She wanted him to admit she’d been good for him.
“It’ll make packing easy the next time I come back here,” Teagan said, and it sounded like a promise.
•••••
The light lingered even in August, this far north, so it was barely sunset by the time they reached Livingston, the nearest large town outside of the park. Darcy turned ontoa long stretch of two-lane highway lined by strip malls with faux Old West facades over casinos, gift shops, and bars, then pulled into a gas station. The tank was still almost half full.
Teagan wondered if she was as reluctant to let the day end as he was. They had not found any beavers, in the end, but Darcy had pointed out a muskrat and an endangered water bird. She seemed very pleased with their visual haul.
He got out of the truck when she did and tried not to ogle her when she bent to stretch her legs after the two-hour drive out of the park, even though her jeans clung to her ass in a really wonderful way. He looked away down the street before she caught him.
“Do you want to get dinner? Since we’ve already stopped?” he asked. Her stomach had been audibly growling for the last half hour, and he couldn’t recall seeing her eat anything but French fries and half a pickle spear all day.
He wanted to buy Darcy dinner. He wanted to sit across a table from her and ask her questions about her life and pretend that today had been a date, pretend that at the end of the evening he’d kiss her under the stars and that tomorrow he’d do it again.
For a few hours today, he’d felt both awake and happy, and the confluence of those two feelings was so unusual over the past two years that he wanted to stretch today until it became tomorrow.
“I doubt there’s much I can eat here,” she replied offhandedly. “And I’ve already had French fries today.”
“Oh, of course, sorry,” Teagan said in automatic response. This place probably wasn’t big enough to support a vegan restaurant.
“I think Kristin was making tempeh-stuffed pepperstoday. We’ll be in time for dinner back at the camp,” she said, flicking a strand of hair behind her ear as she punched buttons on the gas pump.
“Sounds great,” Teagan lied.
Darcy glanced up from the gas pump. “Do you not like stuffed peppers?”
“Who doesn’t like stuffed peppers?” Teagan said, wishing he was better at lying.
Darcy’s full lips pursed as she considered him and his stoic face. She looked away at the convenience store.
“Yeah, you’re right, stuffed peppers suck. If you’ll go buy some peanut butter crackers, we can stop in Bozeman and eat them on Pete’s Hill while we watch the dog-walkers. Do you want to do that for dinner instead?”
“I’m fine, really. I’m not going to let you eat crackers for dinner.”
Darcy laughed. “Wouldn’t be the first time. I didn’t become a vegetarian because I likedvegetables. Pop Tarts and peanut butter crackers were, like, a staple of my diet for years.”
“You deserve better than peanut butter crackers for dinner,” Teagan said before he thought about the judgment implied in that statement. It was true though. Darcy deserved many things she didn’t seem to have. At a minimum, he thought Darcy ought to have at least one person who bought her plant-based dinners and told her she was wonderful on a regular basis, and the lack of a crowd of applicants for the position was mystifying to him.
Undeterred, Darcy briefly patted his chest as she walked past him to the windshield cleaning bin. “Get me Takis too, then.”
Teagan nodded slowly, unhappy that he couldn’t arrangesome big Nepalese spread like he might have done in New York but content at the thought of the rest of the evening with her. He had taken two steps away before Darcy looked up the windshield.
“Teagan,” she said with a small frown. “You should try asking for the things you want sometimes.”
“Of course,” he said. Lying again. Why wouldn’t he spare her the inconvenience of telling him no?
Thinking about Darcy had been a wonderful distraction from dwelling on his present in rehab with his baby sister and his past and future begging strangers to give him money, but he needed to remember to keep it at the thinking level. Too many men mistook the professional politeness of women in service jobs for interest, and even ifpoliterarely described Darcy, the last thing he wanted to do was make her job harder. But he could do what she asked him to do, at least, and that was a good line to toe.
He went into the convenience store, vowing to purchase every terrible nondairy snack food in the place. He loaded his arms with Oreos and potato chips of various textures. He hadn’t seen Darcy drink anything but water, but he picked up a couple of bottles of flavored iced tea in the event that she wanted something sugary to wash down the pounds of sodium they were about to consume. He was in line to check out when he happened to look out the window and notice that Darcy had left the truck with the gas nozzle still in the tank. He looked behind him to check that she hadn’t slipped into the store, then back out the window.
He was beginning to feel faintly alarmed when he spotted her all the way across the parking lot, in front of one of the bars. She was peering into the back window of a dusty red Subaru Outback. She straightened, fists curled at her sides.
Teagan had never seen a grown woman literally stomp her foot on the ground in anger before. Her angry cursing was audible even from inside the convenience mart. Darcy spun on her heel and marched into the bar behind her, fists curled at her sides.
“Excuse me,” Teagan told the startled clerk, dropping his armload of snacks on a case of bottled water and dashing for the exit.
twelve
