Page 145 of Roadrunner

Arthur was beside Riley.

They were talking to Lackey about something I couldn’t hear. Arthur said something and Lackey laughed and Riley glanced at Arthur with that look he had.

The look that was private and complete and needed no witnesses.

I watched it anyway.

Riley felt me watching.

He looked across the kitchen at me.

I raised a bottle of root beer.

He produced one that I didn’t know he was holding and raised it in a mock toast.

Across the noise and the warmth of that kitchen. Across every year and every mile and every version of us that had existed between being stranded in the desert and the room we were standing in.

Root beer.

The most us thing in the world.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Alex

Now

We didn’t leave until almost midnight.

Della had tried twice to shoo the last of the club out of her kitchen and failed twice, and it was Price, of all people, who finally stood up and announced that a married man had better things to do than listen to Lackey’s opinions on carburetors, which got Riley up out of his chair faster than anything else could have.

We drove home with the windows down.

Arthur was staying at Della’s. A fact negotiated weeks earlier, with a thoroughness on his part that suggested he’d understood exactly what he was arranging for us and had decided, generously, not to mention it. Martina had gone ahead of us in her own car, humming something under her breath as she left, which from Martina was as good as a blessing shouted from a rooftop.

The house was dark and quiet when we got there. Ours, now, in every sense that mattered, though it had been ours in the ways that counted for months before a piece of paper caught up to the fact.

Riley didn’t turn on the hallway light.

He turned me instead. Gently, by the hand he was still holding from the drive, and kissed me the way he’d kissed me at the end of the aisle.

Unhurried, like a man who had waited years and intended to take exactly as long as he wanted now that the waiting had a ring on it.

“Mrs. Panzolini,” he said against my mouth.

“Don’t,” I said, laughing. “I haven’t decided yet if I’m keeping my own name.”

“Take your time,” he said. “I like the sound of it either way.”

He walked me backward down the hall without breaking the kiss, unhooking one boot against the door frame and then the other, and I worked the buttons of his shirt loose one at a time because my hands, for once, weren’t in any hurry either. There was no church parking lot urgency to it, no fumbling with foil in the dark. Just his mouth at my jaw, my collarbone, the hollow of my neck, and the unhurried thoroughness of a man who had decided, a long time ago in a dust cloud on a desert highway, that I was worth doing slowly.

“I used to think about this,” he said, low, his forehead against mine in the dark of our bedroom. “Not the wedding. This part. You, in this house, not going anywhere in the morning.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Not this time.”

“I know,” he said. “I still like hearing it.”

He undid the zipper of my dress with a patience that undid something in me far more effectively than speed ever could have, and when the dress was gone he stood back for a moment just to look at me, the way he used to look at the mountains at dusk, like something he still hadn’t gotten tired of and didn’t expect to.