Page 79

He swung the hose again. I turned and the water caught me across the back, soaking through the flannel, running down my spine, cold enough to make my shoulders pull up to my ears. My shirt was stuck to me. My hair was flat to my skull. My boots were full.

Cash walked toward me with the hose, the spray arcing between us, and I was backing up and laughing and shrieking and laughing again, and the clipboard was somewhere on the ground behind me, and my notes were ruined, and I didn’t care.

I didn’t care.

That was the part that frightened me. I didn’t care about the notes or the clipboard or the test or the county or the certificate or the email I hadn’t sent or the phone I hadn’t checked in four hours.

I didn’t care about any of it.

The water hit me again and I screamed and turned and ran three steps before the wet grass caught my boot and I stopped, breathing hard, dripping, my hands in my hair, pulling it out of my face, and when I turned back he was standing ten feet away with the hose hanging loose in one hand, water still leaking from the end, and he was looking at me.

Not laughing anymore.

Neither was I.

He reached me in three strides.

I was against the truck door before I knew I’d been moving — my back flat against the cold metal, my shoulder blades pressing into the seam where the door met the cab. My hands were behind me, palms flat on the wet truck body, and the water on the paint was cold against my skin.

He stopped with one hand on the truck.

Not on me. On the truck, his palm flat against the metal above my shoulder, his arm making a wall on one side. He didn’t touch me. His hand was six inches from my arm, his body a foot from mine, and the space between us was the coldest and warmest thing I’d ever stood in.

My chin was up. I didn’t remember lifting it. My hair hung in wet ropes against my neck and the flannel was stuck to me — to my shoulders, my ribs, the line of my bra visible through the soaked fabric — and I could feel every inch of it against my skin, the cold water and the warm body underneath, and his eyes were on my face.

Both of us breathing hard. Not from running. From the thing that had happened in the field that wasn’t the hose and wasn’t the water and wasn’t the laughter, the thing that had been building for four hours or two weeks or the entire length of the gravel drive, and was now standing between us in the dark at eleven at night with the creek running somewhere behind the cottonwoods and the mountains holding the last of nothing behind their shoulders.

He looked at my mouth.

Not a glance. Not the flicker of a man whose eyes moved and happened to land there. He looked at my mouth and stayed, and the looking had weight and duration and intention, and I knew — in the place below thought, below analysis, below the clipboard and the conditions of engagement and the email I’d drafted in a parking lot — that he had decided.

His jaw was set. Not the grin. Not the dimples. The other thing, the thing that lived under all of it, the face I’d seen once in the truck on the way back from Virginia City when he’d talked about Dena Fry and the rooms he’d performed in and the ones he shouldn’t have. This was that face, aimed at me from twelve inches away, and his eyes were green and dark and completely steady.

He was going to kiss me.

I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted his mouth on mine and his hand in my wet hair and the truck cold against my back and him warm against my front.

He didn’t do it.

He stayed. His hand on the truck, his eyes on my mouth, his breath visible in the cold air between us. He stayed there for five seconds or ten or a year, and I could feel the decision turning in him — the yes and the no and the yes and the no — and then he stepped back.

One step. His hand came off the truck. The space where he’d been filled with night air and creek water and the absence of him, and I stood against the door with my palms still flat on the wet metal and my chin still up and nothing in front of me.

He looked away. His jaw worked once. He pressed both hands through his wet hair and pushed it back from his forehead, and the water ran down his forearms and dripped from his elbows, and he was shaking — not from cold, or not only from cold — and the shaking was the only sign that the last thirty seconds had cost him anything at all.

The not-doing was worse than anything.

Worse than if he’d kissed me, because I could have filed a kiss under impulse and heat and the kind of mistake you make once in a field and don’t repeat. I could have blamed the water and the laughter and the dark and the four hours and the two weeks and the fact that I was thirty and tired and hadn’t been touched by anyone in a year.

But he’d decided not to. He’d stood there and decided and the decision had cost him, and I could see the cost in his hands and his jaw and the careful distance of the step he’d taken, and that meant he was thinking about it, which meant he was taking it seriously, which meant this wasn’t a grin or a performance or the room-warming charm of a man who collected reactions.

This was something else.

I stayed against the truck. My knees had gone unreliable. My flannel was freezing against my skin. The water in my boots had gone from cold to numb, and I couldn’t feel my toes, and I didn’t move, because moving meant deciding what to do next and I had no idea what to do next.

He turned back to me.

“Get in the truck,” he said. “Before you freeze.”