Page 7 of Deacon

“I followed you.”

“Yeah?”

Her lips curve, small and stubborn. “You act like I haven’t been doing that half my life.”

That lands somewhere tender and dangerous. Jackson turns toward the lake because looking away had always been the safer choice with her. Looking at Lila too long made him forget himself, and forgetting himself around Matty’s little sister was something he could never afford. Not when she was all scraped knees, library books, and sharp little comebacks. Not later, either, when she grew into the quiet kind of beautiful that made other men look twice and him force his eyes elsewhere.

The water folds over the shore in a black shimmer. Neither of them speak for a while, but they never needed to fill every silence. Lila made quiet feel full, easy in a way he never found anywhere else.

Then she says, “You’re going to leave.”

The words slide into the night so softly they almost disappear, but they strike hard enough that he turns. “What?”

Her eyes remain on the water as her arms fold tighter across her middle. The uneasiness in his chest sharpens because she shouldn’t look like that. Not tonight. Not here. She should be flushed from the ride, bright and shaken and eighteen, standing too close after kissing him back as though she had been holding it inside for years.

Instead, she looks like she already knows something he hasn’t told her.

“Maybe not tonight,” she murmurs. “But you are.”

He stares at her.

That isn’t right.

The thought comes slowly, dragging through his mind like something caught in mud, but once it takes hold, he can’t shake it. This isn’t how the night went. There had been nerves and laughter, the hard rush of finally touching what he had wanted for too long. This ache hadn’t been there. Neither had the sadness living in her voice.

He reaches for her without thinking, his fingers brushing her wrist. Her skin is warm and real beneath them. “Lila.”

She looks at him, and for one sick second, her face changes again. The girl from the lake gives way to a woman he doesn’t know before becoming the girl once more.

“You don’t stay,” she says quietly.

The lake vanishes.

The Morgan backyard returns in a flood of porch light and voices, the smell of grilled burgers hanging heavy in the air. Somebody laughs too loudly near the fence. A bottle cap strikes the deck, and Matty stands twenty feet away with a beer in his hand and the easy grin he always wore when surrounded by people who loved him.

Jackson leans against the pergola post with ketchup streaked down the front of his shirt and curses beneath his breath. The screen door opens behind him, and he doesn’t need to turn to know it is her. Her voice reaches him first, soft around the edges as she asks, “Hey, you trying to hide from the world again?”

He looks down at the stain. “Nah. Just outta sight, outta mind, is all.”

She laughs and asks whether he spilled something or stabbed his shirt, but the memory slips forward before it can settle. It carries him past the pergola and around the side of the house, into the driveway where she finds him with Matty’s shirt folded in her hands and a look on her face that changes the whole night.

For a stretched second, neither of them breathes right. Teasing her is easier than drowning in what her expression has already given away, so he lets a grin pull at his mouth. “See somethin’ you like, Princess?”

She nods once, small and immediate. Honest.

Color climbs her throat when she realizes what she has done, and his grin disappears before he can stop it. The whole night changes with it.

“You’ve always been what I like.” The shyness leaves her voice, giving way to truth. “What I wanted.”

Something low inside him breaks open.

He should tell her no. Send her back to the party, pull on Matty’s shirt, and laugh the moment away before it becomes something neither of them can survive. He knows that. He can feel the shape of the right decision waiting inside his chest.

Still, when he speaks, what comes out is, “Get on the bike.”

Her breath catches.

He swings onto the seat and looks back at her, telling her he is serious when she questions him. Lila lets the folded shirt fall to the driveway before climbing on behind him, and the second her hands slide around his waist, his entire body tightens with awareness.