Page 3

Brody came in at eleven-thirty for water, drank it, and stayed another twenty minutes.

He leaned in the doorway and narrated the county at her while she worked. Which ranch was which, a diner he talked about the way other men talk about church, the swimming hole again, and she let it run and kept counting cans, and she was enjoying it, which she’d rather not have been. She’d have enjoyed it from anybody. She’d just have preferred it from somebody she wasn’t going to have to look at across a table for three months.

Charm. She knew it when she heard it. She’d watched it work in a hundred hospitality tents and she’d made her living putting it in front of a camera, and it had never once made her feel a thing except tired. She was a little surprised, then, at how much she wanted to hit him with a can of beans. Not for the charm. For how good it was.

“You’re not going to give me one thing to work with,” he said, and he was enjoying it.

“You’re doing fine without.”

“See, most people, you tell them about the swimming hole, they at least ask where it is.”

“Most people didn’t drive twelve hundred miles to get away from people.”

She heard it after she’d said it, and so did he. She waited for him to ask, and he didn’t. He looked at her a second longer than he needed to and let it go, which she wouldn’t have bet on.

“All I’m saying is the swimming hole’s not on any map. You’d need somebody to show you.”

“Then when I need it I’ll come find you. You won’t be hard to hear.”

He laughed, a short real one this time, nothing practiced about it, and she felt her own mouth go before she could stop it and turned to the pantry so he wouldn’t see. Six weeks of nothing getting through, and what got through was a cowboy laughing at himself in her kitchen doorway. She stood there facing the canned tomatoes, annoyed with him, and then annoyed with herself, and then just smiling, because there was nobody to see it but the tomatoes.

“Go put the old man’s tractor back together,” she said.

“It’s a good tractor.”

“Then go admire it.”

He went.

He collided with her at two.

He’d come in to fill a jug and stayed, on the logic that the ice maker was slow, and drifted down the counter to where her afternoon was laid out: the laptop, the chart, the week’s meals in her handwriting on a notepad, and the coffee she’d been rationing all day. He leaned in over her shoulder to read the notepad and reached past her for the pot at the same time, already talking, and the sleeve of him went across her page and the pot came up over her keyboard, and the whole afternoon tilted.

Sunny put the pen down, took his wrist in two fingers and a thumb, lifted the pot out of that hand with her other one and set it back on the burner, and moved him. One full step to the left, by the wrist, to the stretch of counter that had nothing on it, and set his hand down flat on it, and went back to Thursday.

It took maybe four seconds, all told.

“— and the thing about Pearl’s on a Saturday is you want to be —”

He stopped. Mid-sentence, for the first time all day, and the kitchen went quiet enough to hear the ice maker.

Four seconds was long enough to learn things she hadn’t asked to learn. His wrist was hot from the sun and thicker than her fingers could get around, and the skin on the inside of it was soft, and under her two fingers his pulse had jumped, hard, and then gone fast and stayed fast. He smelled of engine and sweat and the outdoors, and he’d been close enough behind her that she’d felt the heat of him down her whole back before she’d ever touched him, and her body had answered that before her brain had a say. Low in her stomach. Lower. She’d let go of him a half beat later than the move needed and she knew it and so did he.

She was furious about it. Not at him. At herself, for six weeks of flinching every time a man got within an arm’s length of her, and then this one leaned over her shoulder and everything she’d spent six weeks building went straight to hell in four seconds over a coffee pot.

“You want to be there before eleven,” he finished, from his new spot, in a voice about a third quieter than before.

“Got it,” she said, writing Friday, and her handwriting was steady, which she was proud of.

He picked up his jug. He put it down again. He looked at the back of her head a while, and she felt that too, all the way down her spine, and kept writing.

“You did that like you’ve done it before.”

“I’ve moved a lot of men off a lot of things.”

“That’s a hell of a sentence to leave standing.”

“It’s standing,” she said. “Go on.”