“New habit. I keep a running tab of places nobody goes, so I know where to go when I’m trying to take my girl on a date.”
“That's the most romantic sentence anyone's ever said to me, and it's about making sure there’s a lack of photo evidence.”
“Welcome to us, Dixon.”
The drive-in's better than I talked it up to be. Big empty field, a screen gone gray with weather, and because there's no town close enough to drown it out, the whole sky's filled with stars. She gets out of the truck slowly with her head tipped all the way back, and for once, she isn't running any scenarios I can see. She just looks up.
“Okay,” she says. “This is good.”
“That’s high praise from you.”
“You know, you don’t have to go through all this trouble, right? I’ve already given you the rose. You got the girl.”
“Everything about you is trouble, Dixon. That’s why I’m addicted to your ass.”
I back the truck up to the screen, drop the tailgate, throw down the blanket and the pillows I stole off my own bed, and get the projector humming off a battery pack. Her show comes up huge and a little crooked, and she laughs, the real one, the whole laugh, not the clipped thing she sometimes gives.
“Brayden's pores are the size of my fist,” she says.
“Worth every dollar I didn't spend. Eat. Chicken's on the left, and yeah, I packed it so nothing's touching. Don't make a speech about it.”
She points at the screen. “She's keeping him. Watch. She fixes her hair right before she makes a bad call.”
“You shove your sleeves up before you make a good one.”
She looks down. Her sleeves are pushed past her elbows in a cold field, because she forgot to keep them down.
“Huh,” she says.
“Yeah. Huh.”
She pulls them back. A minute later, when she thinks I'm not looking, they're up again. I don't say a word about it. I just do one of her numbers, turn, and smile to myself.
She eats. She narrates. She calls an elimination ten minutes early and jabs a finger at the woman's hands like a detective at a chalkboard, and I lie back on a pillow that smells like my own sheets and watch her truly be herself. Someone she doesn’t get to be around most people, not even her own father. And now I understand. This is why people write love songs and shit. This is the thing I didn't know other people had the whole time.
“You watch this every week?” I say.
“Every week for four years.”
“Never with anybody?”
“Who would I watch it with?” She says it matter-of-factly. No pity. Just truth. And it sits there between us, bigger than she meant it to. “You're the first person I thought to ask.”
“And the last.”
She giggles. “I never pegged you for the jealous type.”
“Neither did I, but here we are.”
That's when headlights swing across the field.
She's flat against the truck bed before I've finished sitting up, the show still flickering giant over both of us like a spotlight we can't kill fast enough. The car slows at the mouth of the lot. My whole body goes to the place it goes right before a fight, hands loose, breath gone shallow, and for about four seconds, I run the worst version of what could be happening.
It's Coach.
It's a cop.
It's a nosy puck bunny trying to blow up my spot.
