"I'm not making it weird."
"You're doing the face."
"What face."
"The face you make when something means more to you than you want to show." She pulls her hat down slightly. "I've learned your faces."
I look at her in the afternoon light, feed dust on her sleeve, hat pulled down, the whole of Silver Ridge moving around us.
"Laney," I say.
"Mm."
"I'm going to kiss you in front of this entire town in about ten seconds if you don't give me a reason not to."
She looks at me for a long moment.
Doesn't give me a reason.
I close the distance between us, right there in the Silver Ridge Arena on a Saturday afternoon with Jolene watching from the concession stand.
Pearl Bishop is saying something to Harvey Miller.
Remy makes a noise somewhere behind us that carries over the opening notes of the live band.
She kisses me back with both hands on my shirt, and the particular certainty of someone who has stopped looking for reasons not to.
The band plays.
The crowd moves.
Maisie says somewhere nearby, with enormous satisfaction,
"I knew it!"
Chapter fourteen
Whiskey River Nights
Laney
The cattle took three hours to round up.
I want that on the record because by the time we got the last straggler back through the south boundary gate it was past ten o'clock, the moon was doing exactly nothing useful. Remy had lost his second favorite hat somewhere in the dark.
Rowdy had helpfully joined the operation uninvited and spent most of it running in the wrong direction,
Beckett had a long tear in his shirt from a fence wire encounter he described as a mutual disagreement.
All forty-three head accounted for. Fence repaired. Gate secured.
We stood in the dark at the south boundary covered in various combinations of mud, grass, and the particular exhaustion that comes from chasing cattle by truck headlight for three hours. Nobody said anything for a solid thirty seconds.
Then Remy said, "I need a drink."
Nobody argued.
That was two days ago.
