It feels like she walked into the room.
The laugh tips over into something wet somewhere in the middle, and I let it go there.
I let my eyes spill right at the table.
Finn goes quiet and reaches across and sets his hand on the cloth close to mine, not on it, close to it, so I can cross the last inch or not.
I cross it.
I put my hand over his, and he turns his over underneath and folds it around mine and holds on, and neither of us says a word.
The candle burns down. My mother's voice sinks back to wherever she lives in me now, and for the first time it doesn't take a strip of me with it on the way down.
"I loved that stupid dog," I say.
"I know you did."
"I loved your mom's rosebushes too. I never told her that."
"She knew." His thumb moves slowly over my knuckles. "She talked about you, Mila. All those years. She never once stopped talking about you."
And there it is—the thing I've spent all night not looking at, walking straight up the middle of me while I sit here holding his hand across a white tablecloth.
I never stopped either.
I hated him for years in the dark.
I built whole nights out of hating him, laid brick after brick of it.
And underneath every course of that wall, the whole time, folded up small and hidden where they could never get their hands on it, was this—a boy across the street, a muddy dog, a woman hollering my whole name out a screen door—and the plain fact that I've loved Finn Kincaid since before I had a word for it, and I never stopped, not through any of it, not one single day.
That's what scares me.
Not the men who'll come through the door.
Not the run.This.
His hand folded under mine, the candle, the way my body knew him before I gave it leave to—leaned itself toward him across a table while I wasn't looking—because it's always known him and it always will, and I don't get a vote in it.
I never got a vote in it, and being this close is prying the hinges off the one door I bolted shut to stay alive down there.
"Finn."
"Yeah?"
"Take me home." My voice won't hold level. "With the windows down. I want the cold, and I don't want to talk for a while."
"Well, no windows. The bike's here." He says it carefully, like he's admitting something. "I had Compass run it down before dinner and take the truck back. Figured—" He stops. "Figured you might want it."
He looks at me and reads the rest, the way he's read me since the gate.
"Okay," he says, and lifts a hand for the check.
The night's cold on the back of the bike, and I don't care about the cold.
He gave me his jacket without asking, and I took it without arguing.
It swallows me whole and smells like him, and I've got my arms wrapped around his middle and my cheek against his back between his shoulder blades.
