I'm lying in bed with the lamp off and the window open, listening to the crickets, and I can't make my brain settle.
The mattress shifts and Sloane slides in beside me. "What's the matter?" she asks.
"Nothing," I say. "I'm fine."
"Maggie." She turns to me and strokes my cheek. "You've been quiet all evening."
I stare at the ceiling. "Eighteen days, that's what's left. And then you go back, and this is a thing that happened one summer. I'm trying to get my head around it."
Her hand goes still. "You think this ends when my sentence does."
"I think we should be honest about what this is."
"And what is it?"
I turn my head to look at her, then wish I hadn't. She's so beautiful it's hard to focus on what I need to say. "I'm not going to pretend this isn't important to me. I have feelings for you. But you live in LA, in a world with helicopters and celebrities. Duster's going to be a story you tell at some point. The summer you did community service and slept with the woman who ran the sanctuary." I say it as lightly as I can. "That's not a criticism. It's just true."
She sits up. "Listen to yourself. You can't tell me how I feel or what I want."
"I'm being realistic."
"You keep using that word like it settles the argument. It's a word people use when they want to sound grown up about something they're scared of. You're scared, Maggie. So am I. Don't dress it up." Sloane takes my hand. "I don't want this to end and it doesn't have to end."
I sit up too. "But Sloane, the geography alone is a challenge. It's four hours to LA and you won't be driving for the foreseeable future. And my life is here, with fifty animals that need me twice a day, every day, and a mother whose back is going. I can't leave. Ever."
"You don't have to. I can come here," she says. "Stay with you for weeks on end while we see how this goes."
"You and I both know you'll never end up here. Even if you tried, you'd get bored and frustrated and you'd resent me for it."
"You don't actually know that," she says quietly. "I'm not Reese."
I look away from her. "Reese has nothing to do with this. That was a long time ago."
Sloane shifts closer and drapes her arm over my waist. "It's the same fear. I don't know what Reese wanted, but I know what I want." She smiles. "I want you."
"Sloane —"
"Listen to me. I've spent enough time here to know what it's like in Duster. Hell, I've seen the worst of it. I know it's a boring little town and I know what it's like to work outside when it's a hundred and four. I'm not romanticising it. I'm telling you that I have done all of it and I still want to be here."
"Because you've been here on borrowed time. Everything's brighter when you know it ends."
"Maybe. Or maybe I've been more myself here than I've ever been anywhere else." Her hand slips under my T-shirt and skims my stomach. "I'm begging you," she says, "to stop deciding what I want and be open to something long-term. That's all. Can you please do that?"
Her hand on my stomach is warm, her body is pressed along mine, and I feel her breath against my shoulder. Every argument I've lined up gets quieter when she's near. There's a part of me that wants what she's asking for so badly it scares me and I don't know if she's right about Reese or if I'm wrong about her. I don't know what will happen but what I know is that she's here now, asking me to be brave.
"I can try," I whisper.
Sloane exhales deeply and rests her forehead against mine. "That's all I'm asking." She cups my face and kisses me, slow and unhurried, like she's making a promise she doesn't quite have the right to make yet. Her thumb moves along my jaw and her other hand finds the back of my neck and stays there. I feel her relax against me by degrees — her shoulders, her chest, her breath.
I sigh as I sink into her caress. My body has made its own decision, and I don't have the strength to keep wanting her and resisting her at the same time. My leg slides between hers and she moans softly against my lips. If this ends up costing me everything, so be it.
59
SLOANE
The donkey video did three hundred thousand views overnight. I still can't quite believe it. It was nothing — twenty seconds of Hank refusing to eat a green apple, holding it in his mouth before dropping it in the dirt and waiting for the pink one which he immediately guzzled up. He really looked like a man who'd been served the wrong wine and people in the comments were losing their minds. The sanctuary's gained eleven thousand followers in a week and I feel a little smug about that.
There's a post of Beyoncé standing on her barrel surveying her kingdom, captioned,She didn't ask to be named after a global superstar but she rose to the occasion. There's Dolly, leaning against my legs while I scratch her ear, with a caption about how she spent eight years in a crate and now her hardest decision is which patch of sun to lie in — that one made people cry, which I've learned is just as valuable as making them laugh, and got more engagement than anything else I've posted. There's a deeply unflattering shot of Gerald turning his back to me that I titledI prefer to be left alone, which several thousand people apparently relate to on a personal level. There's a clipof Thelma running across the paddock with Louise hot on her heels, captioned,Day 47 of trying to apologize. A reel of Derek the goat, falling off the top of the playground bridge twice in ten seconds is popular too. It's captioned,He'll get there eventually.
