Page 9

"And your abuela?"

"Made tamales. Told stories. Knew every neighbor's birthday. She was just... present. Fully in whatever room she was standing in." I look at the fire. "I wanted to be like her. Ended up like my dad instead."

Silence. Comfortable, warm, shaped by the fire.

"I broke up with someone nine months ago," she says. Quiet. The admission sounds like something she's been holding. "High school sweetheart. Seven years. He asked me if I even wanted to be at dinner with him, and I couldn't lie."

"Where did you want to be?"

"At work." She half laughs, but there's no humor in it. "Always at work. Always chasing the next contract, the next event, the next thing that proves I'm worth the space I take up. And he was sitting across the table being patient and kind, and all I could think about was a seating chart."

"That doesn't make you a bad person."

"It makes me a specific kind of person." She pulls the sweater tighter. "My mom thinks I'm going to wake up at forty with a perfect career and nobody to come home to. She says it every time I call. 'Sloane Marie, success is not a man. It does not hold you when you cry.'"

"She sounds like my abuela."

"She sounds like every Black mother who's watched her daughter choose a laptop over a husband." That laugh again, warmer this time. Realer. "She's not wrong. That's the annoying part."

"She's wrong about one thing."

Sloane looks at me.

"You've got plenty of time." My voice is lower than I mean it to be. "You're twenty four. The career isn't going to swallow you if you let yourself breathe."

"You don't know that."

"I watched you kick off your heels, walk barefoot across wet grass to fix a crooked sign, step back into them, and never miss a word of the phone call you were on. You don't lose things."

Something shifts between us. A tightening. The fire throws shadows across her face, and her lips part just slightly. Neither of us moves for three full breaths.

Then she stands.

"Walk me to the lodge?" Casual. Almost offhand. Except her voice catches on the last syllable.

I stand. We walk.

The path from the bonfire circle to the lodge cuts through a section of dense pine. String lights end about twenty feet in, and then it's just the moon, full and low, turning the trail silver. Our shoulders brush. Once. Twice. By the third time, it's obvious that neither of us is compensating for it.

She stops walking at the bend where the path splits, one fork toward the lodge entrance and one toward the private cabins behind the property. The moonlight catches her cheekbones, the loose strands of hair around her face.

"Dante."

My name in her mouth. I've heard people say my name a thousand times. It's never sounded like an invitation before.

"We work together." My voice comes out rough. Strained. "For the next two days, you're my boss."

"I know."

"If this goes sideways, your event takes the hit. Not mine."

"I’m aware of that as well."

"So we should go to our separate rooms and pretend this isn't happening."

She takes a step closer. Close enough that I can see her pulse jumping at the base of her throat. "Is that what you want?"

No. What I want is to put my mouth on that pulse point and feel it hammer against my tongue. What I want is to find out if the rest of her skin is as warm as her shoulder was against my arm. What I want is to hear what sound she makes when somebody touches her who isn't being patient and kind across a dinner table.