Page 37 of Devoured

Dean closed his eyes for a second.

And then it passed, the way it did, somebody called for another round, the jukebox rolled over into something with more life in it, and the heaviness lifted up off the table and floated off, and they were five cousins in a bar again instead of five men carrying their parents' war. But something had been said that hadn't been said before, out loud, between them — we are not going to be them — and it had been said in clinks and nods and Mason knocking his bottle against Chase's, the only language any of them trusted with a thing that size.

They came back around to Lara, because it was safer ground, and because they were not going to let Dean off the hook on the same night they'd let each other off so many others.

"She'd be good for you," Chase said. Plain. Not a joke now. "You know it. We all know it. Hell, Pearl's known it since the first week."

"I told her it won't go anywhere." Dean said it to his beer.

The booth went still.

"Did you mean it?" Mason asked. Quiet.

Dean didn't answer.

Knox set his cue down. And Knox, who needled everybody, who never once in his life said a soft thing when a sharp one would do — Knox came over to the booth and looked down at Dean and said, with no edge on it at all, which was worse: "Then you're gonna lose her, cousin. And it's gonna be nobody's fault but yours."

It landed harder than any of them meant it to. Even Knox looked like he wished he'd said it lighter.

Dean turned his beer on the table and didn't argue, because there was nothing to argue. I'm going to lose her. It came up in him clean and final and certain, his father's voice and Knox's voice and his own all saying the same thing from different directions, and he couldn't get under it or around it. He thought about her at his table an hour ago with Levi narrating his food and Giana handing her the salt. He thought about the dimple. He thought about her hand under his on the cabinet and her name in his mouth and the way she'd looked back at him from the kitchen door tonight with the whole unsaid thing hanging between them.

I'm going to lose her, he thought, and I'm doing it on purpose, and I don't know how to stop.

He was still inside that thought, three beers deep and quiet in the corner of the booth while Knox racked the balls again, when the front door of Harvey's opened, and the cold came in off Main Street, and Dean looked up.

His sister came through it first. Remi, loud already, mid-laugh, throwing a wave at Harvey like she'd never been gone. Then Elena. And then Lara.

And Dean's hand stopped dead on his beer.

Her hair was down. She'd changed out of the day's clothes into something soft and dark, and she came in out of the cold a half-step behind the other two, laughing at something Remi had said, the real laugh, the dimple out, and for a second Dean forgot there was anybody else in the bar at all, forgot his sister and Elena and the whole booth of cousins watching him forget.

Across the table, he heard it happen. Heard Jett's breath catch on the front edge of a grin. Heard Chase's cue go still against the felt. Heard Mason, very quietly, to no one and everyone:

"Oh, brother."

It was Remi who spotted them first, of course it was Remi, and her whole face lit with a delight so pure and so dangerous that Dean felt it in his stomach before she'd said a word. His baby sister, who saw the whole of a thing in a second and a half, looked at the back of the bar and found her brother three beers deep and staring at the woman beside her, and put it together so fast and so completely that Dean watched the entire rest of his night arrange itself behind her eyes.

Then Lara's gaze went around the room the way anyone's did walking into Harvey's, and found the back booth, and found him. For one second she looked straight at Dean Royston across the whole length of the bar.

She looked away first. Steered the three of them toward the far end of the counter. But Remi didn't look away, Remi looked from Lara to Dean and back with the open glee of a woman who had just been handed front-row seats to something, and mouthed, across the entire bar, plain as day:

Don't fuck it up.

Dean sat with his beer going warm in his hand and his cousins going quiet around him and his sister installing herself at the bar beside the one woman in the county he couldn't afford to want, and the whole room felt, all at once, about ten degrees warmer than it had a minute ago.

He had no idea yet what he was going to do.

He only knew he wasn't going to be able to keep not doing it much longer.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He was here.

Lara saw him the second she came through the door, before her eyes had even adjusted, the way you always see the one person in a room you've spent all week telling yourself you weren't going to think about. Back booth, a beer in his hand, his brothers around him and a couple of his cousins. His head came up when the cold air came in off the street, and for one half-second across the whole length of Harvey's, Dean Royston looked straight at her.

Her stomach did something stupid. Dropped and lifted at once, like the road falling away under a truck going too fast over a rise.

She looked away. Fast. Get a grip, Baxter.