Page 67 of Smoke and Roses

“He’ll pay you anyway.”

“He will. He’s so stubborn.” She glances over at me. “Heidi Stokes saw my face. She closed my shop for me.”

“That was nice of her.”

She covers her face. “It was. But by breakfast it’ll be all over town that you made me cry and Heidi had to call the sheriff on you.”

“That’s not the truth, though.”

“That’s what the gossip mill will spit out,” she says, laughing into her hands.

Her house is cold when we get there because Lindsey cut the furnace back, so I kneel in front of the little iron stove and build a fire.

When I look up, she’s standing in the middle of her living room in her coat, with her keys still in her hand.

“Honey.”

“I don’t know what to do with myself.” She looks around like it’s somebody else’s house. “I’m really good at waiting. I’ve had practice. And now I have to wait two more weeks, and I can’t remember how. What the hell do people do for two weeks?”

“Work. Sleep. Eat.”

“I’m gonna suck at all three.”

I take the keys out of her hand and hang them on the hook by the door. I unbutton her coat, and she lets me, and I hang that up too.

“Sit,” I say.

“Bossy.”

“Sit, honey.”

She sits on the rug in front of the stove. I sit behind her against the couch and pull her between my knees, and we watch the fire catch.

After a while she unclasps her necklace and holds the half heart in her palm. ST ENDS. The broken edge is shiny from her thumb.

“Hank’s been carrying that promise so long,” she says. “That’s you, you know. With Joey. The twenty dollars.”

I keep my eyes on the fire but her words hit me dead center. She tips her head back against my shoulder so she can look up at me. “You could call Joey’s wife.”

“Marisol.”

“Marisol. You could, Travis. That’s all I’m saying.”

She doesn’t push. She fumbles the clasp of the necklace and lets me do it for her. Then she turns around in my arms, on her knees on the rug, and kisses me.

It’s slow. Her hands slide up into my hair, and mine find the small of her back under her sweater, and she hums against my mouth, the little noise I’d walk through a burning building to hear.

We kiss on her rug until the pine catches and her lips are pink.

“You know what you did today?” she says against my jaw.

“What?”

“You waited for me.”

“Gabe told me to.”

“Liar.”