Page 64 of Devoured

"And it's already my favorite bar in the world." She clinked her bottle against his where it sat on the bar, which Harvey allowed with the pained expression of a man who was going to enjoy this against his will. "I can tell. I have a sense for these things."

"She really doesn't," Lara said.

"I really don't," Addi agreed, "but it's working out."

Elena leaned in close to Lara's ear as the other two started in on Harvey. "Is she always —"

"Yes."

"All the time?"

"Since birth. You get used to it. You sort of start steering by her." Lara watched her sister make Harvey almost smile, an event of geological rarity, and felt something in her chest go loose and warm. "You holding up? You've got your clinic face on."

"I do not have a clinic face."

"You absolutely have a clinic face. You're wearing it at a bar." Lara nudged the beer an inch closer to her. "We've been out plenty, you and me. I've just never once seen you let go of the wheel for five minutes while we were."

Elena turned her beer in her hands and conceded it with a tilt of her head. She was careful, Elena, always contained, measured, the doctor who'd been in this town a year and a half and still kept a quiet inch of herself back from all of it, the way Lara had recognized in her the day she rented the apartment, two women keeping the world at arm's length in adjoining rooms. "Somebody at this table has to be able to drive home," she said. "It's a reflex. Even when I don't have to be the responsible one, I am, anyway. I don't really know how to not be."

"Well, tonight you don't have to be. Remi's got a designated driver thing worked out, and your tenant lives twenty feet from your front door and can pour you up the stairs if it comes to it." Lara bumped her shoulder. "So drink your beer, Doctor. Doctor's orders. Mine, I mean. I'm appointing myself."

"You're not a doctor."

"No, but I'm very bossy, and tonight that's the same thing."

Elena huffed a laugh, and drank her beer, and Lara counted it a small win and let her be.

The band, when they came on, were three old boys and a kid, and they were not good, and it did not matter even slightly.

Addi had the dance floor inside two songs. She didn't ask anybody; she simply established herself out there and the room organized around her, the way it always had, the way it had at every party of Lara's whole childhood. She danced with a rancher she'd never met. She danced with two of his friends. She danced with a woman of about seventy who turned out to move like a freight train and whom Addi declared, loudly, the love of her life. She pulled Lara out by both hands and Lara went, laughing, protesting, and then not protesting, because there was a particular freedom in dancing badly to a bad band in a room where you knew everyone and nobody was keeping score.

And Remi, in her element, was a sight.

Lara had seen her loud before — Remi came loud, it was her resting state, all volume and grab-your-phone-and-add-my-number warmth from the first minute they'd met. But there was loud-at-the-ranch, where some part of her was always half-listening for her father or counting heads or running interference, and then there was this: Remi three beers in with nothing to manage and nobody to look after, up on the little stage singing into a beer bottle like a microphone, missing every other note and not caring, throwing her head back laughing until she had to grab the bar to stay upright. Off the clock. Off duty. Just a woman out with her friends having the kind of night that doesn't ask anything of you.

Once, though, only once, and only because Lara had spent two months learning to read this family, Lara caught the flicker under it. Remi at the bar between songs, the laugh dropping off her face for half a second when she thought no one was looking, her eyes going somewhere far off and not happy, before she hauled the brightness back up and dove into the next song. There and gone. Whatever it was, Remi carried it the way she carried everything, out of sight and on her own. Lara didn't chase it. She just added it to the quiet collection of this family's wrong notes and let her friend go back to being gloriously, deafeningly off-key.

"I'm obsessed with her," Addi said, appearing at Lara's elbow, breathless, flushed, watching Remi miss a high note spectacularly and not care. "The sister. She's perfect. She's got the whole bossy-big-energy thing but she'll get up on a stage and humiliate herself for a laugh, that's the dream, that's the exact dream." She took a pull of her beer. "We're keeping her. I've decided. She's mine now."

"You can't just collect people, Addi."

"I absolutely can. I collected you a doctor and a cowboy's sister in one weekend." She was already bouncing back toward the floor. "Two thousand miles, one Saturday. I should charge for this."

But the thing that got Lara, the thing she'd remember, was Elena.

It took till nearly eleven. Elena nursed one beer and then a second and watched the floor the careful way she watched everything, and Lara had about decided the doctor was a lost cause for the night — and then the band fell into something with a beat to it, and Addi, who missed nothing despite appearing to miss everything, crossed the room and held out a hand and said something Lara couldn't hear, and Elena looked at the hand for a long second like it was a procedure she wasn't sure she was cleared for.

Then she set down her beer and took it.

And Elena Santos danced. Stiffly, at first, laughing at herself, and then less stiffly, and then somewhere in the third song, when she'd forgotten to manage it, actually danced. Loose and bright and twenty-nine instead of forty, her hair coming down, her head back, a woman who had held herself apart from a whole town for a year and a half letting go of it for one night on a bad dance floor. Lara saw two different Soluno regulars stop and stare, because nobody here had ever seen the doctor like this. Harvey, behind the bar, paused with a glass in his hand and watched, and something moved over his face that might, in a younger man, have been called wistful.

"That's the best thing I've done since I got to this town," Elena said later, breathless, dropping back onto a stool beside Lara, glowing. "Why did nobody make me do that sooner?"

"Because you're terrifying and you scowl at people."

"I do not scowl."

"Elena. You scowl like it's a board certification."