Page 76

He was already looking at her, had been, she thought, for the last half block, in the way he looked at things he’d decided mattered. The snow was on his shoulders now, small white accumulations on the dark flannel, and his face in the streetlamp light was the face she’d been looking at for four months and still couldn’t look at without feeling something move through her.

“I don’t want to keep almost,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Neither do I,” he said.

He stepped toward her.

* * *

She had imagined this, in the way she’d been carefully not imagining it, the moment, if there was a moment, what it might be like. She’d thought it might be tentative. The way first things sometimes were, careful and half-formed, feeling their way.

She had been wrong.

He was not tentative.

His hands found her first, one at her jaw, warm and certain against her cold skin, tilting her face up toward his, and the other at the small of her back, pulling her in with a quiet strength that said this had been decided, this was not accidental, this was the thing itself after four months of everything that wasn’t quite. He smelled like woodsmoke and cold air and something underneath that was just him, clean and warm and something she didn’t have a name for but recognized immediately as his, as the smell she would know anywhere without deciding to know it.

She had a half second of understanding what was happening before it happened.

Then he kissed her.

It was... she lost her vocabulary for a moment, the words she’d have used to describe something dissolving into the thing itself. He kissed her like he did everything, with his full attention, completely present, not rushing toward something else. His hand was warm on her jaw and his other arm was around her and she was pressed against him and he was warm, substantially, solidly warm against the cold December night, the kind of warm that came from a man who worked with his hands and moved through the world with his whole body. She felt the breadth of his chest under her hands where she’d grabbed his jacket, the steadiness of him, and she thought, with the small part of her brain that was still thinking, that she’d been cold and hadn’t known it until this, until his warmth against her.

She stopped thinking.

She kissed him back.

His hand at her jaw shifted slightly, tilting, adjusting, and she felt the deliberateness of it, the attention in it, the way he kissed her like she was something worth doing properly. The snow came down around them, small and steady, on the sidewalk in front of Founders Square, and none of it was cold anymore.

When they separated she genuinely couldn’t find her voice.

He didn’t go far.

His forehead came to rest against hers, warm forehead, cold night, and she could feel his breath against her face and he was breathing slightly less evenly than he usually did, which she found, in the way she was finding everything right now, enormously significant. His hand was still against her jaw, his thumb moving once, slowly, across her cheekbone. She was still holding his jacket.

Neither of them spoke.

The snow came down.

“Allison,” he said. His voice was lower than usual. Settled in a way that felt like something he’d been working up to for a long time and had finally arrived at.

She couldn’t answer for a moment.

“Shane,” she managed.

His forehead against hers. His breath. The snow on his shoulders and on hers and on the gazebo roof and on everything.

“Good night,” he said. He didn’t move.

“Good night,” she said. Neither did she.

A beat.

She laughed, small and surprised, the laugh that came out when something caught her off guard and was wonderful, and she felt more than saw the way his mouth moved, the almost smile she’d been watching for since September, the one that lived in the territory around a smile in a man who didn’t use them casually.

“Go,” she said.