"Schedule's not the point."
She looked down. Looked up. The shy was back, but there was something behind it now that hadn't been there before. Something brave, maybe. Something that had decided to risk a small thing.
"If you mean it," she said, "come find me at work."
"I mean it."
"And if you tip well," she said, "next time, maybe I'll buy the donuts."
I stared at her.
She stood there with the strap of her guitar case across her chest and that uncertain courage on her face like she'd just stepped off a ledge to see if there was a floor.
It got me again. Right under the rib. Same place she'd gotten me at the table.
What else was under that shy exterior? What else,Jesus Christ?
She rocked up onto her toes.
She put her hand on my shoulder, light, and kissed me on the side of my jaw—a quick, warm press—and turned and pushed through the glass door of her building before I'd worked out how to breathe through it.
The door clicked shut.
I stood on the sidewalk like a man who'd been hit with something soft and heavy at the same time.
I had not seen that coming. I had not seen any of this coming.
I rubbed a hand over the side of my jaw where her mouth had been, slowly, like the gesture might confirm whether I'd hallucinated it. Then I dropped the hand.
I looked up at the third-floor window with the aggressively cheerful yellow curtains. I thought I saw the curtain move. I couldn't be sure.
I gave it a second.
Then, I turned my face down the sidewalk and tapped the address into my phone. The route ran east, away from her building, away from the donut shop, away from the morning I'd just had. It was running me back toward the hotel I'd left, toward the deputy director two doors down from my suite, toward the brother I hadn't been able to raise on a phone and whatever this Dominion Hall was, which I'd never heard of in my life.
I started walking.
Rebecca Lynn from Caton's Chapel was going to have to be a problem for later.
The other problem was now.
11
REBECCA
Istood in the stairwell for a full minute before I went up.
Not because my legs didn't work. They worked fine. I just needed the stairwell—the neutrality of it, the peeling paint and the smell of old building and the single bulb overhead that flickered when the heat kicked on—to be a place where nothing had happened, yet. Where I was still just a girl coming home from a gig with a guitar on her back and cash in her pocket and nothing to think about except the rent.
I needed sixty seconds of that before I went back to being a person who had been kissed in a donut shop by a man named Tommy.
I counted them out.
Then I went up.
Tasha was on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and a mug of something that smelled like chai, and she looked up when I came through the door.
"How'd it go?"
