Page 24 of Devoured

"Lara." He had picked up the bloodwork. He was holding the door open. He looked at her one beat too long over the top of it. "...Thank you."

He went out.

She stood in the office with the documents on the table and the dogs at her feet and the office that had been chaos at the start of the day and was now, somewhere underneath everything, the room of a woman who had spent the day being good at her work in a place where her work mattered, and she let herself, just for a second, feel it.

Then she put the kettle on, because the night was going to be long.

He came back at nine.

The kids were down. Helen had said her goodnights and gone up the stairs with her library book and the air of a woman who had decided not to know what she was choosing not to know. The dogs had migrated to the office floor. The desk lamp was on and Lara had moved a second chair over from the corner and put it next to the first one because they were going to be working off the same papers and there was no clean way to do that across a desk.

He came in with his sleeves shoved up and his hair wet at the ends from a sink. He'd cleaned the day off himself. She didn't acknowledge that she'd noticed. He didn't acknowledge that he'd done it.

"All right," he said. "Show me the worst of it again."

So she did, again, slower this time, the way you did when somebody was going to have to know it like the back of his own hand by the end of the night because somebody was going to have to negotiate against this eventually and that somebody would be him. He learned fast. She'd known he would. Whatever Dean Royston had done for a living before, he hadn't been a man who needed things explained twice.

The chairs were close together because the papers were.

His knee touched hers under the desk somewhere around ten.

He didn't move it. She didn't either.

It was nothing, the kind of thing that happens between two adults working close together over a table for two hours, the small slide of a body adjusting in a chair, denim on denim, an inch of warm contact that was less than a handshake. It was not a handshake. It went up her leg and sat down between her ribs and stayed there, and she didn’t move, and he didn’t move, and they didn’t look at each other, and they kept reading the page.

He reached for the schedule at the same time she did.

His hand came down over hers on the corner of the document for one whole second before either of them registered.

Neither of them pulled back.

That was the thing. In a different version of her life, of his life, of this whole story, one of them would have pulled back fast and laughed and made it nothing. Tonight, neither of them did. His hand stayed on the back of hers, warm, calloused, exactly as heavy as she remembered from the porch and the kitchen, and she didn’t move her hand out from under, and he didn’t move his off, and the only thing that happened was that he closed his eyes for a beat — she saw it without looking at him, in her peripheral vision, in the small shift of his face — and he kept his hand there for one more breath, and then he picked up the document like that was all he'd been reaching for, and she let her hand go down to her lap, and they kept reading.

Her thigh stayed against his.

It was unbearable.

She thought, with the small dry clear part of her that did not get to vote on these matters: I’m not going to be the one who moves first.

She didn’t know yet whether that was a brave thing or a stupid one. She suspected it was both.

He turned his head. That was all it took. He turned his head and she turned hers, and there was no daylight left between the wanting and the thing itself, his eyes dropping to her mouth and hers to his, the space between them closing on its own without either of them spending a single decision on it.

She felt his breath. She felt the heat come off his jaw. Neither of them was pulling back this time, and that was the new and terrifying fact of it, the one she’d have no way to un-know in the morning: for once neither one of them was going to be the one who stopped⁠—

The dogs went off like a shotgun.

Both of them up off the floor at once, barking, claws skidding on the boards as they scrambled for the window, and a half-second behind them the wash of headlights swung across the office wall and a truck door clunked shut somewhere out in the yard. Mack’s voice, or one of the hands, calling something flat and ordinary about the north gate. The world, arriving. Loud and dumb and exactly on time to ruin everything.

They came apart. Not because he chose it. Not because she did. The moment just got taken out from under the both of them, and that was so much worse than every other time he’d been the one to step back, because this time she’d have let it happen. She’d wanted it to. And she knew now, with no argument left anywhere to hide behind, that he’d have let it happen too.

He scrubbed a hand down his face. When he found his voice it had gravel all the way through it.

"That’ll be Mack about the gate," he said, to the window, to the dogs, to anything that wasn’t her.

"Dean."

"Go on home, Lara." And this time it wasn’t the wall coming down between them. This time it was a man holding onto the last rope he had, in front of her, where she could see his knuckles white on it.