Page 44 of So This Isn't Love
"You were saying?" she says. "Something about trellis wire."
"I have no idea what I was saying."
She holds my eyes and reaches for the next oyster, and when the brine escapes again, slower this time, she catches it with her tongue again, and suddenly I understand that I am dining with a hostile power.
"You're doing that on purpose," I say.
"Doing what?" she says, and sips Dad's wine, innocent as a hymnal, and under the table her knee settles against mine and stays.
My phone buzzes face-up on the table. Text message.
Wyatt:Still playing nursemaid to your brother, Bardot? Poker night's a snore without you. When are you coming back to the city?
Shit. I haven't thought about The Retreat or my life back in Manhattan for days. Longer than that, if I'm being honest. I'm definitely not thinking about it now.
Nor do I want to.
I turn the device and Wyatt's message face-down without answering and put my hand back where it was, which is on the table, near Darcy's. Close enough that our fingers keep conducting small negotiations neither of us acknowledges.
We stay through the sunset and then through twilight. She tells me about Lisa's story and the Oakley twins' ongoing cold war. I tell her about the time a client's llama unpacked our entire base camp in Peru, and she laughs with her head back, loud, over the water. An older couple two tables down smiles at us the way you smile at a thing you remember being.
I know exactly how short my runway in this town is. I know it the way you know there's a drop on the far side of a ridge. I'm just not looking at it tonight, and I've gotten very good, this last week, at not looking at it.
Here's the truth I'd deny under oath to anyone: I've eaten dinners on four continents with views that make travel writers weep, and this shack, this paper tablecloth, this woman stealing the last oyster with zero remorse, is the best evening I can remember having anywhere on earth.
The breeze comes up off the water when the light goes, and she shivers. I place my jacket around her shoulders and she pulls it close instead of protesting. The sleeves swallow her hands. Something about Darcy wrapped in a jacket that's going to smell like her tomorrow does absolutely nothing to improve my condition, and the condition wasn't good to begin with. The picture of her wearing my jacket and nothing else has moved in permanently, and tomorrow I'm going to put it on smelling like her and lose ten minutes of my morning to that too.
Worth it. All of it.
As we walk out the gravel lane to my car, her hand finds mine, or mine finds hers—I'm not sure which. It doesn't matter.I hold on to her like she belongs to me and I don't care who in this town knows it.
Deep down, it feels like she's been mine for a hell of a lot longer than just the past few days.
At the car I open her door and don't step back.
She turns in the space between me and the door, chin up, close, the jacket huge on her, her eyes gone nearly black in the darkness, and the pull between us is a physical thing. I watch her mouth, but I don't take it.
"Not yet," I say, mostly to myself.
"Not yet?"
"If I start now, we won't make it out of this parking lot." I can't tell if I'm warning her or inviting her to finish what we've started.
"Then we'd better leave now," she says quietly. "Take me home, Finn."
She gets in the car. I close her door and walk around the hood and give myself one breath of night air, which fixes nothing.
The drive back to her place runs along the water, and we make the whole trip with her hand on my forearm where it rests on the shifter, the radio low, the town lights coming up ahead one street at a time. Neither of us says a word about the night ending.
Or where we'll be afterward.
Tonight there's only us.
CHAPTER 18
DARCY
Unlike the other night, this time I hold on to my keys.
