Page 38 of Her Rival

"I didn't ask because I assumed you needed the money," I said.

"That's a piece of it."

"What's the other piece."

She looked at me through the open window. The floodlight caught half her face. The other half was in shadow.

"Ask me on Tuesday," she said. "Ask me on Tuesday in your kitchen with the recorder off, and I'll tell you. Some of it. As much as I have."

She rolled the window up before I could answer.

She drove away.

I stood in the driveway in the desert cold a long time after the taillights disappeared, and I thought about a kiss that had lasted half of half a heartbeat, and a question I'd been avoiding for two and a half weeks, and the dry little sound she'd made at my kitchen island on Tuesday over her own bad notes. And the fact that I'd heard Dani Hartley's real laugh and now I wanted to hear it again. On purpose. Sober. With no spaghetti involved. Just because I'd asked her something funny.

That was the thing I hadn't, until that moment, fully understood.

I'd been carrying the line for two and a half weeks under the false impression that what I needed from her was distance.

I hadn't needed distance.

I'd needed to know if she was a real woman or a thing I'd built in my head at seventeen and never let out of the cage. And the real woman had eaten my spaghetti. The real woman had told me about her grandmother. The real woman had stopped me at the door not because she didn't want to be kissed but because she did. And the real woman had then asked me a question at her car window in my driveway that meant she'd been thinking, all this time, about what she was actually doing in my life. Not just about what she was supposed to write about me in the magazine.

I went inside.

I shut the door.

I leaned against it a long minute with my eyes closed.

Then I called Rhett.

He picked up on the second ring.

"You all right."

"No."

"Want me to come over."

"No."

"Want to come here."

"No."

"What do you want, then."

"I want to know if you've ever kissed a woman you swore to yourself you weren't going to kiss."

A long pause on his end.

"Once," he said.

"What did you do after."

"Kept her."

"Stone."