Okay.
10
WREN
Rowe’s trailer is smaller than I expected.
“It's not much,” he says behind me.
“It's nice.”
“It’s tiny.”
“It'stidy.” I look at him and smile. “Do you know what my apartment looks like? There's a laundry chair. The laundry chair has achieved sentience.”
The corner of his mouth quirks up. He edges past me—careful, a full body's width of distance—and opens the mini fridge, pulling out two bottles. He pops the caps on the counter edge with a practiced knock of his palm and holds one out at arm's length.
Our fingers don't touch when I take it. He makes sure of that.
“Sit wherever,” he says.
Whereveris a padded bench along one wall and a single chair by the fold-down table. I take the bench. He takes the chair, and there's maybe four feet between us, and the door is shut, and it occurs to me all at once that I am alone in atrailer with a man I've been thinking about for two days straight.
I take a long pull of the beer.
When you’re the good girl from a small town, you spend your whole life assuming men like this exist in a separate ecosystem. Men with forearms like his, with ink disappearing under rolled sleeves, with cheekbones that belong on a movie poster. They date yoga instructors. They date women who look effortless in cutoffs. They do not invite midsize veterinarians with laundry chairs into their trailers for a beer.
And yet… here I am.
“You're quiet,” he says.
“I'm always quiet,” I assure him.
He lifts one brown eyebrow. “You talked for two hours while we did the chores.”
I cut the air with my free hand. “That was about hay logistics. Hay logistics are safe.”
Rowe’s eyes settle on me. In the low light of the single lamp, they look darker, and the way he’s looking at me makes my neck feel warm.
“And this isn't safe,” he murmurs.
I peel at the corner of the beer label. “You're leaving in two weeks.”
“Twelve days.”
“Twelve days.” I laugh, and it comes out thin. “See, you're not even arguing.”
“Arguing what?”
About how I don't know what I'm doing here. How men like you don't want girls like me. How you can't be touched, and I don't know what that leaves us, and I came anyway, because apparently, I'd rather have twelve days of whatever this is than zero.
“Nothing,” I say. “Forget it.”
He doesn't push. He drinks his beer, and I drink mine, and the silence should be awkward, but instead it's charged, humming like the air before a storm rolls over the county. He's changed out of the performance vest into a gray henley, and it pulls across his shoulders when he leans back, and I make myself look around his trailer instead.
It doesn't help. Because when I glance back, his eyes are on me.
Not my face.
