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“And then,” he said, “slowly, we became…”
“Us.”
His thumb drew a small circle over her skin, not at all by accident, and a shiver gripped her neck. “This feels good,” he said. “It feels right.” And there it went, her heart, sliding between her ribs and skipping along the floor. “I think we’ll have them all fooled.”
Fooled, right. She swallowed something bitter, wondering if she was the first person in the world to be jealous of themselves in a relationship that had never happened. “I still can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“Oh, come on, Mira.” He pulled her close again, and she leaned in, notching her chin over his shoulder, smelling the sea on his skin. “Who ever said we couldn’t do ridiculous things anymore just because we’re old?”
“Young people.”
He barked a laugh, then, after another verse, another chorus, he admitted, “The answer is yes, by the way.”
“Yes, what?”
Solemnly, he said, “I do like ponies.”
Hiding her grin in his neck while he spun her around, even though she knew it was a terrible idea, possibly the worst she’d ever had, she let herself think, if only for a second,I wish you didn’t live in Seattle.
CHAPTERSIX
COLE
Despite its apparentlack of sex appeal, Cole’s Volvo always gave him a smooth ride. But after he’d danced with Mira for three more songs before walking her back to her bakery, the winding road up to Bluebird might as well have been paved with feathers. His skin hummed everywhere she’d touched him, the lingering sensation of her body against his distracting him so thoroughly he’d accidentally veered onto the gravel shoulder twice.
While he drummed a random beat on the steering wheel, his headlights blazing a path between the trees, he gasped, fingers snapping between his ears as the unmistakable lightning strike of inspiration hit. Beats, rhythms, lyrics. They were right there, thrumming through his veins. He wanted to write a poem, a song, an epic space opera, a—“Best man’s speech!” he said out loud.
He’d been stuck for days, but now the lines wrote themselves in his mind, everything he wanted to say to Ashley and Madigan, all his hopes for them as clear as the night sky over his head. It had been a while since he’d had a muse, butdamnif Mira Harlow wasn’t Red Falls’s very own Edie Sedgwick.
Pulling into Bluebird’s parking lot, he grabbed his coat and tie from the passenger seat and raced up the steps and into the lodge, words swimming in front of his eyes, his fingers itching to put them down.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?”
Wheeling around, he clutched at his chest. “Davis,” he wheezed, his heart pounding. “It’s dangerous to scare a man my age like that.”
“I know CPR,” Ashley’s daughter stated calmly, sitting alone at a table, her shoulder-length blond waves curtaining her face while she stared at her phone. “And we have an AED if things get really hairy.”
He dropped his hand to his side. “You do?”
She nodded. “In the kitchen. On the wall by the back door. My grandpa bought it years ago after watching a60 Minuteson cardiac arrest. It probably still works.”
“That’s…good to know,” he said haltingly, his heart rate stabilizing, helped in part by the way Davis’s shoulders slumped, her thumb sliding absently up and down her screen, her expression flat as lake water. He glanced around the empty dining hall, the only light coming from the EXIT signs, her phone, and the moon. “You’re up late.”
“It’s only midnight. It’s early.”
“Timeissubjective,” he conceded. When he was Davis’s age, the night didn’t even start until two a.m. Now, he was lucky to make it past ten thirty with his eyes open. “Everything all right?” he asked, because she didn’t seem all right. She hadn’t seemed all right at the rehearsal dinner either, sitting quietly next to Kev, neither of them saying much to each other, or to anyone else, for that matter. He didn’t pretend to know the details of their relationship, but he knew they’d been close. And it had pressed on an old bruise, watching her whisper in Kev’s ear, rub his back like she was trying to coax some sort of response from him. If Cole knew anything, it was when someone was shutting their partner out. He’d been that partner more times than he could count.
“Yep, fine,” she replied. “Just excited. Big day tomorrow.”
Davis wasn’t much younger than Becks, and maybe because they seemed so similar to him, both take-no-shit spitfires, the second Cole had met Davis at Flannelfest, they’d just clicked. They’d stayed up for hours by the big bonfire, talking, cracking jokes, telling stories. But if she’d been a spitfire then, there was no spark in her tonight.
His speech could wait.
Pulling out a chair, he joined her at the table. “Hugeday,” he agreed, setting his coat and tie on the chair next to him. “Lots of changes.”
“They never stop, do they?”
“Not until we’re in the ground.”
