Page 26

I'm not worried he'll take that anger out on me, but he looks like he wants to pick up the van and throw it.

“Okay,” he says, and his voice has gone rough. “Okay.”

He turns back to me.

“You’re not sleeping here tonight.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. You’re not sleeping in this lot.”

“It’s my car.”

“It’s my lot.”

“It’s our lot,” I say. “Apparently I own some of it now.”

The corner of his mouth moves, and then it doesn’t. “Then as one of the owners, I’m telling you it isn’t a place to sleep.”

“I have a plan. I get paid Friday. By next week, I’ll have a deposit on a place that takes dogs. It’s four nights. I can do four nights.”

“I believe you.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“You don’t have to do four nights.” He spreads his hand on the roof of the car. “I have a house with four bedrooms, and I sleep in one of them. Nobody’s charging you rent. Nobody’s keeping a tab.”

“I don’t want charity.”

“Call it whatever you want, Tara. The bed’s empty, and you need somewhere to sleep.” “I met you yesterday.”

“I know.”

He’s annoyingly agreeable. I push past it. “The point is, I’m not going home at four in the morning with a man I met yesterday because he’s...”

I stop. His eyebrows go up.

“Because I’m what?”

“Because you have a nice house,” I say, which is not what I was going to say, and his face tells me he knows it.

We both start talking at once. He’s saying that nobody expects anything from me, and I’m saying that isn’t the point, and then we both stop, and the rain fills the gap.

He looks down at his hand on the roof. When he speaks again, it’s lower.

“Do you know what I did tonight?” he asks. “At three o’clock, I stood on the front step and asked you where you were staying. You told me a hotel downtown, and I let you walk off around the corner, and I thought, good. She’s somewhere warm.” The lines along his jaw flare. “I went back inside and spent an hour with William taking that freezer door apart, and the whole time, I thought you were in a bed at The Nines.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I should have walked you anyway.”

“I wouldn’t have let you.”

“I know. That isn’t what I’m angry about.”

“Then what are you angry about?”

He looks at me, and his eyes are very dark. “That this was the best option you had. And that I didn’t see it.”