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It frightened him too. She saw it. His eyes went wide for a second, and he made a sound that wasn’t a word.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t. Whatever that is, put it away, I can’t —”

“I know.”

“Brody —”

“I know. I know.” And he moved, and it broke, and he got his mouth on hers and it was fast again, and hot, and she could hold on to that. She got her hands on his back. She got her heels behind his thighs and pulled him in harder, and he went harder, and the bed knocked the wall and neither of them cared, and he got a hand under her hip and changed the angle and she said “There,” and then “there, there, don’t —” and bit his shoulder to keep from saying the rest, hard enough to mark, and he made a sound she’d never heard a man make, and she went again, with him inside her this time, which she hadn’t known she could, tight around him and shaking, and he lasted about four more strokes and went over with his face in her neck and her name in his mouth. And it wasn’t the name everybody else called her. It was a different one, quieter, and she’d think about that later, and she did.

They lay there. His weight on her, all of it, and his breath in her hair going slow, and her hands still on his back, and she didn’t want him to move and didn’t say so.

The lamp was off. The fan was going. She was on her back with his arm across her and the whole house asleep around them, and she should have gone.

She didn’t go.

“I run the social media for a race team,” she said, to the dark.

He didn’t move. She felt him listen.

“IndyCar. Indianapolis. Six years. I make drivers look good online, which is harder than it sounds, because they’re twenty-three and rich and they say things. I’ve got four hundred thousand people who think they know a man because I picked the right nine seconds of him. I’m good at it. I’m the best there is at it, and I’m telling you that because it’s true, not because I’m bragging.”

“I know you’re good at it.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know you photographed my toolbox,” he said, and she laughed, once, in the dark, and put her hand over her mouth.

“I’m working remote,” she said. “That’s what I told them. Working remote from Texas for the summer, family thing, and they said fine, because I’d never once asked for anything in six years and they didn’t know what to do with it. So I’m here, and I run a race team’s Instagram from your father’s kitchen between breakfast and dinner, and nobody in Indianapolis knows where Soluno is, and that’s how I like it.”

He waited. She felt him wait. He was waiting for the rest of it, the part with the man in it, the part with the gray sedan and the flowers at the shop and the police being kind, and she lay there with his arm across her and didn’t give it to him, because it wasn’t in the terms, and because if she said it out loud in this bed it would be in this bed forever.

He didn’t ask.

“Four hundred thousand,” he said, instead.

“Give or take.”

“And you came here to cook for ten.”

“And a dog.”

“And a dog,” he said, and she felt him smile in the dark, and she got up, and found her shorts and her T-shirt, and put them on, and stood at the door with her hand on it.

“That’s all you’re getting,” she said.

“That’s all I’m getting.”

“Go to bed, Sunny.”

She went. Twenty feet of dark hall, barefoot, every board, and her own door, and her own bed, tight and fresh with the fan in the window, and she lay down in it with his sweat still on her and her hair still wet at the neck and the thing that had happened in the lamplight still going through her.

Fine. Fine. It was an arrangement. She’d written it herself. She lay there and went down the list of what she wasn’t feeling, plainly, one at a time, the way she’d have gone down Helen’s list: not that, not that, not that either, and got to the end of it.

Then she started over.

CHAPTER TEN

“Settled,” Pearl said. “That’s the word. I’m not saying married, I’m not saying anything Earl’s got on a slate, I’m saying settled, the way you’d say it about weather. That girl and that boy have been a settled thing since the Fourth of July and everybody in this county with eyes has known it, and I’ll say it to anybody.”