We drink. The bourbon is warm and smooth and entirely wrong for two people who've spent the day driving through the mountains with a dead man's evidence and a relationship they can't define.
"There's food in the pantry," I say. "Rice, canned beans, some seasoning."
"I can cook if you can find a pan."
"You cook?"
"I'm from Texas, Holloway. I could make a meal out of ingredients from a gas station and a hot plate." She opens the pantry and starts pulling cans. "Don't look so shocked. Journalism doesn't pay enough for restaurant habits."
"I'm not shocked. I'm skeptical. Last time somebody offered to cook for me on the road, I ended up with food poisoning from a gas station burrito and spent the next day wishing I'd died."
"That's because you ate a gas station burrito, which is a judgment call so poor it makes my fake press credentials look responsible."
I find a pan in the cabinet beside the stove. I hand it to her, and our fingers brush on the handle. The contact is brief and accidental and it jolts through me like I grabbed a fence charger. She pulls the pan away and turns to the stove, and I see the muscle in her jaw tighten.
We move around each other in the small kitchen, and it's nothing like careful. It's combative. We crowd each other at the counter and then flinch apart. She reaches past me for a spoon and her hip catches mine, and neither of us apologizes because apologizing would mean acknowledging what the contact did.
I reach over her for the salt and my chest brushes her back, and she goes rigid. I hold the position for one second longer than necessary because I am not a good man and the heat of her spine against my shirt is the most honest thing I've felt all day.
"You going to take the salt or just stand there generating body heat?" she says without turning around.
"Considering my options."
"Your options are salt or move. Pick one."
I set the salt on the counter beside her hand. My fingers graze her wrist, and neither of us pretends it was an accident.
She heats the beans and seasons the rice, and I lean against the counter and pretend I'm not cataloging every movement.
The way she tastes from the spoon and frowns. The way she adjusts the burner with the same precision she brings to a spreadsheet. The way she rolls her sleeves up and exposes the tendons in her forearms, and I think about my forearms andher forearms and the way they looked tangled together in motel sheets, and the thought is a sucker punch I walk straight into.
We eat standing at the counter because sitting across from each other at a kitchen table feels too much like something we used to do before the lie blew it apart.
"This is actually good," I say.
"Don't sound so surprised. Grant taught me." She takes another bite. "Well, Grant taught me what not to do. He was a terrible cook. We ate a lot of burned rice and undercooked chicken until I took over the kitchen out of self-preservation."
"Sounds about right. That man burns water."
"Burned," she says, and the word lands between us like a stone dropped into still water.
I set my plate down. She sets hers down.
"He'd have liked this, though," I say, because somebody has to say something before the silence swallows us whole. "You cooking in a stranger's kitchen in New Mexico. He'd have said something about you finally putting your stubbornness to practical use."
"He'd have stolen the last of the rice and blamed it on you."
"He'd have been right to. I'd have let him."
The kitchen is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the weight of a man who isn't here filling the space where the laughter should be.
I wash the plates because it gives my hands something to do that isn't grabbing her. She dries them because she needs the same excuse.
When she reaches past me to put a glass in the upper cabinet, her arm presses against my shoulder, and the contact sends heat racing down my side. She doesn't pull away immediately. She holds the position, the glass in the cabinet and her arm against my shoulder, and I can feel her pulse through the pointof contact, fast and hard. Then she steps back, and the loss of contact is worse than the contact was.
"Colt." She says my name, and the way it sounds in her mouth is stripped raw. No journalist. No cover. Just Kenna.
I turn around and lean against the counter and look at her.
