Page 24 of Thunder

"I'm not askin' you for anything." I keep my voice low. "You made your choice and I heard it. I'm not takin' it back for you and I'm not gonna stand at your pens beggin'. But you asked me why I'd break my own body rather than sit still, and that's your answer. Because the two things that were my whole life turned into three somewhere back in the spring, and one of them won't look at me anymore, and a man'll do a lot of stupid things with his hands when the rest of him's got to keep distracted."

Her eyes have gone wet now, full and shining, and one breaks loose and cuts a clean line down through the dust on her cheek, and she doesn't wipe it away.

"That's not fair," she whispers.

Same thing she said at the pens. Same three words.

"You can't just—you can't say things like that to me. Not when I'm trying so hard to⁠—"

"To what?"

"To not want this." Her voice breaks all the way. "Do you have any idea how hard I'm working to not want this? My family fell apart, Thunder. My sisters won't look at me, my whole life cracked down the middle, and the one thing I know—the one thing I've got left to hold onto—is that I can't add one more secret to the pile. I can't. And then you go and get a rattlesnake put on your neck, and you say what you just did, and you make it so hard."

I get a hand up. I shouldn't.

My hip's on fire and I've got no business moving, but I get my hand up off my knee, and I bring it to the side of her face, and I catch that wet line with my thumb, and she doesn't pull back.

She leans into it.

Barely, the smallest press of her cheek into my palm, her eyes falling closed.

It's the first time I've touched her since a hotel room in the spring and it goes through me worse than the fragment ever did.

We're close now.

She's crouched in the dirt between my knees and I've got her face in my hand and her breath's gone shallow, and her mouth is right there.

Close enough that I can see the freckles the sun's brought up across her nose, close enough that all I'd have to do is lean, just lean, six inches and I'd have her mouth back after all these weeks of nothing.

She knows it too.

Her eyes come open and drop to my mouth and come back up.

For one second we hang right there on the edge of it, both of us, her hand fisted in my shirt at my chest and my thumb at her cheekbone, and the whole ranch has gone silent around us.

Then she pulls back.

She does it slowly, but she does it—takes her hand out of my shirt, sits back on her heels, and puts eight inches of hot air between her mouth and mine.

She presses the back of her wrist to her lips like she's holding something in.

"I can't," she says. "Not because I don't—" She stops. Shakes her head. "I can't, Thunder. Nothing's changed. Everything that was true when I walked out your door is still true."

"I know it is."

"Then you have to let me go get someone to help you up to the house."

She's already standing, already putting the ranch back between us, already reaching for the steady voice she runs her whole life with.

"You need ice on that hip, to stay off it, and you need to not hang any more gates by yourself, you stubborn, impossible⁠—"

"Presley."

She stops.

"Thank you," I tell her.

"For stoppin'. For gettin' under my arm. I know how difficult it must’ve been for you. Not just physically, speakin’."