Maybe that wasn’t a question that was even worth asking.
If things had been different, maybe they never would’ve met. But maybe they could’ve been… Something. Maybe they could’ve been something easier, lighter, more functional. Maybe there would’ve been a future that was easier for both of them to imagine.
He twirled her, and she laughed, letting that laughter clear out the heaviness inside of her.
Letting herself get caught up in him.
One song bled into the next, some were fast, and some slow, and she felt like they had created an entirely separate world there, just the two of them.
They danced until the playlist ended, until her feet ached.
“And because this is prom,” he whispered in her ear. “I have to tell you that I reserved us a room.”
Illicit excitement shot through her. They were going to have sex in the hotel. That was just… naughty. Because Marlowe managed it, it felt spectacularly wrong.
Even though it shouldn’t.
She felt almost reluctant to leave the prom behind, but it was time to go.
He took her hand, and they walked out of the barn and into a rainstorm.
She looked up and laughed. She couldn’t escape the rain. The rain was dogging her, and there was nothing she could do about it. The rain seemed to have it in for her. Sliding her down a hill, but it had also led to her first kiss.
So maybe she couldn’t be so resentful of the rain.
She turned toward him, and he dipped her back, kissing her deep and long, as the water pounded down over them.
He kissed her like they weren’t standing there in a storm, like there was nowhere left to be.
And she supposed that was the beauty of being wet already. The beauty of being in the rain.
There was nothing to be afraid of. No reason to run.
Because it had all already happened.
Alarm bells went off in the back of her mind, and she couldn’t quite say why. But she just let him keep on kissing her, and she ignored them, because she didn’t really want to do anything with them, not right now.
“You know,” he said, pulling her back up, his hand still coming down the back of her head, “my grandma used to quote that scripture about the rain falling on the just and the unjust.”
“Yeah, I remember you saying that,” she said, raindrops rolling down her face.
“And she used to say it, and I believed it, like it meant that bad things could happen to everybody. But I realize just now… the rain is good. The rain is a gift. I mean, I’m a rancher, I ought to know that. Farmers sure know it. Definitely back then, when they wrote the Bible, they would’ve known it. The rain is a good thing. It’s a gift. I wonder… I wonder if what that really means, when it comes right down to it, is that blessings come to everybody. Whether they deserve them or not. Just a little perspective shift. But it kind of changes everything.”
His words resonated inside of her, echoing down deep within her soul.
“Zane…”
“You’re the rain for me, Cara. The rain that I desperately needed, because God, I have been in a drought. I’ve been lost. Lost in the goddamn wilderness, and I know how to survive in the wilderness, but I haven’t known how to findmy way home.
I haven’t even known how to get close. Like I said, it’s a lot easier to get lost than it is to get found, but you… You’re out here with me. Maybe that’s not the same as the two of us knowing exactly where we are, but we are together, in the rain, and I’ve never been more certain in my life that that rain is a blessing. That it’s a gift. Because you are. You are.”
“I…” She reached up and touched his face.
“I love you, Cara,” he said.
Her heart stopped, her breathing stopped.
“You… You love me?”
