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He came across the floor and stopped in front of her and held out his hand, palm up, and didn’t say anything, and didn’t smile, and stood there.

She looked at the hand. She’d said no twice and she’d meant it twice and Pearl was at the pie table and half the county was on the floor and the other half was watching it, and she’d had one beer, and it wasn’t the beer.

She put her hand in his.

He didn’t say anything. He took her onto the floor and turned her once and stopped, and she stood there with her hand in his and his other hand nowhere, hanging at his side, because he’d said he wouldn’t, and she saw him not do it, and something in her gave way.

She took his hand off his side and put it on her back herself, low, where it had been.

He breathed in. She heard it. Then his hand spread, slow, flat, warm through the shirt, and pulled her in the last six inches, and she went, and her forehead was at his jaw and her hand was on his shoulder and his heart was going under her palm as fast as hers, and they danced.

Neither of them said one word. Not through the whole song. A man who talked for a living, with his mouth shut and his jaw against her hair, and she could feel him not saying it for three minutes, and it was worse than anything he could have said.

Don’t, she thought. Don’t say anything. If you say one word I’ll walk off this floor, and if you don’t I’m going to stand here and let you hold me, and I don’t know which is worse, so don’t.

He didn’t. His hand didn’t move on her back. It didn’t need to. She could feel every one of his fingers through the cotton, and she was pressed to him from the chest down and could feel what he wanted, plain, and neither of them did one thing about it, on a concrete floor, in front of the county. She was going to have a bruise on her palm from her own nails. She’d have gone another song.

The song ended. He let go of her back first. Then her hand.

“Thank you,” he said. Quiet.

She nodded. She couldn’t have said anything if the pavilion had been on fire.

He went. She stood on the floor a second with the band packing up and the lights coming on and Pearl at the pie table not even pretending anymore. Then she went and found Dean, who looked at her once and said nothing, and drove her home.

She lay in bed at one in the morning with the fan going and her hand flat on her own stomach and her back still warm where his hand had been, and she made herself look at it, because she’d promised.

She’d danced with exactly one man since April. One. Out of a pavilion of three hundred with a deputy in it who’d have carried her around the floor on his back if she’d asked, and she’d picked the one she couldn’t stand, and put his hand on her body herself, in front of Pearl and the Baptist choir and half the county, and she was going to have to think about what that meant.

She turned the fan up and did not.

CHAPTER SIX

Remi lasted four minutes.

“Okay,” she said, and put her fork down. “What is this?”

“What’s what?” Chase said.

“This.” She pointed the fork at the coffee pot, which was in the middle of the table, which was where Brody had put it down after not handing it to Sunny, who had then picked it up without looking at him and filled Levi’s milk glass with coffee. “That. Levi, don’t drink that. Somebody tell me what happened at that dance, because I was at the beer trough losing a contest I should’ve won and I missed it, and these two have been passing that pot like it’s got a bomb in it.”

“Nothing happened,” Brody said.

“Nothing happened,” said Sunny, at the same time, to the stove, and Remi looked from one of them to the other and said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and picked her fork back up.

Nothing had happened. He’d danced with her. Three minutes, not a word. She’d taken his hand off his own side, where he’d been keeping it because he’d told her he would, and put it on the small of her back herself, in front of three hundred people. He’d stood on that floor with his palm on her spine and his mouth shut for the first time in his life. Then he’d driven home behind Dean’s taillights with the feel of her still in his right hand, slept about three hours, and come down at six to find she wasn’t going to look at him. Which was fair. He couldn’t look at her either. If he did, his face was going to do something in front of his father.

“Levi,” John said. “Hyenas.”

“They don’t laugh.” Levi had a fresh fact and had been waiting. “It’s not laughing. It’s the noise they make when they’re scared.”

“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” Giana said.

“It’s not sad. It’s science.”

“It’s both,” said Sunny, and set a plate of biscuits down in front of the boy, and her arm went past Brody’s shoulder to do it, six inches off, and didn’t touch him, and he felt it not touch him all the way down his back.

Christ. It was going to be a long week.