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She stopped, because her voice quit holding.

Owen turned her around. His hands did it, the coat and her shoulders inside it, no hurry in it and no asking either, and she came around and looked up at him in the almost-dark, at thirteen years of him standing six inches away with his jaw set and his eyes moving over her face like a man reading bad news twice, and she watched something in him lose the fight it had been winning all afternoon.

“Liv,” he said, and kissed her.

His mouth was warm and the night was cold and her whole body answered before her brain got a vote, up on her toes, her fists closing in his coat, and he made a rough sound against her mouth and hauled her in, one arm across her back and his other hand coming up bare into her hair, and there was nothing careful in it anywhere, not in his mouth and not in his hands and not in the breath he kept losing, and she gave it all straight back with interest, thirteen years of interest, and the coat slid off her shoulders into the dark and neither of them grabbed for it.

He walked her one step and her back met a cottonwood and the bark bit through her shirt and she didn’t care. His hand left her hair and found the hem of her shirt and spread flat against her ribs, bare skin, work-rough, and she arched into it and heard exactly what that did to his breathing. She got her mouth on his jaw, salt and stubble, and he swore, low, his hand flexing at her ribs, his thigh coming between hers, his weight settling in, and she had his coat in her fists and his heart slamming under her knuckles, and she pulled him closer, and he let her.

He broke it. His forehead came down against hers, hard, and they stood there breathing each other’s air, her hands still full of his coat, his hand still on the back of her head, and under her fists his heart was going and going.

“That,” he said, rough, “was a mistake.”

The cold arrived all at once, everywhere.

He stepped back. He took his hands off her, careful, the way he took them off a gate he’d just chained, and he bent and picked her coat up out of the leaves and held it out, and his face in the dark was already shut.

“Olivia. I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have⁠—”

“Don’t.” She took the coat. Her voice came out level, the last of what she had, and she spent all of it. “You said it fine the first time.”

She put her coat on with her back to him, both arms, took her time about it, because her hands were shaking and he was not going to see that, and then she walked around the bend toward the fire and the music and left him standing at the water in the dark he liked so much.

She came around the bend braced for it, a party’s worth of faces swinging her way, everybody knowing. Nobody looked up. Knox was still litigating the horseshoe rules, Remi was singing over the top of her own playlist, the fire was exactly where she’d left it, and the biggest thing to happen to her in years had happened to nobody but her. Her face burned in the cold. She’d kissed him back with everything she had, up on her toes, her hands full of his coat, and he’d set her down and apologized for it, and there was nobody to tell and nothing to show and a whole party to walk back into with her face fixed.

She was excellent for the rest of the night. She wanted that on a stone somewhere.

“Where’d you get to?” Lauren said, when she sat back down.

“Walked up the creek a minute.”

“Mm.”

She sat back on Lauren’s tailgate and finished a beer she couldn’t taste and told the alligator story again for the ones who’d missed it. She watched Knox lose the rematch and Jett take his money with a bow, and an hour later, with only Remi anywhere near, a horseshoe finally rang off the far bank like a church bell.

“Anybody see that?” Knox roared.

“No,” said Remi.

“Remi. You saw it.”

“I saw nothing. I’ve been bought.”

“Bought with what?”

“The last brownie,” said Remi.

Brody dropped onto the tailgate beside her with two fresh bottles and handed one over. “This fire’s all right,” he said. “Needs a lizard.”

“Everything does, to hear you tell it.”

“You laugh. That shed ran better than half the outfits I’ve worked for.” He knocked his bottle against hers and looked at the fire, and for a second there was nothing performed on him at all. “This is what I missed, right here. Same creek. Same idiots.”

“Same four songs.”

“I heard those songs on the other side of the world, Bateman. In my sleep.” He drank. “You warm enough?”

“I’m fine.”