He looks at Walt, who is already turning away, back to the bar, as if this kind of loyalty requires no acknowledgment at all. I can tell by the way Kragen stills that it matters anyway, something having reached him somewhere unguarded.
He looks back at me.
“Ready?” he asks.
Outside, the Missouri summer night is humid and loud with crickets, the sky fully dark above the street. We walk toward the parking lot, and he slows before we reach it, one hand coming up to find my face, that big palm, the one I know, curving from my jaw to my cheekbone the way it did the first night in my grandmother’s living room.
I tilt my face up.
He comes down to meet me, slow and deliberate, his thumb tracing along my jaw, and I feel the whole evening settling into this moment—the stage, the song, Walt’s eight words, the picture complete—and I close my eyes.
The bar door bangs open behind us.
A group spills out into the night, loud and half-lit, laughing at something that happened inside. They flow around us without noticing us, or noticing and not caring, voices carrying down the block.
We stand in the sudden noise, not quite touching.
I look up at him. His hand is still at my jaw.
He looks down at me with an expression that has stopped managing anything at all.
He opens the passenger door of his car. I get in. My car is in the lot and will be there until tomorrow, and neither of us says so because we don’t need to.
Twenty-three miles of Missouri two-lane. The ridge dark against the sky. His hand finding mine across the console, warm and certain, and the knowledge settling into my chest that I have stopped managing this—somewhere around the fourth song of the second set, without deciding to, I just stopped—and I am entirely glad.
The creek will be running when we get there. The house will be lit from the inside.
I know what tonight is.
Chapter Twenty
Honey
He doesn’t wait for the porch steps.
We’re barely across the parking area—my hand in his, the Missouri night loud around us—when he stops walking, turns, and picks me up. Not with warning. Not with a question. Just—his hands at my waist and then the ground is gone and I make a sound that is, briefly, very undignified.
“Kragen—”
“I’ve got you,” he says. Simple. Like this is information rather than reassurance.
He does have me. That’s the thing. My feet are nowhere near the earth, and he’s walking toward the porch like I weigh nothingbecause to him, I probably don’t. I should have a feeling about being carried like luggage. I find I don’t. What I find instead, once the startled laugh fades, is that my arms have gone around his neck without my deciding to, and his face is close to mine in the dark, and whatever I was going to say about being perfectly capable of walking has left me completely.
He takes the porch steps without breaking stride.
“The door’s open,” I say, when we reach it.
He turns the handle, pushes it with his shoulder, and ducks the frame without putting me down. We’re inside.
He sets me down in the living room, both feet on the floor, straightens, and just stands here in my grandmother’s house.
He takes it in. The amber oak and the lace curtains and the quilts over the chair backs. The tatted doilies on every flat surface, the butter churn visible through the window on the porch, the piano against the wall. My grandmother’s dulcimer where it’s always been. All of it, and him in the middle of it—seven feet of green-skinned orc in a flannel shirt, the lamplight falling across his face, the low ceiling closer to his head than it was built to accommodate.
It looks exactly right.
I don’t know why that hits me as hard as it does. I’ve known it would look right for weeks, in the way you know things you won’t let yourself examine directly.
He belongs here. Not because the house was built for him—it wasn’t, nothing is—but because he is exactly who he is in every room he occupies, and this room is exactly what it is, and somehow those two things fit together without either one having to change.
