Page 21 of Handful

“I’ll tell you what I can. The rest is club business.” I held her eyes. “I’m not going to lie to you. But there are things that don’t leave the club.”

She looked at me for a moment. “I can work with that,” she said firmly. The way she said things when the decision was already made.

The check came. I reached for it.

“I can pay my own way,” she said.

“I know you can.” I put my card down without looking at it. “Doesn’t mean you’re going to tonight.”

She studied me a second, then let it go — not because she’d lost, because she’d decided the hill wasn’t worth it. “Next one’s mine.”

“Deal.”

Neither of us moved to leave. She told me about the bar she wanted to open someday — her own place, not someone else’s kingdom. She had a name for it already, a Jane Austen reference she wouldn’t tell me yet. I told her about Mark’s boys. Finn’s gap-toothed grin, Owen’s twelve-year-old handshake, and the dirt bikes I’d taught them to ride on my Sundays in Glenwood.

“You love those boys,” she said.

“They’re easy to love.”

“That’s not what I mean.” She looked at me. “You’re good with them. I can hear it in the way you talk about them.”

“Kids like me,” I said, and it came out easy because it was just true. Luca and Knox, and their baby brothers Graham and Danny. Even Maya.

We left together. The lot was quiet — Willowbrook at ten on a Sunday, the shops dark.

Austen stopped at her car and turned to face me. The streetlight was behind her — face half-lit, half-shadow.

“Can I kiss you?” I asked.

She studied me. I stood still. I didn’t lean in, didn’t move, didn’t do any of the things I would normally do — close the gap, make the decision for her, assume the answer was yes because the evening had gone well and that was how the math worked.

“Yes,” she said.

I leaned in and kissed her. Quick, careful, my hand on the side of her jaw and her mouth warm against mine for about three seconds before I pulled back. I wanted to stay.

She looked at me after. That careful, measuring look she had — the one that was doing math I couldn’t see.

“Good night, Handful,” she said, and reached for her door.

“Let me take you out on the bike next time.” It was out before I’d run it past the part of my brain that’s supposed to check these things first. “Get you on the back, let you ride—”

I heard it the same second she did.

“—the bike. Let you ride the bike.”

I’d been sweet talking women since I was fourteen and never once needed a do-over. Now here I was in a dark parking lot making things worse with every word. Whatever she’d done to me, it had taken something I’d never had to think about and turned me into a fumbling sixteen-year-old.

Austen laughed, her head tipped back, delighted with me.

“Ask me again when you can finish the sentence.” She got in her car. Pulled the door half shut, then leaned back out. “Good night, Handful.”

“Good night, Austen.”

I waited until she’d started the engine and pulled away from the curb before I walked to my bike.

The ride home was slow. I took the long way — not back through Willowbrook’s main street but out along the farm road that looped south before connecting to the highway. The long way added twenty minutes and I needed every single one.

The night air was warm, the sky was clear, and I didn’t turn anything over in my head. I just rode. For the first time in eleven weeks, I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing or why I was doing it or whether it was working. I was just on the bike, in the dark, with the taste of Austen, and the memory of the three seconds I’d kissed her.