“It does mean that, yeah.” I let that sit. Watch the color come up her neck in the last of the light, and feel ridiculously pleased about it. “Go on.”
She picks at the pretzel bag. Glances at me sideways, deciding. “I cry at the dog food commercials. The ones where the dog waits at the door.” She says it fast, like ripping off a bandage. “Every time. Sobbing. It's humiliating. Lily's banned me from talking about them at school.”
“That's not embarrassing. That's the correct response to those commercials.”
“It's ayogurt brand's faultthat I cried on a Tuesday.”
“They engineered it. You're a victim.” I hand her back one of the pretzels I stole, a peace offering, and she takes it, and for a second neither of us is performing a single thing. “See, now I have to tell you one back. That's the rule.”
“There's a rule now.”
“There's always been a rule. You just got here.” I think about it, actually think, which I don't usually do out loud. “I keep every birthday card anybody's ever given me. In a shoebox. I'm thirty-one years old and I have a shoebox of cards and I reread them when the shop's slow.” I shrug. “There. Now we're even, and you know something nobody else does, and I know about the dog commercials. That's basically a binding contract.”
She doesn't say anything. The valley's gone gold to rose to that deep blue it does, and she's looking at me like I've handed her something she doesn't know where to put, and the quiet stretches out warm between us, and I become very aware of how little space there is on a tailgate.
“Hudson,” she says. Just my name. Soft, like the front half of a sentence she's not sure she's allowed to finish.
I don't make her finish it. My voice has gone rough and useless anyway. She's close. She got close at some point and neither of us moved to fix it, and her eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, and the last of the light goes, and I stop being able to think about a single reasonable thing.
I don't decideto kiss her. That's the truth of it, and it's the part I'll turn over later, in the dark, for hours. There's no decision.
There's just her face tipped up and the blue light and the unfair scent of her and the fact that I've been wanting to do this since the first day she walked into my shop and made disaster sound like a punchline. And then I'm kissing her, and her hand is fisted in my shirt, and the bag of snacks goes off the tailgate into the dirt and neither of us cares.
A kiss that isn't for show is a different animal. There's no audience to play to, no Dottie, no town, no point to prove. There's just her mouth and the small sound she makes against mine, surprised and then not surprised at all, and the way she turns into it, into me, climbing half into my lap on a truck bed at an overlook like a teenager.
I have kissed a lot of people in a lot of ways. Not one of them has ever made me forget my own name like this.
She fits her hands into my hair and pulls, just slightly, and the sound I make is not dignified. Her scent floods the small space between us, brown sugar and that sharp warm edgeunderneath, and it goes straight to the base of my spine and lights everything up.
I get a hand at the small of her back and she arches into it, closer. I can feel the heat coming off her skin through her shirt. The kiss tips from soft into something with teeth in it, slow and deep and starving, her in my lap and my whole body voting hard for a great many things this tailgate is not the place for.
I keep it slow. I want to keep it slow. I've got her face in both my hands now and I'm trying to stay on the right side of a line I can feel us both leaning over, because whatever this is, it deserves better than a tailgate and the back half of a panic.
She breaks first, forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we ran here.
“Okay,” she says, a little dazed. “That was. Okay.”
“Yeah.” I can't stop my thumb moving along her cheek. My voice has gone to gravel. “That's about where I'm at too.”
“Hudson.” She pulls back enough to look at me, and her eyes are wrecked, and her scent has gone so warm and so sweet it's hard to think straight, and for one second I think she's going to say it, whatever it is, the thing rattling around behind her face all week. “I have to go home.”
It's not what she meant to say. I can see it isn't. But I'm not going to push a scared woman on a tailgate, not for anything.
So I just nod and find her shoe where it fell and drive her home the long way with the windows down. She's quiet the whole way, her hand on the console between us, not touching mine. An inch away. The longest inch in the county.
I walk her to her door. I don't kiss her again, though every part of me is voting for it.
“Goodnight, Porter.”
She looks at me for a long second on her doorstep, her keys in her hand, like there's a whole sentence sitting behind her teeth. “Hudson,” she starts.
“Don't.” I say it gentle, almost smiling, because if she finishes that sentence I'm not driving home tonight. “Whatever you're about to talk yourself out of. Go on inside and don't decide anything yet. Just let it be good for one night.”
She goes inside. I drive home the rest of the way with the radio off, doing math I don't want the answer to, because I came into this a man who was annoyed to catch feelings around day three, and somewhere up on that overlook I stopped being able to pretend it's anything as small as feelings.
I am so far past the leash I can't even see it anymore.
Chapter 14
