I suspected the latter. I was not unhappy about the suspicion.
Figure out the bread man situation, I had written.
Situation, I thought. That was one word for it.
"I'm going to get another drink," I said.
Izzy nodded.
The concourse was between events—the in-between energy of a live show at rest, the crowd spilling into the aisles and the lines at the concession stands, the noise level dropping from communal roar to the ambient din of individual conversations.
I found the bar without trying. It was the most visible thing on the level, lit and busy, the line moving with organized chaos.
I got in line. Looked at my phone. Looked at the arena monitors showing replays of the last ride. Looked at the crowd.
And then I didn't look anywhere because I didn't have to.
I felt him before I saw him. There was a change in the air to my left, a shift in the pressure of the crowd, and I knew without turning that he was there.
I turned.
He was four feet away, facing the bar, hands in his front pockets. The black Western shirt. The buckle. The jaw that in this light, under the harsh fluorescence of the concourse, was somehow even more unreasonably architectural than it had been this morning.
He hadn't seen me yet.
I had approximately three seconds to make a decision, and I made it the way I made every decision I was proud of—without thinking, on instinct, from the part of me that had driven southeast without a plan and writtenstart hereat the top of a fresh page.
"You're bad at staying gone," I said.
He went still.
Then he turned. Slowly. The way a man turned when he already knew what he was going to find and was buying himself a second to prepare for it.
His eyes found mine. That stillness again—the thing that happened in them when he looked at me, the quality of complete arrested attention that he clearly didn't want to be giving and was giving, anyway.
"You're bad at staying gone," I said again, because I'd liked it the first time and because repetition in chemistry indicated a reliable reaction.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The shape of one.
"I needed a drink," he said. His voice was low, even. The voice of a man who'd learned to keep himself out of it.
"At the bar I happen to be at."
"Apparently."
A beat. The crowd moved around us, indifferent, and the monitors showed a replay of a horse spinning in the dirt, and the bar line moved forward and neither of us moved with it.
"You have my bread," he said.
"You gave it to me."
"I know." He said it like he was still working out why.
I looked at him—the full, direct, undeflected look I'd learned to use in rooms where men were hoping I'd look somewhere else. The look that saidI see you exactly as clearly as you're hoping I don't.
He didn't look away.
The bar line moved again. This time we both moved with it, which put us side by side. Close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him, something my nervous system catalogued immediately and filed in a place I wasn't going to examine right now.
