“I introduce myself the way I am.”
“You’re also the guitar player,” she points out. “You don’t introduce yourself that way.”
I look at the bottle arrangement. “The guitar is private.”
“I know. That’s what made it…” She stops. She does this, starts sentences and stops them when they’re heading somewhere she hasn’t fully decided to go. I’ve learned to wait. “I’m not good at letting people be more than I decided they were,” she says, and it’s careful and honest and she’s looking at the bottles when she says it. I understand that she’s not talking about the guitar.
Not only, anyway.
“Neither am I,” I reply.
She looks at me. The look is unguarded, which is not her default, and I’m close enough to see it clearly. The tiredness underneath. The weight she carries. The way of someone who is starting, in small and frightening ways, to put things down.
We’re standingveryclose.
I don’t know when that happened. The natural driftof two people at a counter, the proximity of a conversation that’s gone somewhere neither of us planned. But we’re close and I can smell the smoky warmth of her scent at this range and my hand is on the counter near her hand. I am running approximately thirty percent of my usual control. The other seventy percent has been going elsewhere for two weeks.
“Archer,” she says.
“Don’t,” I warn.
“I wasn’t—”
“You were going to say something that closes this down,” I reply. “I’m asking you not to. Not yet.”
She holds that for a moment. “You’re asking?”
“Yes.”
Our eyes lock together for a moment. The game alley is noise and movement and we are somehow the stillness in it. Her eyes drop, briefly, a fraction, and come back up. Her breath hitches.
I don’t think. I have always thought too much. I act from evidence and I think before I move and I have never in seven years of pack membership let instinct make a decision that should belong to judgment.
I kiss her.
It’s not aggressive, not a claim. It’s quiet in the way that I am not usually quiet. It’s the briefest contact, her mouth under mine, the warmth of it, and her breath stops and then starts and her hand on the counter turns over.
One second. Two.
She kisses me back.
Not tentatively. She doesn’t do anything tentatively. She’s present. Her mouth is warm and real and the smoky warmth of her is everywhere. My hand comes up to the counter’s edge to keep myself where I am, to hold the line between a moment and something more, because more isn’t mine to take right now and I know that.
I pull back.
She pulls back.
We look at each other and we’re still very close. Her expression is not what I expected. Not shock, not surprise. Something real and open and slightly wrecked, which mirrors what’s happening in my chest, and neither of us says anything. Even though we’ve had sex before, this kiss felt far more intimate somehow.
The carnival goes on around us like nothing just happened.
Jack, somewhere in it, is deliberately not looking at this. I know because he’s Jack and he can feel it and he’s giving us the only privacy available.
“That—” she starts.
“Yes,” I say.
“Was that—”
