Page 33 of Thunder

"That's not what—" She stops.

Shakes her head. Her eyes flick down to the mug in my hand and back up. "Did you eat?"

"Every bite. Ma'am." I let that sit a second. "Best breakfast I've had in a while. You want to tell me why the woman who made it was gone before I could say thank you?"

Her jaw sets.

There it is, the Lyle line, her daddy's exact stubborn line, and God help me, even that turns me on at this point.

"Because if I'd stayed for breakfast it would've been a thing," she says. "It would've been you and me at your table like—" She gestures, helpless, at the whole idea of it. "And that's not what last night was."

"That's exactly what last night was."

"Thunder—"

"I'm not gonna do the dance, Presley," I say it easy, but I say it plain, because I'm too old and too tired and too shot-up to play coy with the one thing I want. "I'm no good at pretendin' and I'm done tryin'. So here's where I'm at, and you can do whatever you want with it."

She goes still against the rail.

"I can't fight this," I tell her. "I quit tryin' somewhere around the time you fell in my tub, and if I'm honest, I quit a long while before that. I'm not built to want a woman halfway. And I've got eyes, rattlesnake—I watch you work yourself half to death out here every day tryin' to outrun the same thing, and you're losin' the same way I'm losin', so let's the both of us quit pretendin' we're winnin'."

Her eyes have gone bright. She doesn't say anything.

"It doesn't have to be a secret," I go on, gentler now. "That's the part you keep gettin' stuck on, like the only two choices are hide it or blow up your whole life. There's a middle. We go slow. We figure it out a piece at a time, quiet, on our terms, nobody's business till we say it is. I've kept harder secrets than you, and I've kept 'em longer, and I'm tellin' you it can be done without it eatin' you alive. We can make this work. I've done a lot of hard things in my life. This wouldn't even crack the top ten."

"And when my father finds out his Sergeant at Arms has been—" Her voice drops. "You know what he'd do."

"I know exactly what he'd do." I hold her eyes. "I've thought about it more than you have, I promise you that. And I'm still sittin' here."

She looks away from me, out at the heifer, and for a long moment the only sound is Number 68 pulling hay and the far-off drone of somebody running a tractor down by the hay barn.

I let her have the quiet.

You don't rush a skittish thing.

First rule of working anything worth working.

"I can't give you the daylight," she finally says. "Not yet. I can't sit at a Sunday supper and have you pass me the potatoes in front of my whole family and pretend that's normal. I'm barely holding what's left of me together as it is, and if it came out right now, on top of everything with my mom and my sisters—" She shakes her head. "It'd be the thing that finished me off. I need you to hear that."

"I hear it."

"But." She turns back to me, and there's something set in her face now, something decided, and my chest goes tight watching her get there on her own. "Raine asked me to dinner. A few days ago. I told her I was busy, and I've felt like garbage about it every day since, because that little girl has never once been anything but sunshine to me, and I lied to her to protect myself."

She takes a breath. "So I'll come to dinner. Tonight. I'll bring it, even, so you stay off that hip. Me and you and Raine, at your place, where nobody's watching and nobody can make it into something it's not ready to be."

It takes everything I've got not to let her see what that does to me.

Because she thinks she just offered me a consolation prize.

She thinks she said no to the big thing and softened it with a small one.

She has no idea she just handed me the whole game, because she doesn't know men like me, doesn't know that a woman offering to feed my kid at my table is worth ten Sunday suppers and a hundred passed bowls of potatoes in front of Phantom.

Daylight I can wait for.

This. My girl and my daughter and a meal at my table. This is what I want, and she just walked herself right up to it and offered it like it was less.

"Raine'll lose her mind," is all I let myself say.