Chapter 16
GRANT
The car moved through Charleston like it had nowhere to be. Which was fine, because neither did we.
The driver—different one from earlier, older, with the quiet professionalism of a man who'd driven people home from things before and understood that silence was part of the service—took the long way back.
Or maybe it was the short way and the city was just like that at night, the streets narrow and unhurried, the gas lanterns doing their amber work on the old facades, the live oaks overhead turning the road into a tunnel of shadow and intermittent light.
Lou sat beside me. Close, but not touching.
Her hair was slightly mussed in a way that said something had happened to it recently, and the black top she'd put back on had a wrinkle at the hem that hadn't been there before.
She smelled like me. I could smell it—my soap, my skin, underneath her perfume—and the primitive part of my brain that lived below civilization registered that fact with a satisfaction I wasn't going to examine right now.
We didn't talk.
Not because there was nothing to say. Because everything we could say right now would be smaller than what had just happened, and neither of us seemed willing to shrink it.
The silence in the car wasn't awkward. It was full—the fullness of a space occupied by two people who'd been as close as two people could be twenty minutes ago and were now sitting six inches apart, letting the distance do what distance did after intimacy, which was make you aware of every inch.
I watched the city slide past the window and tried to think clearly.
I couldn't.
What had I been thinking? That was the question forming in the back of my skull, pressing forward with the insistence of a headache that hadn't fully arrived. What had I been thinking—at the concourse, in the hallway, in the storage room with a woman I'd met at a bread stall this morning?
The answer was that I hadn't been thinking.
I'd been feeling, which was the thing I'd spent three years training myself not to do, and I'd been good at it—disciplined, methodical, the emotional equivalent of a man who'd sealed the windows and locked the doors and then someone had walked in, anyway, because the door had never really been locked.
It had just been closed. And closed wasn't locked.
I knew that. I'd known it in the stables with Ethan and the horse. I'd known it at the bread stall. I'd known it at the rodeo, when she'd grabbed my arm and the electricity had burned through every circuit I'd built.
The rodeo. The talk about fathers. The way she'd said our fathers like it was a shared room. The heat. The storage room. The wall. The sound she'd made when—
I shut that down. Not here. Not in the backseat of a car with the woman in question six inches to my left.
But more thoughts were already lining up.
The rodeo—the nostalgia of it, the vulnerability of talking about parents, the sheer physical fact of a beautiful woman who'd chased me into a hallway and looked at me like I was worth the trouble.
All of it had conspired. And men who got swept up in conspiracies of feeling were men who got hurt.
I knew that. I had the scar tissue to prove it.
I glanced at Lou. She was looking out her window, her chin resting on her hand, the Charleston streetlight catching the line of her jaw. She looked calm. Settled. Like a woman who'd done something she intended to do and wasn't interested in regretting it.
I envied that. The absence of second-guessing. The quiet confidence of someone who made decisions and let them stand.
The car pulled up to the Palmetto Rose. The driver came around and opened the door. Lou stepped out first, and I followed, and the night air hit us both—warm, salt-threaded, carrying the faint jasmine from somewhere in the garden.
The lobby was quiet at this hour. Low lights, the chandelier dimmed to a glow, the marble floors reflecting nothing. But there was someone waiting—a man in a dark suit, mid-forties, the composed bearing of hotel management, standing near the entrance to a hallway I hadn't been down before.
"Mr. Dane," he said. "Ms. Isabel called ahead. If you'll follow me, we've prepared the Azalea Lounge for your use this evening."
I looked at Lou. She raised an eyebrow—the universal expression for I didn't know about this either but I'm not complaining.
We followed him down the hallway, past a set of double doors that opened into a room I hadn't known existed.
The Azalea Lounge was small—intimate, really, the kind of private room that hotels kept for guests who wanted to entertain without being seen.
Soft lighting. Leather chairs. A fireplace that was lit, because Charleston apparently ran its fireplaces in spring, probably because the aesthetic demanded it regardless of the temperature.
And a spread.
The bar was fully stocked—top shelf, the kind of bottles that had age statements and prices that didn't appear on the label because if you had to ask, you couldn't afford it.
Beside the bar, a table had been laid with an assortment that suggested someone had been given the instruction prepare everything and had taken it personally.
Cheeses I couldn't name. Charcuterie arranged with the geometric precision of someone who'd gone to culinary school.
Fruit. Crackers that looked handmade. A bowl of olives.
Bread—real bread, the good kind, the kind that made me think of a certain stall at a certain market, which made me think of a certain morning.
And on a separate plate, presented like the centerpiece of a museum exhibit: chocolate-covered strawberries.
"A few items," the manager said, with the practiced understatement of a man who knew the difference between a few and this. "Ms. Isabel sends her compliments. Please ring the front desk if you need anything further."
He left. The door closed. The room was ours.
Lou looked at the spread. Looked at the strawberries. Looked at me.
"Chocolate-covered strawberries," she said. Her voice carried the flatness of a woman confronting a cliché and finding it wanting. "Really?"
"I didn't order them. Your friend did."
"She's a romantic terrorist." Lou picked up a strawberry, examined it with the critical eye of a woman who evaluated things for a living, and took a bite. Her eyes closed. She chewed. Swallowed. Then she grabbed another one and ate it in two bites.
"Okay," she said, mouth still half-full. "They're good. I'm not apologizing."
Something broke open in my chest. Something that had been held under pressure for so long that the release of it felt like carbonation. Like laughter trying to find its way out of a bottle that had been sealed too tight.
I grabbed a handful of the charcuterie. Stuffed a piece of sopressata into my mouth with the elegance of a man who'd been eating MREs for a decade and had never fully recalibrated to civilian dining.
Lou watched me. Then she grabbed a fistful of cheese and crackers and shoved them in with a commitment to efficiency that bordered on competitive.
We looked at each other. Both chewing. Both slightly ridiculous. Both—for the first time since the storage room—completely at ease.
She laughed first. Through a mouthful of Gruyère, which shouldn't have been charming and was.
I laughed second. Through sopressata, which was worse.
And then we were just—eating. Standing at the table like kids at a buffet, pointing at things, grabbing things, making sounds of appreciation that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the simple, animal pleasure of feeding a body that had burned a significant number of calories in the last two hours.
"The olives," Lou said, pushing the bowl toward me. "Try the Castelvetranos."
I tried them. They were buttery, mild, nothing like the shriveled black things I'd eaten from cans in field kitchens.
"Good," I said.
"Good?" She looked at me like I'd insulted her family. "They're extraordinary. The brine is perfect—just enough salt to enhance the fruit without masking it. Someone cured these with actual care."
I ate another one. Slower this time. She was right—there was a depth to it I'd missed on the first pass, a complexity I wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't pointed at it.
The way she talked about food—about process, about the craft underneath the surface—told me something.
This woman didn't just eat things. She understood how they were made.
I filed that. Didn't know what shelf it went on yet, but I filed it.
"Who knew sex could give me such an appetite," Lou said, reaching for another strawberry.
I laughed. She laughed. The room laughed, or felt like it—the warm light and the fire and the ridiculous abundance of it all creating a space where laughter was the only appropriate response to the absurdity of the evening.
A rodeo. A storage room. Chocolate-covered strawberries in a private lounge at eleven o'clock at night in a hotel neither of us was paying for.
I moved to the bar. Poured two bourbons—the good stuff, the twenty-year, because whoever had stocked this bar had done so with the understanding that the people drinking from it would know the difference.
I poured them neat, because Lou drank neat, and I'd noticed, and noticing felt like something I wanted to keep doing.
I handed her one. Our fingers touched on the glass. Brief. Electric. A reminder that the current was still live, even with clothes on and food between us.
We settled into the leather chairs by the fire.
The bourbon was exceptional—deep, complex, the kind that opened in stages as it warmed on your tongue.
I drank it slowly. Lou drank hers slowly, too, and I could see her doing the thing she did—analyzing it, tasting it not just as a drink but as a product, as a process, as a thing that had been made by someone who understood what they were doing.