Page 21 of In the Crease

"Nothing appropriate," he said.

The air between us went still.

I stood in his reply for a moment and let it sink in. He’d told me the truth; it seemed he always did, especially when it was the simplest answer available. I understood exactly what he meant.

“Nothing appropriate,” I said quietly, giving it back to him.

He held very still. The air between us was charged and neither of us was pretending otherwise. We both wanted the same thing and neither of us was moving to take it.

“In April you’ll be gone,” I said finally. Just a matter of fact.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Both of you.”

“Yeah,” he said slightly more wistfully this time.

We stayed quiet a moment, not uncomfortably, while the pond sat in front of us, dark and still, and the cold pressed in from every direction. I was standing next to someone I'd known for forty-eight hours who already felt like someone I would miss.

I shivered, not dramatically, just one involuntary thing my body did, the cold finding a gap in the layers I’d tried to bury myself in.

He noticed and snapped to attention. “I’ve got a blanket in the truck. If you want to sit for a while.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to the party?” I asked, hoping he’d say no, wanting to be alone with him a bit longer. I enjoyed our conversation. He said things that mattered, and I liked that about him. He held a quiet, a reserve, but there was more just under the surface and I’d hoped to get a piece of that too.

“I’m exactly where I want to be,” he replied softly. “Come on, let’s warm you up.”

The truck was twenty yards away; the tailgate facing the pond. Griffin was on the other side of the bonfire with his full attention elsewhere. Likely on a female.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. That would be nice.”

He put his arm around my shoulders to walk me over, just warmth, just practical—and even knowing that was all it was, my whole body registered it. The solid weight of his arm. The heat of him. I kept walking but relaxed into him for that brief moment.

He dropped the tailgate with one hand and grabbed a plaid blanket from behind the seat, that looked like heavy wool, worn soft from years of use. I sat on the tailgate and he sat beside me, and he shook it out over both of us without asking, just did it, then pulled me closer against his side and scooted us to a position where we could both lean back a bit.

The wool blanket was thick and warm and his muscular torso was solid against me, and I was very aware how I wasn’t doing anything to create more space between us, and neither was he. Quite the opposite in fact.

The pond spread out in front of us, dark and flat and perfectly frozen. Stars had come out, more than I’d ever seen in Tempe, more than I’d known were up there, the whole sky dense with them the way it only got far from city lights. The birch trees stood white at the edges of the firelight and disappeared into the dark past it. The air where we sat away from the group was quieter than at the fire, stiller. So quiet I could hear the low crackle of the bonfire, and Griffin’s voice somewhere in the group, but mostly our own breathing.

His jaw was about eight inches from my eyeline, and I wasn’t looking at the pond anymore.

I was examining him as discreetly as I could, which wasn’t very discrete at all. I wanted to remember everything about him.

The scar through his left eyebrow. The line of his jaw in the dark. The way he was very deliberately staring at the pond like it had done something interesting, which it hadn’t. I knew his lack of movement meant he knew exactly what I was doing and was choosing not to acknowledge it, and then the muscle in his jaw ticced, which was its own kind of acknowledgment.

His hand moved to my knee.

It landed there. Over the blanket, warm and still, like it belonged there, like some quiet part of him had made a decision and the rest of him was catching up. Not a squeeze. Not a question. Just the solid, warm weight of his hand on my knee, and neither of us saying a word about it.

I didn’t move.

He didn’t move.

The fire crackling and the stars were everywhere, and it was so still around us I could hear my own heartbeat, which was hammering considerably faster than I wanted it to. My heart was hammering hard enough that I was concerned he could hear it. His shoulder was solid against mine. His thigh was against mine under the blanket. His hand was on my knee and his jaw was right there, and I was aware of every single inch of distance between us that wasn’t distance at all.

Three inches. Maybe less.

His thumb moved. Just barely. A small, slow circle through the wool, like it had done it before his brain signed off on it.