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“Yes.”
“Good.” He straightened up. “We’ll leave it. Chase’ll bring the trailer in the morning. Get your things.”
She got her things. The bag, the prescription, the phone. Her hands were all right by the time she’d gotten them. She got down out of the truck onto the gravel and he was there, a foot off, not touching, and he walked her back through the headlights to his own truck with his hands in his pockets, on her left, the whole way, and opened her door and shut it after her and went around.
He didn’t say anything for a mile. Then he asked, “You want the radio?”
“No.”
“All right.”
They drove.
The house was dark when they came up the drive. One light, in the office, that went off as the truck pulled in, which was Lara seeing the headlights and going to bed, because Lara had that much sense.
He turned the engine off. Neither of them got out.
The porch light was off. The yard was dark and the stars were still up and the cab was ticking as it cooled, and she sat there with her hands in her lap and the white bag on her knees and found that she was shaking. Now. Not on the road, not with the tire iron, not walking through the headlights. Now, in his father’s yard, with the danger an hour behind her and nothing in the world wrong, her hands wouldn’t hold still.
“I’m fine,” she said, before he’d said anything.
“I know.”
“I’m just —”
“I know.” He was looking at the windshield. “It comes after. It always comes after. You do what you’ve got to do and you’re fine for it and then you sit down somewhere safe and your hands go. It’s not you. It’s how it works.”
She looked at him.
“I’ve had it happen,” he said, and left it there.
She got out. She had to; she couldn’t sit in that cab another minute with her hands going and him not looking at them on purpose. She went up the porch steps and stopped at the top, by the rail, in the dark, and put the bag down on the rail and both her hands on it and held on.
He came up behind her. Not close. She heard the boards.
“Go in,” he said. “I’ll lock up.”
“In a minute.”
“Sunny.”
“In a minute, Brody.” She turned around. He was two feet off, at the top of the steps, with his hat in his hand, because he’d taken it off coming up, and the light from the stars was enough to see his face by and not enough to read it. “You came around the front of the truck.”
“What?”
“With your hands out. Into the light. So I could see you.” Her voice wasn’t fine now. She heard it go and let it. “You didn’t have to do that. You could’ve just walked up and said my name. You came around into the light with your hands out like I was a horse, and you didn’t ask me why.”
“No.”
“Why not.”
“Because you’d have lied,” he said, “and I’d rather not know than have you lie to me.”
She didn’t decide. She’d like that understood, later, when she went back over it, which she would, for weeks. She didn’t decide, and she’d swear he didn’t either. There was two feet of porch between them and then there wasn’t, and she had a fistful of his shirt and he had a hand in her hair and her mouth was on his, or his on hers, and it didn’t matter, because it was one thing, and it was the best thing that had happened to her in her life.
He’d been waiting a month and he kissed her that way. His mouth was hot and slow and then not slow, and his hand went from her hair to the back of her neck and held her there, and she opened for him, and he made a sound low in his throat that went straight through her, and she pulled him in by the shirt until there was nothing between them but the cotton and her back was against the porch post and his whole body was against hers and she could feel all of it, all of him, and she wanted every inch, right there, on his father’s porch, in the dark.
She got her hands under his shirt. His skin was hot. He got his hand flat on the small of her back, low, where she’d put it herself three weeks ago, and pulled, and she went up on her toes into him and bit his lip, and he laughed against her mouth, and that was worse than the kiss, and she kissed him again to make him stop.
