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“C’mere.” I patted the cushion next to me when I sat on the couch, tucking my bare foot under my thigh and turning toward her as she sat two feet away. She smelled like fresh honeydew, sweet and earthy, so I breathed her deep into my lungs. It had to be her lip gloss. Her lips glistened while her brown eyes searched mine. I wanted to be the reason they lit up, and I suddenly heard myself asking, “Will you go to the dance with me?”
So much for all the things I’d planned to say, things that made sense.
Her face scrunched up in confusion, eyebrows dipping down in doubt. “Huh?”
“Oh, wait, sorry,” I said, laughing at myself. “I meant to say some other stuff first and then ask you, but guess I got a little ahead of myself.”
She smiled, but it felt guarded. She had come, though, and she seemed open to hearing what I had to say, but she was still wary. She didn’t plan to get invested if anything I said even had the possibility to cause her pain. I understood that, and I didn’t blame her. I hadn’t exactly given her anything steady to hold onto.
“I’ve never had a girlfriend. I told you that,” I said, and she blinked. “I guess I tried to convince myself it was a necessary fact of workin’ the job I do, that I needed to be discreet so I didn’t ruffle anybody’s feathers, but that’s not true. I mean, yes, the whole gay thing does factor in. Obviously. Look where we live. And in my job, it’s… Well, you can imagine. But plenty of people live their lives out in the open. Like you.”
She nodded.
“Theo and Brady do. Shit, there’s even some cowboys who do. That’s pretty brave around here. So, I guess I’m thinkin’, why can’t I?”
She blinked once. “So… you’re askin’ me out? Like, officially? Out out? Out in the open?”
“Yes.”
Her hesitation hung thick in the air between us. A lot of it. Had I screwed up too badly already?
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Me too.” That was the biggest understatement I’d ever made.
“Yeah, but I’m scared for a different reason than you.”
I reached for her hand and held it. “Why’re you scared?”
“Because if you change your mind, if it’s too hard or people react badly, then you’re gonna hurt me. I can already feel the rip wantin’ to start.” She touched her chest with her free hand, right where her heart would be if I could’ve seen inside her. If she’d let me. “Can you promise you won’t?”
How could I promise that if I couldn’t promise myself the same thing?
Whatever she saw in my eyes pissed her off. She pulled her hand out of my grasp and leaned away from me. “What the hell happened to you? Why does the word ‘promise’ make you squeamish?”
Of course she’d noticed.
I sighed, and my heart broke as I admitted the truth. “People break promises too easily. They don’t mean anything. They’re just words.”
“They mean somethin’ if—” She cleared her throat. “If the person makin’ the promise cares for you, they can mean the world.”
I hoped she did, but I had to ask, “You care about me?” I needed to hear her say it.
“’Course I do.” She lowered her eyes, playing with a rip in the knee of my jeans, pulling at the frayed edges. “Do you care about me?” There was a mountain of vulnerability in that one small question.
Lifting her chin with a touch of my fingertip, when she finally looked in my eyes, I said, “More than I know how to say.”
She beamed, lighting up my whole house with her smile while I worked out the rest of what I needed to say.
“You’ve been in love before.” It wasn’t a question. I’d known since that first night, when she told me some ex had broken her heart.
“Yeah,” she said, “but it was that stupid first love, where all you see is the good stuff while all the bad is buildin’ up in the background, gettin’ ready to take you down.”
“Like what bad stuff?”
Devo shrugged. “She decided she wasn’t gay after all. Or maybe she’s bi now. I don’t know, but after three years together, all of a sudden, she wanted some dickhead over in Idaho. Some farm boy.”
“What was her name?”
