CHAPTER 12 #2
He was already looking down at her. Close — they were both crouched, both reaching, the lamp behind him so his face was half in shadow and the storm-grey of his eyes catching the gold.
Up close she could see the rain in his hair and the day's stubble and the white split through his eyebrow, and she could see that he wasn't reaching for the rope anymore. He'd forgotten the rope.
His hand turned, slow, and his fingers slid from the back of her hand to her wrist, to the inside of it where her own pulse was hammering out the truth she'd been refusing to file all night.
“Laney,” he said. Just that. Her name, low, the way he used to say it. He laid it down between them with no question in it and no apology, just her name, like it was a whole sentence, like it was the only word he had.
She should have stood up. She knew the exact sequence required to end this. Stand, step back, pick up the chart, give the instructions, leave. Six steps. She had done harder things with shaking hands.
She didn't move.
His other hand came up — slow, so slow, telegraphing every inch of it, giving her the whole long second she needed to turn her face away — and his fingers found the loose copper at her temple where her braid had come undone in the work, and tucked it back, and didn't leave. His knuckles grazed her jaw.
His thumb came to rest at the corner of her mouth, light as a question, and the whole barn narrowed down to the warmth of it and the rain roaring overhead and the small space of charged dark between his mouth and hers, closing.
She went still.
It was her tell and she knew it was her tell — the stiller she got, the more it cost — but for the first time in her life the stillness had stopped being armor. The old reflex would have carried her cold and far away to protect the soft thing underneath, and tonight it failed her entirely.
The soft thing sat right there at the surface, in plain view, undefended, wanting, and she held still not to hide it but because she was afraid that if she moved at all she would close that last inch herself, would fist her hand in his shirt and pull, would take the thing she'd told herself for ten years she was too smart to take.
I want this. The thought arrived in her own voice, clear and clinical and terrifying, the way a diagnosis arrives, undeniable once you see it.
This has nothing to do with adrenaline. Forget the storm. I want this and I have wanted it the whole time and I lied.
His breath was on her lips. She could taste the nearness of it — coffee gone cold and rain and warm skin.
One inch. Less than an inch. His thumb moved against the soft seam of her lips, the gentlest pressure, asking, and her own mouth parted on a breath she didn't decide to take, and the lamp swung gold and the lightning came again —
The lightning came again, blue and enormous, the strobe ripping through every gap in the barn boards and laying the whole world bare-white for one suspended heartbeat: his hand at her jaw, her own hand risen halfway to his chest without her permission, the mare's dark bulk behind them — and Juniper threw her head and stamped and let out a long, hard, gut-deep groan.
Laney was on her feet before the thunder hit.
She crossed to the stall in three strides, heart slamming, hands already reaching, every part of her flooding back into the channel it knew.
“Easy. Easy, mama. What've you got.” She had the stethoscope on the flank, listening, listening, and the groan had only been a shift of the bowel, only gas moving, only the pain medication doing its work — the gut sounds were good, the flank was soft, the mare was fine, the mare was fine.
The mare was fine.
It was Laney's own heart that was running away, eighty, ninety, refusing to come down, and her hands — her steady hands, her father's hands — were not steady now at all.
She kept the stethoscope pressed to the flank long after she'd heard everything she needed to hear. She used it the way she'd always used the work, as a place to put her face where no one could read it.
“She's fine,” Laney said, to the mare, to the wall, to the kit.
“She's settling. The banamine's holding.” She heard how level her voice was and was distantly proud of it and distantly horrified by it, because going level was what she did when she was coming apart, and they both knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it now.
Behind her she heard Beck get to his feet.
Heard him not come closer. Heard him give her the whole width of the barn, deliberately, the way you'd back off a spooked animal — and the fact that he understood her well enough to do that, that he kept his hands to himself and left her room and refused to turn it into something she had to fight, was somehow the hardest part to bear.
He just stood there in the lamplight, three nights of want and ten years behind it written all over a face he'd never learned to hide as well as he thought, and he let her have the distance.
“Laney,” he said again. Quieter now. No edge of grievance in it, none of the old hurt. Just — careful. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have — ”
“You didn't.” She didn't turn around. “Nothing happened.”
A silence. The rain easing now, the worst of the cell moving off east, the thunder gone long and tired.
“Okay,” he said. And she heard him accept it, heard him take the door she'd shut and not put his foot in it, and she hated how much she'd wanted him to put his foot in it. “Okay. Nothing happened.”
She fell back on a list. It was the only thing that worked.