"Don't," Njal says from the doorway.
I freeze.
He's standing there with two mugs of coffee, dressed already, and Hoagie is sitting at his feet looking enormously pleased with himself, tags jingling as his tail sweeps the floor.
"You—" I pull the blanket up. "Is that my dog?"
"Got up in the night to use the bathroom and he was crying at your back door through the window." He crosses the room andhands me a mug like it's the most ordinary thing in the world, like I'm not sitting in his sheets with my hair a disaster and my need to flee written all over my face. "Walked over and got him. Figured you'd worry."
Hoagie launches himself onto the bed, all seventy pounds, and flops across my legs.
"You went out in the middle of the night," I say, "to get my dog."
"He's good company." Njal sits on the edge of the mattress, careful not to crowd me. "You were doing it again. Just now."
"Doing what?"
"Getting ready to run before I woke up. So it wouldn't count."
My face goes hotter because that's exactly the word for it, the exact thing I was doing, and I hate that he can see it.
"I wasn't?—"
"Drink your coffee, Sophie." There's no edge to it. He says it the way he says everything, low and certain and without an ounce of hurry. "You don't have to run. Nothing happened here you have to be sorry for in the morning. Same as I told you last night." He reaches over and scratches Hoagie behind the ear. "It still counts. And the sky's still up there."
I drink my coffee.
The shame I braced for—the old reliable shame, the kind I was raised on, the kind that's been waiting at the bottom of every good thing my whole life—I keep waiting for it to smack me across the face.
It doesn't come.
I sit in a strange bed with a man I've known a couple of weeks, my idiot dog across my legs, coffee he made me, and the sky is still up there.
And I don't feel ruined.
I feel like somebody pulled a stone off my chest I'd been carrying so long I'd stopped feeling the heaviness of it.
"You start at Meghan's at nine," he says. "And Dag and Esperanza are coming by to meet you."
I set the mug down. "Today?"
"Today." He stands, holds out a hand to pull me up. "Get dressed. I'll feed your dog."
* * *
The drive into the outskirts of Tallahassee is nearly an hour of me talking myself out of turning around.
By the time I cross the county line, my hands are damp on the wheel, and I have to remind myself, out loud, in the cab of my own truck like a crazy person, that I’m doing manual labor for strangers I've never met, in a world my mother spent twenty-six years teaching me to be afraid of.
Bikers. A motorcycle club. The kind of people the news shows in mugshots, and the kind of people Mama would cross a parking lot to avoid.
I'm going to walk in there in my oldest jeans, broke, disgraced, and on unpaid leave for a thing I didn't do, and ask them to let me paint their walls for money.
The deacon's daughter, scrubbing floors for outlaws.
I almost laugh.
It comes out closer to a sob.
