"You walked into a room where you were scared," he said. "You played, anyway. Then, something went wrong and you held your face together and didn't flinch. Then, you played something real." He paused. "I wanted to know who does that."
I didn't have an answer for that. I didn't think he expected one.
We sat there a moment. The donut shop did its warm, quiet thing around us. A couple came in and stood at the case deliberating, and the woman behind the counter gave them the same cheerful patience she'd given us.
He stood up.
I thought he was leaving. I started to reach for my guitar case, already assembling the graceful exit, already composing myself for the walk home alone.
Then he came around the table.
He stopped beside my chair. I tipped my head back to look up at him, which brought him into close proximity in a way that made my breathing adjust without my permission.
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from my face. His fingers barely grazed my cheekbone. The touch lasted less than two seconds.
"Can I?" he said, low.
I didn't ask what. I just—nodded.
He bent down and kissed me.
It was soft. Unhurried. The kind of kiss that didn't ask for anything except to be what it was—a man who'd made a decision and was seeing it through, without apology.
His hand came to the side of my face, careful, and I felt the warmth of his palm against my jaw and the solid, certainpresence of him and everything in my chest that had been braced and managed and held-carefully-together since I'd walked out of Caton's Chapel loosened by one degree.
He pulled back.
I opened my eyes.
He was watching me with that expression—the focused, serious one he'd worn at the end of my set, before the smile came back.
"I'm Tommy," he said.
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out surprised and real.
"Rebecca," I said. "Which you already knew."
"Rebecca Lynn," he said. "Named after a legend." His thumb traced the edge of my jaw once, lightly, and then his hand dropped. "Come on. I'll walk you home."
I picked up my guitar case. My heart was doing something it hadn't done in a long time, maybe ever—not the nervous flutter of being on stage, not the anxious thrum of not enough money, but something quieter and more frightening than either of those.
Something that felt a lot like wanting.
I didn't know what to do with Tommy Dane.
I didn't know yet that I was going to have to figure it out.
10
TOMMY
Tommy Dane did not get rattled.
That was a documented thing. Other men had said it about me in a number of countries, sometimes admiringly, sometimes not. I could walk into a room with the wiring still smoking and ask a joke about it before I asked who'd lit the match. I could take a phone call from a colonel and a phone call from a smuggler at the same time and lie expertly to both of them. I was not the man you put in the back of an SUV when you needed somebody who'd shake.
I was, apparently, the man who got rattled by a girl with a guitar case slung across her back.
We were walking up King Street and she was telling me something about her roommate.
