Page 20 of Diesel’s Desire

That gets a real laugh out of me, unexpected and a little too loud for the room, and the waiter arrives at exactly that moment to save me from whatever else might’ve slipped out of my mouth. Evan orders a bottle of red I don’t recognize, something expensive by the way the waiter’s eyebrows lift, and once the man walks away, Evan’s attention comes right back to settle on me like I’m the only thing in the room worth looking at.

“So,” he says. “Seventeen years.”

“Seventeen years,” I agree.

“Where do we even start with that?”

I trace the stem of my glass, buying myself a second. “You could tell me why you never came looking for me.”

Something flickers across his face, fast, gone before I can name it. “I did. Once.”

My chest goes tight. “You didn’t.”

“Drove out to that address you gave your mama before you left. Sat outside for an hour trying to figure out what I was going to say.” He shrugs, like it costs him nothing to admit it, though I can see it does. “Never got out of the truck. Figured if you wanted found, you would’ve left a number.”

I didn’t. I know exactly why I didn’t, and it has everything to do with how much easier it was to convince myself I’d made the right choice if I never gave him the chance to talk me out of it.

“I thought about calling,” I admit. “A hundred times, probably. Never did it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I knew what you’d say.” I meet his eyes, steady, because if we’re doing this, I’m not doing it halfway. “And I knew I’d believe you.”

The wine arrives before either of us can pick that apart further, and I’m grateful for it, grateful for the small ceremony of the pour, the way it gives us both something to do with our hands besides reach across the table.

We order—steak for him, fish for me—and somewhere between the first glass and the second, the conversation stops feeling like an interrogation and starts feeling like something else entirely. He tells me about Lucy’s baby, about Stray checking the baby’s breathing every five minutes, and I laugh so hard I have to set my fork down. I tell him about Thunder, about the ridiculous drama he makes out of squirrels, and Evan grins in a way that makes him look eighteen again, like no time at all has passed since we used to sit on his truck’s tailgate arguing about nothing just to hear each other talk.

“You remember the homecoming bonfire?” he asks, halfway through his steak, wine loosening something in his voice. “Junior year. You wore that ridiculous scarf even though it was eighty degrees out.”

“It wasn’t ridiculous.”

“It had tassels, Penny.”

“It was fashionable.”

“It looked like something died on your neck.” He’s grinning now, easy, unguarded in a way I haven’t seen since we were kids, and something in my chest aches at how familiar it feels, how much like coming home after being lost for longer than I want to admit. “I kept it, you know. That scarf. You left it in my truck.”

I blink. “You did not.”

“Box in my closet. Old ticket stubs, a couple of your hair ties, that scarf.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, like a grown man keeping a box of teenage memories for seventeen years is a perfectly normal thing to admit over dinner. “Never had a reason to throw it out.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I drink my wine instead, and across the table Evan watches me do it with an expression I can’t quite name—soft around the edges, hungry underneath, as if he’s trying to decide whether I’ll let him kiss me later.

By the time the plates clear and my second glass is half gone, I’ve laughed more than I have in months, and somewhere in the last two hours I stopped thinking about my job or the club he belongs to. I stopped thinking about Diesel entirely.

It’s just Evan. Just us, the way it used to be, before things got in the way.

He pays the check before I can even reach for my purse, waves off my protest with a look that dares me to argue, and when we walk back out into the cool night air, his hand finds the small of my back like it belongs there, like it never left.

“I’ll take you home,” he says, opening the truck door for me.

Something in the way he says it makes my pulse stutter, because it doesn’t sound like the end of anything. It sounds like a beginning, patient and certain, the same way he used to say things when he already knew how the night was going to go and was just waiting for me to admit I knew it too.

I climb into the truck, and the whole drive back, I already know how this ends. I know I’m not just going to thank him at my door and send him off into the dark like a man I barely know.

Seventeen years, and he still looks at me like nothing ever changed. Like we’re still those two kids on the back of a truck, certain the whole world was going to bend around whatever we wanted badly enough.

God help me, I want to believe it too.