Page 4 of Desert Rain
Everett looked away, then looked back. Not openly enough to be brave. Just enough to remind me he still had a pulse and a conscience that probably kept irregular hours.
Good.
Let him sit in it.
Lena bumped my shoulder. “You wanna leave?”
I watched Everett’s reflection in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. “No.”
Her eyebrows rose. “No?”
“Nope.”
The blonde laughed at something he said and smoothed her fingers down his shirtfront like she was petting a prize animal. Maybe she belonged there. Maybe she always had. Maybe I’d been nothing more than an ego snack, a convenient little detour for a man who liked being admired by women too young to recognize rot under polish.
Around us, men started doing that thing men did in bars when a woman stood still too long. A guy in flannel with nicotine fingers smiled from beside the dartboard. A construction type with a neck like a fire hydrant kept glancing over the rim of his whiskey. One kid—because he was absolutely a kid, barely old enough to order legally—kept fixing his hair every time I turned my head. Another guy had potential until he grinned and revealed teeth that looked like they’d fought coffee for decades and lost every round.
Lena watched me catalog them. “You’re brutal.”
“I have standards.”
“You’re in a dive bar.”
“I didn’t say I had realistic standards.”
She laughed into her drink. “Maybe that’s your problem.”
Maybe it was. Or maybe once you’d mistaken combustion for love, everything afterward felt like damp cardboard. Even if the combustion had been manufactured. Even if it had burned you instead of warmed you.
Lena leaned closer. “Seriously. We can go. I’ll key his car on the way out if that helps.”
“That’s sweet.”
“I’m a nurturer.”
I looked back at Everett. He was watching again, quietly, cowardly, like guilt had made him curious. Like my pain was an experiment he wanted to observe without touching. Something inside me straightened. Not healed. Not fine. Just unwilling.
“No,” I said.
Lena blinked. “No what?”
I set my beer down and slid off the barstool. “Let’s dance.”
Her grin broke wide. “There she is.”
The dance floor was barely a dance floor—just a sticky square of wood near the jukebox and a speaker that crackled every time the bass hit. Some old rock song spilled out, raw guitars and a drumbeat that sounded like trouble with a pulse. I let myself move. Not pretty. Not polished. Mine. Hair loose down my back, boots sticking slightly to the floor, beer warming my blood while muscles uncoiled after months—years—of being folded into chairs, expectations, deadlines, and sensible decisions.
Every few seconds, I caught Everett looking.
Good.
Let him see me outside the version of me he’d used. I wasn’t the girl crying in her car after his last unanswered message. I wasn’t the grad student reading too much into a man’s pauses. I wasn’t soft clay. I never had been. I had survived fieldwork in freezing rain, academic panels full of men who repeated my findings back to me like they’d invented them, and a thesis advisor who once told me my “tone” was intimidating. I hadsurvived ramen, overdraft fees, loneliness, and fluorescent lights that wanted me dead.
I would survive Everett Cole.
By midnight, my feet ached. By one, Lena was tipsy and singing directly into my face.
The guy in flannel took my willingness to move as an invitation, drifting in too close with a lazy grin and hips that had no business making contact with mine. One song, two drinks, and the stale heat of too many bodies should have made me careless. Instead, it made my skin prickle.
