle and the dark to hear it, would have made it a true thing he'd have to do something about. Four years. And it's coming down over a woman who reaches for the same cabinet I do, and I don't know how to stop it, and I'm not sure anymore I want to, and that's the part that scares me.

He didn't say any of it. He sat on the bench he'd built and watched the sun go all the way down behind the curve of the world, and when it was gone and the first stars were coming up cold and clean over six generations of his family's land, he stood, and put his hand for a second flat on the top of her marker the way he always did, and walked back down to the house in the dark.

He lay in his bed that night with the window open and the basin breathing in through the screen, and he didn’t think about the offer on his desk or his father on the stairs or the four hundred head or the company circling his fence.

He thought about three seconds.

He ran them again, and again, the way a man runs a thing he can't stop running, her hand under his on the cabinet, the pulse in her wrist, the dimple that had been for him and the want that had come after it, the word that had fallen out of him with all the contempt boiled off and only the helplessness left, and her not pulling away, her not pulling away, the last of her caution gone and leaving him standing there holding the only caution left between them.

He was a man who'd kept his footing through every hard thing a hard life had handed him. He'd buried a wife and built a family out of the rubble and worked a ranch through drought and grief, and he had held on, the whole way, with both hands.

He lay in the dark and felt his grip go.