Page 81 of What Remains of Grace

“I am,” he said simply.

There was no joke attached. No caveat. Just that quiet conviction of his that made it hard to breathe.

They finished the bottle, and Cole ordered a second. “This feels dangerous,” she said as he poured.

“Good thing I’m off the clock,” he said. “Consider this hazard pay.”

“You’re not off the hook yet. We still have to pass tomorrow,” she said.

“We’ll pass,” he replied.

The room yielded. Her shoulders loosened. She felt the champagne in her fingertips, in the warmth at the back of her neck, in the way everything he did seemed magnified.

The jukebox hummed out something slow and scratchy. Harvest Moon, if she remembered right. “Dance with me,” he said.

She blinked. “Here?”

“Here.” Standing and holding a hand out. “Please come save me from myself. If I have to sit back down after this, I’ll never recover.”

“Can’t have that,” she murmured, slipping her fingers into his.

He drew her into the open space between their table and the wall, one hand settling at her waist, the other still wrapped around hers. They swayed more than danced, their steps small, almost lazy.

It shouldn’t have felt this intimate in a room with other people, bad lighting, and a sticky floor. But it did.

She focused on the thin cotton of his T-shirt and where it clung to him, the fleecy scrape of denim against her bare knee from where their legs brushed. His thumb drew a slow, absent arc at her hip, completely unaware of what it did to her.

“Jenna,” he said quietly.

“Hmm?”

“I’m very glad you said yes to this,” he said. “To being here.”

She swallowed. “Me too.”

They didn’t talk about Friday. They didn’t talk about porches or almost-confessions or the way he’d stepped back like he was afraid he’d break her if he didn’t.

But the memory crackled between them all the same, sparking every time she caught his gaze and saw something raw there.

By the time the second bottle was nearly empty, her head felt pleasantly light, and her chest felt heavy, and she knew she should call it a night before all the pieces inside her slipped out of the neat compartments she’d tried to keep them in.

“Come see where I live,” he said suddenly.

She looked up. “What?”

He ran his tongue along his bottom lip, clearly reconsidering the words even as he said them. “I mean, it’s right next door. Tiny bungalow, ugly couch, terrible art. You can mock my taste, get it out of your system before you go opening a very stylish bakery.”

She knew exactly what he was asking, what he wasn’t saying. The look in his eyes made it unmistakable.

And the dangerous part was that she knew exactly what she was agreeing to, what saying yes meant.

“Okay,” she said.

His eyes darkened. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she murmured. “I’d like to see where you live.”

He paid the tab before she could reach for her wallet. They stepped back out into the thick night air, the bar door swinging shut behind them with a final-sounding thud.