12. Penny
PENNY
Five minutes to seven and I’ve worn a groove into my own living room floor.
Thunder watches me from the couch, head propped on his paws, dark eyes tracking my path from the window to the hallway mirror and back again like he’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. I wish I could tell him. I wish I understood it myself.
I smooth the front of my dress for the tenth time, a soft green thing I bought on a whim two years ago and never had an occasion to wear.
My mirror shows a woman who spent forty minutes deciding whether her hair should be up or down, then put it up, then took it down, then finally left it down because up felt like trying too hard, and either way I’m mortified at myself for caring this much.
He’s a criminal. I remind myself of that fact like it’s new information, like I haven’t spent a year filing reports that circle his club’s business without ever quite landing on proof.
You investigate men like him for a living.
My body doesn’t seem to care about the badge in my nightstand drawer. My body’s been thinking about the way he looked at me, steady and unblinking, like he’d already decided something and was just waiting for me to catch up.
Headlights sweep across my front window at three minutes to seven, and my stomach drops the way it used to right before a big game, right before I’d watch him take a hit that should’ve put him on the ground and get right back up instead.
I peek through the curtain.
A truck. Not the bike.
Relief hits me harder than I expect, sharp and immediate, because I am absolutely not ready to be pressed up against him on two wheels tonight, thighs bracketing his hips, my dress riding up in a way that would leave nothing to the imagination.
The truck is safer. The truck gives us both a little distance.
Small mercies.
He knocks before I’ve even finished breathing out, two solid raps against the door, and I don’t make him wait. I pull it open, because standing there staring at a closed door feels somehow worse than facing him head-on.
Evan stands on my porch in dark jeans and a black button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, ink climbing out from under the fabric, rings catching the porch light.
His hair’s still damp at the edges like he showered right before driving over, and the stubble along his jaw has that deliberate roughness men his age either can’t be bothered to shave or know exactly what it does to a woman when they don’t.
His eyes drag down the length of me slow enough that I feel it everywhere his gaze touches—my collarbone, the curve of my waist, the hem of the dress skimming my knees—and when his eyes finally climb back up to my face, something dark and pleased settles into his expression.
“You ready?” he asks, voice low enough that Thunder’s ears perk up behind me.
“Yes.” The word comes out steadier than I feel. My pulse is doing something ridiculous, hammering against my throat like I’m seventeen again and he’s picking me up for prom instead of a man I suspect of grand theft and armed robbery I can’t prove.
“You look beautiful, Penny.”
I don’t have a response for that, so I grab my purse off the hook by the door and let him walk me to the truck instead, his hand hovering near my elbow but never quite touching, like he’s giving me the choice.
I take the choice. I let my arm brush his on the way down the steps.
The truck smells like leather and something citrusy he must’ve put on tonight, cologne instead of the usual motor oil and cigarettes I remember from years ago.
He opens my door before I can reach for it myself, waits until I’m settled before he shuts it, and the whole thing feels absurdly formal for a man who used to lift me over his tailgate by the waist without asking.
“Where are we going?” I ask once he’s pulled out of my driveway.
“The Depot.”
My eyebrows climb. “The Depot? That place has a two-week waiting list.”
“Not tonight.” He doesn’t elaborate, just keeps his eyes on the road, one hand loose on the wheel, and I decide I don’t actually want to know what favor got called in or what threat got implied to clear a table on a Friday night at the nicest restaurant in Briar Fork.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Wanted to.” He glances over, quick, and the porch light’s long gone, but I can still feel the weight of that look. “Figured you deserved better than the diner.”
“I like the diner.”
“I know you do.” Something in his voice softens. “I remember.”
We don’t talk much the rest of the drive, but it isn’t the bad kind of quiet. It’s the kind that used to sit between us in his truck two decades ago, back when neither of us needed to fill every silence with words because we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.
The Depot used to be exactly what its name suggests—an old railroad depot from the boom years, brick and timber, with the original ticket window still built into one wall like a museum piece nobody had the heart to tear out.
Somebody with money and vision turned it into the closest thing Briar Fork has to fine dining, white tablecloths and low lighting and a wine list that takes longer to read than my last vacation lasted.
The hostess seats us at a table near the back, tucked half behind a support beam, and I suspect Evan requested it. Not hidden, exactly. Just not front and center where every set of eyes in the place has a clear shot.
Doesn’t matter. I still catch two separate couples doing double takes on their way to the restroom, and I know exactly what they’re seeing—Officer Carpenter, out of uniform, sitting across from a Wicked Sinner with more ink than a man ought to have and rings on every finger.
By morning, half the department’s going to have heard about this.
“You’re doing that thing,” Evan says, watching me over the top of the wine list.
“What thing?”
“Checking the exits. Counting who’s watching us.” He sets the list down. “You’ve done it since you sat down.”
I shrug. “Occupational hazard.”
“Or you’re nervous.”
“Maybe both.” I let myself smile, because there’s no point pretending otherwise with a man who’s known me since I was fourteen. “This is a small town, Evan. People talk.”
“Let them.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have a badge and people’s expectations hanging over you.”
“No.” He leans back, and something wry pulls at his mouth. “I’ve got a cut people expect other things from. Trust me, sweetheart, whatever they’re saying about you sitting here with me, they’ve been saying worse about me for twenty years.”
That gets a real laugh out of me, unexpected and a little too loud for the room, and the waiter arrives at exactly that moment to save me from whatever else might’ve slipped out of my mouth.
Evan orders a bottle of red I don’t recognize, something expensive by the way the waiter’s eyebrows lift, and once the man walks away, Evan’s attention comes right back to settle on me like I’m the only thing in the room worth looking at.
“So,” he says. “Seventeen years.”
“Seventeen years,” I agree.
“Where do we even start with that?”
I trace the stem of my glass, buying myself a second. “You could tell me why you never came looking for me.”
Something flickers across his face, fast, gone before I can name it. “I did. Once.”
My chest goes tight. “You didn’t.”
“Drove out to that address you gave your mama before you left. Sat outside for an hour trying to figure out what I was going to say.” He shrugs, like it costs him nothing to admit it, though I can see it does. “Never got out of the truck. Figured if you wanted found, you would’ve left a number.”
I didn’t. I know exactly why I didn’t, and it has everything to do with how much easier it was to convince myself I’d made the right choice if I never gave him the chance to talk me out of it.
“I thought about calling,” I admit. “A hundred times, probably. Never did it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I knew what you’d say.” I meet his eyes, steady, because if we’re doing this, I’m not doing it halfway. “And I knew I’d believe you.”
The wine arrives before either of us can pick that apart further, and I’m grateful for it, grateful for the small ceremony of the pour, the way it gives us both something to do with our hands besides reach across the table.
We order—steak for him, fish for me—and somewhere between the first glass and the second, the conversation stops feeling like an interrogation and starts feeling like something else entirely.
He tells me about Lucy’s baby, about Stray checking the baby’s breathing every five minutes, and I laugh so hard I have to set my fork down.
I tell him about Thunder, about the ridiculous drama he makes out of squirrels, and Evan grins in a way that makes him look eighteen again, like no time at all has passed since we used to sit on his truck’s tailgate arguing about nothing just to hear each other talk.
“You remember the homecoming bonfire?” he asks, halfway through his steak, wine loosening something in his voice. “Junior year. You wore that ridiculous scarf even though it was eighty degrees out.”
“It wasn’t ridiculous.”
“It had tassels, Penny.”
“It was fashionable.”
“It looked like something died on your neck.” He’s grinning now, easy, unguarded in a way I haven’t seen since we were kids, and something in my chest aches at how familiar it feels, how much like coming home after being lost for longer than I want to admit.
“I kept it, you know. That scarf. You left it in my truck.”
I blink. “You did not.”
“Box in my closet. Old ticket stubs, a couple of your hair ties, that scarf.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, like a grown man keeping a box of teenage memories for seventeen years is a perfectly normal thing to admit over dinner. “Never had a reason to throw it out.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I drink my wine instead, and across the table Evan watches me do it with an expression I can’t quite name—soft around the edges, hungry underneath, as if he’s trying to decide whether I’ll let him kiss me later.
By the time the plates clear and my second glass is half gone, I’ve laughed more than I have in months, and somewhere in the last two hours I stopped thinking about my job or the club he belongs to. I stopped thinking about Diesel entirely.
It’s just Evan. Just us, the way it used to be, before things got in the way.
He pays the check before I can even reach for my purse, waves off my protest with a look that dares me to argue, and when we walk back out into the cool night air, his hand finds the small of my back like it belongs there, like it never left.
“I’ll take you home,” he says, opening the truck door for me.
Something in the way he says it makes my pulse stutter, because it doesn’t sound like the end of anything. It sounds like a beginning, patient and certain, the same way he used to say things when he already knew how the night was going to go and was just waiting for me to admit I knew it too.
I climb into the truck, and the whole drive back, I already know how this ends. I know I’m not just going to thank him at my door and send him off into the dark like a man I barely know.
Seventeen years, and he still looks at me like nothing ever changed. Like we’re still those two kids on the back of a truck, certain the whole world was going to bend around whatever we wanted badly enough.
God help me, I want to believe it too.