"That," I said, "was —"
"Yeah."
"I can't feel my legs."
"You're welcome."
His mouth was on my neck, still breathing me in, still tasting my skin between words, and I was trying to form a sentence, but his hand was tracing the curve of my thigh, and my brain had left the building.
"We just did that," I said. "In a bathroom. At the Silver Spur."
"While Garth Brooks played."
"While Garth Brooks played."
He pulled back to look at me, and his eyes were dark and blown and satisfied and absolutely delighted with himself, and something about that look made me clench around him, and his whole face changed.
"Don't," he said, low. "Unless you want round two against this door."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a promise."
My legs gave out and he had to set me down and I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror — my dress twisted sideways, his shirt untucked, my lipstick smeared across his jaw, his hair absolutely destroyed by my hands, a bite mark on his collarbone that I did not remember leaving — and lost it completely.
"You cannot go back out there," I said, wiping my eyes.
He looked at himself in the mirror. Grinned. "I look great."
"You look like you were mauled."
"I was. Happily." He tried to fix his hair. Made it worse. Ran his thumb across the bite mark and raised an eyebrow at me. "This yours?"
"I have no memory of that."
"Liar. I felt teeth."
"Prove it."
He caught me by the waist and pulled me back against him and kissed me — slow this time, lazy, tasting like whiskey and trouble — and I felt him grin against my mouth.
"How's my collar?" he murmured.
"There's lipstick on it."
"Good."
I shoved him. He caught my hand and kissed it, and we stood in a bathroom at the Silver Spur grinning at each other like two people who'd just gotten away with something.
We cleaned up. I fixed my hair. He tucked his shirt in. I caught his eye in the reflection — flushed, wrecked, a mark on his neck I'd put there — and grinned.
We walked back into the bar. Bev took one look at us over her margarita, and her eyebrow climbed half an inch. She sipped. Said nothing. Didn't need to.
We walked home.
Hand in hand through the empty streets, the air still warm, the stars absurd. I leaned into him, and somewhere around the corner of Main and Elm, he stopped. Turned me to face him. Put both hands on my face and kissed me in the middle of the street under the hardware store awning with the whole empty town as witness.
Not hiding. Not careful. Not tucked into a bathroom or a dark booth.
