She steps onto her porch, pauses, and looks back at me.
I stop, too.
Why do I stop? Good question.
She tucks another strand of hair away. “I’m glad I sat with you today.”
My chest tightens with a sensation I haven’t felt in a long, long while.
“Me too,” I say.
The sky’s darker now, storm clouds thickening, rolling in slow and heavy from the west. The kind of storm that makes the air smell charged. Makes you feel it in your ribs.
Abilene looks up at it, listening to something only she can hear. Maybe she is. Bees probably sense storms better than the rest of us, and she spends so much time with them… maybe she feels the world differently.
“You should get inside,” I say gently. “Looks like it’s gonna let loose any minute.”
She nods. “Yeah.”
But she doesn’t go in. And I don’t leave.
We stand there in a strange, soft little bubble.
Me on the walkway. Her on the porch step.
Close enough that I can see the freckles on her nose.
Close enough that I realize something:
I want to kiss her.
Badly. Embarrassingly badly.
But I don’t move.
Because wanting something and taking it are two different things. And I’ve lived long enough, been left hard enough, to know the price of wanting the wrong way.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks softly.
Damn. She sees too much.
I force a grin because that’s what I do. “Honestly? I’m thinking about how I should probably wrangle the twins before they start climbing the barn roof again.”
Her lips twitch. “Again?”
“Not my proudest parenting moment.”
She steps down one stair. Just one. Just enough to make those hazel-green eyes level with mine.
“They’re good kids,” she says.
“They’re wild.”
“They’re sweet.”
“They lie straight to my face.”
She laughs. “They do not.”
