Page 48 of Devoted

He turned his water glass. “It’s quiet at night,” he said. “Quieter than here. No pumpjacks, no trucks on the highway, no coyotes, nothing. You’d lie there in the dark and hear your own blood. About the third month you quit minding it. About the third year you’d started to need it, and I don’t know what I’m going to do about that, now.”

“That’s a real one.”

“You asked for a real one. I’ve got about four. I’m saving the rest.”

“For what?”

“Church,” he said, and she laughed.

It got away from her. It came out real, in a room that was watching her, and she heard it and couldn’t stop it, and he sat back and looked pleased with himself the way he’d looked pleased at fourteen every time he got her sent to the hall.

“That’s one,” he said.

“You’re counting?”

“I’m counting.”

The steaks came. Kenzie put them down, looked at the tape on Olivia’s hands, didn’t ask, and went away again with her phone in her hand before she reached the kitchen door.

“You’re not going to ask,” Olivia said.

“Ask what?”

“Anything. About him. You’ve talked about my mama’s pie and Tanner Voss’s snake and the African night, and you haven’t said his name since we left my yard.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“On purpose?”

“On purpose.” He cut his steak. “I’m not going to sit across a table from you and work you. I’m working him. It’s a different job.”

“That’s a fine line, Brody.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got. Eat your supper.”

She ate her supper. It was a good steak, and she was hungry, and halfway through it he told her about Dean trying to teach Giana to drive the feed truck at ten years old and Lara finding out from the sheriff, and she laughed again, the second real one, and put her fork down and looked at her plate, because she’d caught herself at it. She was enjoying it. She was sitting in a steakhouse in Lamesa with a good steak and a man who’d loved her since they were children making her laugh on purpose, and the whole county was going to know it by the time the dishes were washed, and for one whole minute she’d forgotten why she was there, and she hated that worse than the rest of it put together.

“Two,” Brody said, quiet.

“I know what it was.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I’m right here.”

“You’re right here, and you hate it.” He didn’t say it unkindly. “That’s all right. You’re allowed to hate it and eat the steak.”

“Is that what you did? Over there?”

He looked at her a second longer than the question needed. “Some nights.”

His phone lit up on the table between the salt and the bread basket. Face up. She saw the name before he turned it over.

“Remi,” he said.

“Already. We haven’t had pie.”

“She’s fast. She’s got a group text with Ainsley and Lara and I don’t know who else, and Delia’s on it, don’t ask me how.”