Page 45 of Bounced!

And I laughed, because it was that or come apart, a wet, undignified laugh with my forehead against his, my palm against his cheek. I felt him breathe out something that was almost a laugh, too. The tension drifted out of his enormous frame by degrees, the man realizing by slow inches that the thing he’d braced to lose he was not, in fact, losing.

“People are looking at us,” Dante murmured.

“People are wearing cages, Dante. We’re the most normal thing in here.” But I glanced up, and he was right. We’d drawn a couple of soft looks—and a few less-soft stares. A bearded man in a harness two stools down lifted his drink to us with a knowing tip of the glass. I felt heat climb my bare neck. “Okay. Yeah. Maybe not here.”

“Maybe not here,” he agreed.

We tossed the harness in the bin by the door, got my shirt back on at the door, which felt like putting a roof back on a house after a storm had already had its way with it, and stepped out into the thick, warm night. The quiet out there hit different than the quiet inside. Inside, there’d been his mouth to keep me from thinking. Outside, there was only the two of us and a streetlight and my truck down the block and his car around the other. The enormity of what had just happened sat down between us like a third person.

We stood there. Neither of us reached for the other.

The giddiness had cooled just enough to let the fear back in. I could see it working on him the same as it was working on me, both of us coming down off the same cliff and realizing we hadn’t checked whether there was water at the bottom.

“So,” I said.

“So,” he said.

“I don’t know what this is.” I made myself say it, because he was the kind of man who’d take my silence and fill it with the worst possible reading. I wasn’t going to let him do that tonight, not anymore. “I want to be straight with you, no pun intended. I’ve wanted . . . No, I’ve been wanting something so bad for so long that I don’t trust myself to know what I’m doing right now. And you . . . you just . . . that wall came down about ten minutes ago and I watched it . . . well . . . I know that wasn’t easy. This is all new for both of us, and I’m forty-eight years old, and I’ve made exactly this kind of decision at exactly this kind of midnight before and woken up sorry.”

Something flickered across his face. Not hurt. Something more like relief that one of us had said it aloud.

“I keep thinking about the truck,” I went on. “How good that was, how easy, how I’d have spoiled it if I’d grabbed at whatever that was. I don’t want to grab at this, Dante. I’ve been grabbing at things for months, and every one of them turned to ashes in my hands.” I swallowed. “I don’t want you to be a thing I grabbed at, at midnight in a leather bar, half drunk on the worst-best night of my whole year. You’re worth more than a midnight decision. You’re worth me being sure.”

Dante was quiet for another long moment, the streetlight cutting the side of his face. When he finally spoke, it came out rough and careful, the most measured man I knew measuring even this.

“I’ve spent two years not letting myself have you,” he said. “I can stand to wait a little longer to do it right. I’d rather wait and have it be real than spend tomorrow watching you decide it was a mistake.” He paused. “I’ve read how that story ends. I don’t want to be in that novel.”

“Yeah.” My throat was tight. “Yeah. So. We—what?”

“We go home. Separate. Like a couple of grown-ass men with some sense, which between us, we’ve got maybe half of.”

The corner of his mouth moved, that rumor of a smile.

“And tomorrow, in the daylight and sober, and with our shirts on—” I huffed. “We figure out what this is, on purpose, not because we couldn’t help it.”

“On purpose,” he agreed. And then lower, the honesty of the whole night gathered into it, “For the record, I could very much not help it. I want you to understand that.”

That nearly undid all my good sense right there on the sidewalk.

“Get in your car, Dante,” I said, unsteady, “before I stop being wise about this.”

He leaned forward and kissed me one last time, then crossed to his car. I walked to my truck, and we both did that thing where we looked back at the same time and caught each other doing it, neither of us embarrassed.

We both smiled instead.

I got in and gripped the wheel and didn’t start the engine for a solid minute. My hands weren’t quite steady, and the machine in my chest that had gone quiet in his arms was running fast, turning over and over, bright and terrified and brand new.

I’m not too old or too much. It’s not too late.

I drove home alone, which was the smartest thing I’d done in months. It felt like the hardest thing I’d ever done. At a red light on Nebraska, I reached for my phone, and my fingers found the card instead, still in my shirt pocket where it had been living for a week. Meridian Commercial Properties. I’d meant to call Gerald. I kept meaning to, but calling meant hearing a thing I couldn’t un-hear, and after tonight of all nights, I didn’t want to know anything except the way Dante’s mouth had felt, so I pushed the card back down into the pocket and told myself it could wait another day.

It had waited a week.

What was a while longer?

The light turned green.

Chapter 15