When the last aftershock faded, I didn't pull out.
I stayed inside her, forearms braced on either side of her head, forehead resting against hers. The way a man rested against something that had become essential without asking permission first.
Her breathing slowed. Mine did, too.
I brushed my lips across her temple, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth.
She smiled—small, soft, real. And for the first time in years, the stubborn part of me that had been holding on for eight seconds at a time finally let go.
Because I'd found something worth the ride.
17
LOUISA
Three days.
That was how long it had been since the rodeo, since the storage room, since Izzy's private lounge with its chocolate-covered strawberries and its deliberately stocked bourbon bar. Three days since I'd stopped being someone who was only in this city for research.
I kept paying rent on my apartment. The courtyard gardenia was blooming without me. Several of my notebooks were there, my reference binders, the legal pad with its color-coded Post-its and its five pages of research. All of it waiting, patient and organized, for the version of me that had a schedule.
That version of me had temporarily taken leave.
Not entirely. Every morning I left the Palmetto Rose with a notebook and spent hours doing what I'd come to Charleston to do—walking warehouse districts, photographing potential sites, calling a commercial real estate broker named Dennis Rudd who had the cheerful persistence of a man who'd learned that the clients worth having required the most patience.
I met with a maritime attorney about bonded warehouse licensing. I called the TTB's industry specialist line and sat on hold for forty-seven minutes and then had the most useful regulatory conversation of my entire career with a woman who knew the federal standards of identity the way I knew fermentation chemistry—not academically but bodily, the knowledge in her hands.
I was working. The work was real. The work was mine.
And then, somewhere in the late afternoon when the Charleston light went gold and the salt air thickened and the city shifted into its evening version, my feet would find their way back to East Bay Street.
Grant was always there. Or would be, within the hour. He had his own days—I didn't ask the specifics and he didn't offer them, which suited us both. I understood that whatever he was navigating was serious and not entirely his to disclose, and he understood—or seemed to, in that quiet, perceptive way of his—that my business in Charleston was mine until I chose to share it.
We were two people carrying separate things, meeting in the middle to set them down for a while.
What we'd built in three days was something I didn't have a clean word for. Intimacy, maybe, but that word was too small.
We'd talked for hours—the kind of talking that happened when the lights were low and the bourbon was good. I'd told him about my brothers. About Forrest with his steady certainty and Wade with his phone permanently attached to his hand, about the conference room with its long oak table and the quarterly report with my work and their names. I'd told him about Daddy—not just the death but the man, the private respect he'd had for my work that he'd never made public, the way I held onto that the way you held onto something that was true even when it was also inadequate.
Grant had listened. Not with the performed attentiveness of someone waiting for their turn to speak but with the full, still quality of a man who understood that listening was its own kind of action.
In return he'd given me things carefully. Deliberately. The way you handed someone something fragile—with the awareness that what you were offering had weight.
He'd told me about Valentine, Texas. About the ranch that existed now only as a satellite image he'd stared at in a bunk. About his brothers scattered like seeds after something he described only as when things fell apart, the edges of that particular story still sealed, and I didn't push. About his mother in her facility, her mind going soft at the edges, and the way he'd saidI haven't beenwith the flat, undefended honesty of a man confessing something he'd already convicted himself for.
He’d heard Izzy call me Lou, but he didn’t leave it there.
The second night, stretched out beside me with the city breathing through the glass, he’d said it low?—
“Lou.”
Then, quieter?—
“Short for?”
“Louisa,” I’d told him. “Kentucky family. They must have run out of creativity by the third child.”
“I like it,” he’d said. “The whole thing. Louisa.”
