Page 56 of Her Rival

We ate. We finished. He paid. I didn't see the bill, but I saw him slide a black card across the table, and I didn't ask about that either.

He drove me back up into the hills.

I didn't ask where we were going.

I knew where we were going.

He parked in his driveway and turned off the engine, and we sat in the car a moment with the warm desert dark all around us and the lights of his house in the gravel turnaround and the city below in its grid of yellow squares. He didn't say anything, and neither did I, and the air in the cabin of the Pontiac thickened in a way I'd felt before exactly once in my life. On his front step at ten p.m. on a Thursday a week ago. A half-of-half-a-heartbeat kiss.

"Hartley."

"Yes."

"You can stay or you can not stay. I'd like you to stay. The guest room is open. The other room is also open. Both choices are real. I'm telling you both choices are real before either of us gets out of this car, because once we get out of this car the geography gets harder."

I closed my eyes.

"I want to stay," I said.

"Okay."

"Not the guest room."

"Okay."

"Jett."

"Yeah."

"I haven't done this in three years."

"Two for me."

"Yeah."

"Okay."

"Hartley."

"Yes."

"We're going to do this slowly. With the lights on if you want them on. Off if you want them off. With you stopping any time you want to stop, and stopping isn't something you have to explain, and stopping doesn't change anything that's happened or is going to happen. I need you to know that before we walk inside."

I opened my eyes.

He was looking at me in the dark of the car. His face in the dashboard light. The same controlled attention I'd watched him drive with, now turned on me.

"Okay," I said.

"Lights on or off."

"Off."

"Off it is."

I let him come around the car. Let him open my door. Let him take my hand. We walked up the path. He unlocked the front door and held it for me. I went inside.

He locked it behind us.