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Or he kissed her. She would never, after, be able to say which. Whether she pulled or he came down, whether the last inch closed because of her fists in his shirt or his hand coming up hard into her hair, and it didn't matter, because it happened all at once, both of them, a collision neither one planned and both had been driving toward for twelve weeks. His mouth was hard on hers and then not hard, then sure, then thorough, one big hand splayed at the back of her skull and the other arm banding around her and pulling her up onto her toes against the whole solid length of him, and she made a sound into it she'd be mortified about later, and he answered it low in his chest, and Main Street and the cold and the bar and Boston and every single careful thing she had ever told herself fell straight off the edge of the world.

It was brief. It couldn't have been more than a few seconds. It rearranged her entire life.

Because the man kissing her like this, like she was air, like he'd been holding his breath four years and she was the first he'd let himself take, could not also be the man from the porch. The cold one. The one who'd looked at her shoes and written her off as gone by Christmas, whose contempt she'd worn like armor every day since. They could not both be true, and she'd bet everything she had on the cold one being the real him, on there being nothing under it to fall into.

There was everything under it.

She'd be fine, she'd told herself that first night, lying in a rented room. He's an irredeemable ass, so I'm safe. She'd been lying. She was so good at lying about being okay that she'd believed that one for three whole months.

He broke it off.

Not gently. He came off her like a man pulling his hand back from a flame, the exact motion, she'd think later, of that first handshake on the porch, let go a beat too quickly, and he set her back down off her toes and stepped away, and his chest was going like he'd run the length of the county, and his face⁠—

His face was closing. She watched it happen. She watched everything that had been wide open three seconds ago fold itself back down behind the wall, watched the banked fire get buried under the ash again, and she stood there on the sidewalk with her mouth still warm from his and her hands still half-raised and felt the cold come back into the world.

"I'm sorry," he said. Rough. Looking at a point just past her shoulder. "That shouldn't have…I shouldn't have started that."

"Dean—"

"It won't go anywhere, Lara." He said it quiet. He said it like it was a kindness, like he was doing her a favor, like the words cost him something to spend. "It can't. I'm sorry. I should've…" He stopped. Set his jaw. "I'll see you get home safe."

And that was it. That was all. He'd crossed a crowded bar to put his hand on her and say mine to a stranger, he'd kissed her like a drowning man, and then he'd stood in the cold and told her it wouldn't go anywhere, all in the space of ninety seconds, and she could not make the pieces fit, and she was not going to stand on Main Street and fall apart in front of him while she tried.

"Don't bother," she said. Her voice came out level. She didn't know how. "I know the way."

She made it to the blue truck. She got the door open and got up into the cab and got the key in on the second try because her hands weren't working right, and she did not look at him standing there on the sidewalk, and she pulled out onto the empty street.

She made it three blocks, to where Main went quiet and dark past the shuttered feed store, and then she pulled over to the curb and put the truck in park and gripped the wheel with both hands because she could not see straight enough to drive.

She didn't cry. She was almost proud of that. She just sat in the dark on a quiet street in the only town for forty miles with her heart going like a hammer and her mouth still warm and her whole careful three-months-in-the-making peace lying in pieces on the floor of the cab, and she breathed, and she waited for her hands to come back.

A truck came down Main behind her, big, dark, slowing for half a second as it drew level, and she knew the engine, she'd know that engine anywhere now, and then it didn't stop, it went on, the tail-lights pulling away toward the edge of town and the long dark road to the ranch beyond it, and she sat at the curb and watched the man drive off who had just kissed her like the answer to a question and then told her it wouldn't go anywhere.

When she could drive, she rolled both windows all the way down.

She needed the air. It was only five minutes to Elena's, barely long enough to matter, but she needed every second of it, the cold roaring through the cab and the enormous indifferent stars overhead, and she drove the few dark blocks with her hair coming loose and whipping around her face and did not turn the radio on, because there was nothing on God's earth she wanted to hear except the wind taking the heat off her skin.

She lay in her bed at Elena's a long time after, on top of the covers, still dressed, watching the ceiling go grey and then less grey toward a morning she wasn't ready for.

Wide awake. Undone. Stung in a way she couldn't find the bottom of.

She kept reaching for the old armor — he's an arrogant ass, he insulted your shoes, he called you a gold-digger, he is exactly the kind of man you came here to get away from — and her hands closed on nothing, because the armor was gone, he'd kissed it clean off her on a cold sidewalk and then walked away, and there was no getting it back now that she'd felt what was underneath.

It won't go anywhere.

She turned it over and over and couldn't make it mean anything. She wanted it to be the ugly simple thing, that he was just another man who didn't really want her but couldn't stand to watch somebody else have her either, a dog in the manger with a good jaw, exactly the kind she had a whole bitter history of. That one she understood. That one she could have wrapped back around herself like the armor he'd kissed off her, and gone to sleep angry and safe.

But it didn't fit, and she was too honest at two in the morning to pretend it did. A man marking territory didn't kiss a woman like he was the one going under. Whatever made Dean Royston stop, it wasn't that he didn't want her, the wanting had been in his hands and his mouth and the sound he made. It was something else. Something in his way.

She didn't know what. She lay in the dark and turned it and turned it and couldn't see the shape of it.

That was tomorrow's problem. That was a problem for a Lara who had slept, who had her face back on, who could think about that man without her whole body lighting up like a struck match.

For tonight there was just the ceiling, and the cold air through the open window, and her own mouth still warm, and the slow terrible certain knowledge settling over her like the dawn coming up grey in the glass:

She was not going to be fine.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN