Page 25 of Devoured

She gathered her bag. She turned off her lamp. She walked past him in the doorway close enough to feel the heat come off him, and he didn’t move, and she didn’t either, and then she was past him and across the porch and down the steps and the night air hit her face like a hand.

She got into the truck.

She got the engine on.

She drove down the track to the road, and she rolled the windows down because she needed to feel the wind on her face, and she let the dark come in and the smell of the basin and the wide flat hum of West Texas at night, and she didn’t tell herself anything about Dean Royston this time, did not bother running the arguments and the dismissals and the he insulted your shoes, because there were no arguments left that worked.

It was, somewhere underneath the wanting, a kind of relief.

She drove with both hands on the wheel and the windows down, and she let the want sit in the cab with her like a passenger, and she didn’t pretend it wasn't there.

She got home. She climbed the stairs to the apartment over Elena's garage. She lay in the dark on her back, and she didn’t say she'd be fine, because she wasn't telling herself anything tonight.

She just lay there and felt it.

And somewhere out at the ranch, a man stood in an empty office with his hand still on a doorframe, looking at the chair she'd been sitting in, and did not say what he had not been able to say.

She knew it the way you know weather.

She slept anyway, eventually, on that knowledge, which was its own kind of new.

CHAPTER NINE

Remi came home, and Dean knew it the way he'd always known it, which was that the volume of his own life went up by half a notch before he'd so much as seen her truck.

He was crossing the yard with a coil of wire over his shoulder when he heard the music. Somebody's bad country turned up too loud, coming up the county road and getting louder, and then the little gray Tacoma she'd bought herself with her own money and would not let any of them touch came over the cattle guard at a speed that said she'd been driving since before dawn and intended to make the last mile count. She had the windows down. She had her arm out the window. She laid on the horn twice, for no reason except that it was her and she was home, and the dogs lost their entire minds and went streaking across the yard to meet her, and Dean stood there with sixty feet of wire on his shoulder and felt the first thing he'd felt in three days that wasn't sideways or guilty or about the woman in his office.

He felt glad. Plain glad. His baby sister was home.

She came out of the truck before it had finished rocking on its springs. She was twenty-three, built small and quick, the only one of the five who'd come out looking just like their mother, more so every year. Levi was up on her hip before he'd hit the bottom step, Giana wrapped around her middle, the dogs going in circles. The noise of it carried clean across the yard, and Dean stood there and didn't put the wire down — not yet, because the second he set it down he'd have to go be a person about how much he'd needed her home.

"There he is." She'd spotted him over the top of Giana's head. "There's the old man. You look like hell, Dean."

"You look like you drove through the night."

"I did. Don't change the subject. Hell, Dean." But she was grinning, and she'd freed a hand, and she put it up shading her eyes against the bright afternoon sun to get a real look at him, and whatever she saw made the grin go down a little at the edges into something older. She didn't say anything about it. That was Remi. She saw the whole of a thing in about a second and a half and then chose, out of a tact none of the brothers had been issued, exactly how much of it to say out loud.

"How's Dad," she said instead.

"Better. Cranky. They've got him walking the hall twice a day and he hates every step. Still a couple weeks off coming home, they think — they want him stronger first, and Elena won't sign off till the city man does."

"And you've been doing all of it."

"Chase has been doing half."

She let it stand. Dean never would claim the full weight of anything that was his, and she'd known that about him her whole life. She shifted Levi higher on her hip, took in the house, the barns, the long flat land running off to nothing, and breathed it in like someone who'd been holding her breath two states over.

"Okay," she said. "I'm home. Somebody catch me up. Levi. You're heavier. What are they feeding you."

"Chocolate chip," said Levi, with feeling.

"Of course they are."

Dean came in behind them with the wire finally off his shoulder, and the kitchen was loud again, full of people, the way it hadn't been in a long time.

Helen had the kettle on and was pretending she hadn't teared up at the door. Giana was talking at a speed that suggested she'd been saving it. Levi was showing Remi a scab. And Lara was at the counter where she'd been when Dean walked in, a dish towel over her shoulder and the last of the lunch things in her hands, gone still and a little careful the way a person goes when a family closes over itself and they're not sure yet whether they're inside the circle or at the edge of it.

Dean watched his sister find her.