Page 42 of Forbidden Rancher's Return
"No." She looks at me. Her eyes are dry. Bright but dry. She is not going to cry in front of me. Not about this. She has already spent whatever tears she had for my leaving and she is not going to manufacture new ones for my benefit. "But it's a start."
I step closer. Not to kiss her. Not to hold her. Just to stand near enough that she can feel I'm not retreating from what she just gave me.
"You said prove it," I say. "Tell me what that looks like."
She considers this. The way she considers everything. Carefully, thoroughly, from every angle before she commits.
"It looks like mornings," she says. "It looks like being here when the work is boring and the weather is bad and the town is talking and nothing is romantic about any of it.
It looks like January when the pipes freeze and February when the mud is so deep the trucks can't make it up the road and March when the calving starts and nobody sleeps for three weeks." She pauses. "It looks like staying through the parts that don't make a good story."
"I can do that."
"You say that now. Standing in a warm kitchen after your best friend just walked out and your ex-girlfriend just told you her worst year."
"You're not my ex-girlfriend."
Her eyebrow lifts. "What am I then?"
The question fills the room. The lantern throws our shadows large against the wall. Two figures standing close enough to touch without touching. The whole history of us pressed into the space between her folded arms and my hands at my sides.
"You're the reason I came back," I say. "You're the reason I couldn't stay gone. You're the only person on this mountain orany other mountain who has ever made me feel like the ground I'm standing on is where I'm supposed to be."
Her arms unfold slowly. Not a surrender. A decision.
"Then be here tomorrow," she says. "And the day after that. And the day after that. And eventually I'll stop counting the days and start believing them."
"How long."
"As long as it takes."
"I've got time."
Her mouth curves. Just slightly. The smallest softening of the expression she's been holding like a shield all evening.
"Yes," she says. "You do."
Beck's truck disappears down the road and the quiet that follows has a different weight to it. Not the silence between Calla and me. That one I know. This is the silence between me and the man I used to call my best friend.
He's right about all of it.
Eight years. No call. No letter. I told myself it was respect for her father's wishes. It was cowardice wearing a better man's clothes. And Beck carried the weight of both of us the whole time.
My thumb traces her cheekbone. Slow.
"I'm not leaving again," I say.
"You'd better not."
"That a threat."
Her eyes soften. Just barely. Just enough.
"Yes," she says.
I kiss her.
Slow. The kind of kiss that isn't asking for anything except the right to be here. In this kitchen. In this house. On this land that always felt more like home than anywhere else.
