Page 10 of Diesel’s Desire

I peel Honey off me, no charm to it, no easy smile to soften the exit the way I usually manage. First time in longer than I care to admit that I’ve been anything but smooth walking away from a woman, and Honey’s expression goes confused and a little hurt before I’ve even fully untangled myself.

“I’ll find you later,” I say, which sounds like a promise I have no business making, and then I’m moving, cutting through the crowd before she can ask me anything I don’t have an answer for.

I walk past Ryder and Ace, who’ve apparently settled their dispute by both dancing with Sharon at once, one hand each, spinning her between them while she laughs loud enough to carry over the band. I walk past Tank in a folding chair with Ruth now perched sideways on his knee, feeding him a piece of cake off a fork like he’s a man who can’t be trusted to do it himself, and the sight of it—big, grizzled Tank letting his old lady baby him in front of half the club—loosens something in my chest even as I keep moving.

Past the tables. Past the lights. Past the point where Sharon’s crew stopped stringing bulbs because the party wasn’t supposed to reach this far, out where the grass goes ragged and the tree line starts eating the noise behind me one decibel at a time.

Bluebell nickers from her pen off to the left. On the other side, the frames of the new houses rise up against what little light there still is. Skeleton walls. Rafters with nothing on them yet. Sharon’s blueprint come half to life—houses for brothers who’ve decided they want a yard instead of a dorm room down the hall from the bar, houses for old ladies tired of raising kids in a clubhouse.

I stop there, hands on my hips, and try to talk some sense into myself.

She’s not yours. Hasn’t been yours in seventeen years. She came for Sasha, not for you, and whatever happened back there with Honey isn’t anything Penny’s got a right to care about, because she gave up that right the day she drove off with the radio too loud.

It’s a good speech. Reasonable.

Doesn’t stop my pulse from doing something stupid when I hear grass shift behind me, when I smell her, that same perfume, something vanilla and floral, the scent I used to find on my letterman jacket.

She still wears the same damn perfume.

I turn slowly. Give myself the extra second to arrange my face into something that isn’t as wrecked as I feel.

Penny’s standing maybe ten feet back, champagne flute gone, arms crossed loosely over her middle like she’s cold, though the night’s warm enough that can’t be the reason. The string lights don’t reach out here, so she’s mostly shadow and moonlight, but I’d know her anywhere.

“Didn’t peg you for the type to wander off from a party,” she says.

Her voice hasn’t changed either. Seventeen years of academy training and policing and whatever else built the woman standing in front of me, and her voice still sounds exactly like it did the last time she said my name in a parking lot.

“Needed air,” I say. “Lot of people back there.”

“Lot of blondes, too.”

I don’t have a good answer for that, so I don’t try. Penny doesn’t fill the silence either. We just stand there, ten feet and seventeen years between us, while somewhere behind her the band starts up something slower, softer.

“You look good, Evan,” Penny finally says, and my chest goes tight at the sound of my actual name in her mouth. Nobody calls me that anymore. Nobody’s really called me that in years except her, right now, out here where nobody else can hear it.

“Diesel,” I say, not because I want to correct her, but because I don’t know what else to do with my hands or my voice or the ten feet of grass between us.

“That’s not your name,” she counters.

I breathe out slowly. “It’s the name everyone here knows.”

Penny tilts her head, studying me like she used to when we were kids and she could tell I was lying about something, some small thing, homework I hadn’t done or a fight I’d gotten into that I didn’t want my mother hearing about. “Not to me.”

I take a step. Just one, testing the ground, waiting to see whether she’ll back away.

She doesn’t bolt.

“You following me out here for a reason,” I ask, “or you just enjoy watching men fall apart at weddings?”

She blinks. “Wasn’t following you. Needed air too.”

“Funny. Lot of air back there by the cake table.”

“Wasn’t the air I had a problem with.”

So she did see Honey. I don’t ask her to say it. I’m enjoying the possibility that she’s jealous far too much. So instead I just look at her—hair down, dress soft and blue in the moonlight, standing close enough now that I could reach out and touch her if either one of us was stupid enough to let that happen.

“Seventeen years,” I say, quiet. “You still smell the same.”