Page 43 of Devoured

He stood. The chair scraped. In that tiny kitchen, he had to more or less stand into her space, and she stood too, because sitting while he loomed felt like an advantage she wasn't willing to give.

"I should go," he said. He didn't move toward the door.

"Yeah."

He didn't move at all.

The second kiss was nothing like the first.

The first had been a collision, a dare answered, both of them falling off a cliff they'd been backing toward for twelve weeks. This one he chose. She watched him choose it, watched him set the hat down on her table, slow, deliberate, watched him close the small distance with his eyes open, and when his hands came up to frame her face they weren't hesitant, weren't a man grabbing for something before his better sense caught up. He kissed her like a man who had said his piece and meant to follow it with this, and she kissed him back without one ounce of hesitation, because she'd said her piece too and the kiss was the seal on both of them, both their plain truths and the choice they'd just made to step off the edge together anyway.

It went on. His thumb moved along her cheekbone. She had her hands fisted in his shirt again and this time she knew she was doing it. When they finally broke it they were both breathing like they'd run, foreheads close, and he didn't apologize this time, didn't say I shouldn't have, and that absence was its own kind of promise, the only kind he had to give.

"Tonight," he said, against her mouth.

"What's tonight?"

"Cattlemen's Dance. At the pavilion. You're coming."

"Am I?"

"Yeah." He stepped back, picked his hat up off her table, and the corner of his mouth did the thing it almost never did. "Wear a dress. And not those city shoes, ground's all gravel."

And he was gone down the stairs before she could decide whether to throw something at him, and she stood in her kitchen with her mouth warm and her heart going and thought, helplessly, there he is. The porch one and this one, the same man, finally, in the same breath, the contempt burned all the way off and the thing underneath it grinning at her about her shoes.

She had a dress. She'd packed it in Boston in some last act of defiance she couldn't have explained at the time, throwing one good dark dress into a suitcase otherwise full of jeans, as if to prove to herself she wasn't only running, she was going somewhere, somewhere a person might one day have a reason to dress up. She'd never once taken it out of the closet. Tonight Elena found it in there, pulled it off the rod, and held it up with an expression that did not invite discussion.

"This," Elena said. "Obviously this."

She thanked her.

It was simple, dark, the kind of dress that didn't try too hard because Lara had stopped trying too hard for anybody, and that was exactly why it worked, Elena informed her, doing her hair for her, leaving it down for once, the wave of it loose past her shoulders.

"You're nervous," Elena said, delighted, pinning one side back.

"I'm not nervous. I'm an adult attending a fundraiser for the volunteer fire department."

"You're an adult attending a fundraiser for the volunteer fire department with the man who carried you out of a bar last night over his metaphorical shoulder." Elena met her eyes in the mirror. "You can tell me what happened in that kitchen this morning, or you can not tell me, but you can't sit there with that face and expect me to believe it was nothing."

"It wasn't nothing," Lara admitted.

Elena waited.

"It's complicated," Lara said. "He's… there are things. Terms. It's not a simple thing."

"Is it a good thing?"

Lara thought about the hat turned to rags. About you deserve the plain version. About the second kiss, the chosen one.

"I don't know yet," she said honestly. "But it's a true thing. That's new."

Elena, who knew the whole Boston story, who'd poured the wine on the back step the night Lara almost said it all, went quiet and gentle behind her, and finished the pin, and didn't push.

"Then go," she said. "And dance with your cowboy. And if it goes sideways, I have wine and I have a porch and I am not going anywhere." A beat, and the grin came back. "He's picking you up, isn't he. At the door. Like it's a date."

"It's not a⁠—"

"He's picking you up at the door," Elena said, delighted, "to take you to a dance, in front of the entire county. Honey. I've lived here two years and that man has never once brought a woman anywhere. Do you understand what you're about to walk into?"