"You keep saying that like the number's going to change."
His jaw tightened.
"I'm not asking you to take me to prom," I said. "I'm asking you to?—"
"I know what you're asking."
"Thenanswer me."
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes cut to the barn door, then back to me. He dropped his voice.
"Haven." His voice was low. "If I say yes—and I'm not saying yes—but if I did. You understand what that means. It means nothing changes out here. You work, I work. Nobody knows."
My heart was going hard but I kept my face steady. "That's what I said."
"And when it's done, it's done. No—" He stopped. "No complications."
"I'm not a complicated person."
He looked at me like he wasn't sure he believed that. I wasn't sure I believed it either, if I was being honest, but this wasn't the moment for honesty about that particular thing.
"I need to think about it," he said.
That was not a no.
That was so far from a no that I had to work very hard not to smile.
"Okay," I said.
"Haven—"
"I said okay." I picked up my jacket. "Come on. Your mom made lunch and I'm starving."
I walked out of the barn ahead of him into the thin February sun and I did not smile until my back was to him and I was sure he couldn't see my face.
Not a no.
I could work with that.
FOUR
Wyatt
We didn't talk about it for the rest of the day.
We ate lunch at my mother's table and Haven had two helpings of the soup and talked to Forrest about a course she was taking at UTSA. She laughed at something Dakota said when he came in from the pasture smelling like horse. I sat across from her and drank my coffee and watched her like a man losing an argument with himself.
Nobody knows.
That was the thing she'd said. The thing I kept turning over.
It was true. Nobody would have to know. Haven wasn't going to tell anyone—she'd been the one to suggest it, she was the one who'd framed it as simple and clean and contained, and she wasn't wrong that it could be those things. People made arrangements like this all the time.
Adults.
Which she was.
She was twenty-one years old and she knew what she wanted and she'd said so clearly, twice now. I was forty and I'd already had my hand down her jeans behind a bar.
