Chapter 47
SLOANE
The wind is picking up now that the sun's dropping, and it lifts the corner of the sheet and presses it against my shoulder.
"Sorry." Maggie nods at it. "I just wanted us to be safe from anyone coming up the drive." She forks up a bite of pasta. "After last night, I'm not taking chances."
"Right." I reach back and push the sheet off my shoulder. "Because heaven forbid someone sees two people eating dinner."
"In Duster, two people eating dinner is a news item." Maggie says it lightly but she glances at the drive anyway, a quick check. "There are no secrets here. None. Whatever happens at one end of town is at the other end before the coffee's cold. Ruthie alone could power the grid."
"You don't have to tell me." I spear a tomato. "I'm the most surveilled woman in the Central Valley. I got filmed taking a bus."
Maggie's foot is resting against mine under the table, and she's watching me over the rim of her glass. I don't mind the secrecy at all. Every glance feels stolen, every touch like we're getting away with something. It's exciting and the most alive I've felt in years.
"If anyone asks, I can always say you were reading the Bible to me," Maggie jokes.
I laugh and throw my napkin at her. "Please. I need you to forget that ever happened."
"No chance. That book," she says, "is going to follow you around for the rest of your sentence." She leans back in her chair with a glint in her eyes. "You went to a lot of trouble to read sapphic romance."
"It was the only thing on the shelf that looked interesting."
"Mm-hm. Out of an entire wall of romance, the one you reached for happened to be about lesbians." Maggie sips her wine. "Tell me again how this isn't a sexuality thing." She grins. "Was it research?"
I blush and hate that she can see it. "No amount of research could have prepared me for this." I hold her eyes. "The books skip a lot."
"Do they?" Maggie slides her foot up and down my leg and watches me. I take a sip of wine to cover the fact that my pulse has gone stupid.
"The books didn't warn me about how I'd feel when you do that thing with your foot under the table." I grin. "But I bet you're just as surprised at the fact that we're here. I'm really not your type, am I?"
Maggie nearly chokes on her wine. "Oh, you're really not." She wipes her mouth. "My type is generally someone who lives within an hour's drive, owns sensible clothes, and thinks a big night out is a trivia quiz at Rosie's. Low drama. Low maintenance."
"Low maintenance," I repeat. "Someone who'd never, say, drive a Porsche into a barn."
Maggie shakes her head. "Someone who'd never own a Porsche to begin with. Or friends with helicopters." She rolls her eyes humorously. "I'm still not over the helicopter."
"In my defense, I didn't ask for the helicopter."
"I've never even been in one. So no," she says.
"You're the opposite of my type in every measurable way.
You're high maintenance, you've never composted anything in your life, you cried because the bus didn't come, and you arrived in my life by committing a crime against my animals.
You're a disaster. You're spoiled and take selfies and until recently you didn't even know how to crack an egg. "
I roll my eyes. "That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."
"I'm not finished." She points at me. "You are, on paper, the worst possible woman I could be sitting across from right now."
"And yet."
"And yet." Her voice drops, and the teasing goes out of it. "Here you are and I can't think about anything else but kissing you. It makes no sense at all." She gestures to me. "But I'm guessing I'm not your type either. Taking the fact that I'm a woman out of this occasion."
"No, you're nothing like my type." I prop my chin on my hand.
"My type wears loafers with no socks and talks about his portfolio.
My type 'summers.' My type would last about three seconds in that pig barn before calling his assistant.
" I look her over. "I go for tall, expensive, and allergic to commitment.
Men who can't be trusted to hold a houseplant alive, let alone a relationship.
You'd probably remember my birthday and frankly, that's alarming. "
Maggie turns her glass by the stem, watching it instead of me.
"Part of me knows you'll come to your senses.
To look at all this —" she nods at the sheet, the chipped plates "— and realize it isn't you.
That has to be in there somewhere. The part that's wondering what the hell you're doing on a date with the woman who runs a sanctuary in Duster. "
I consider the question seriously, as it deserves a serious answer.
"I keep waiting to feel like I'm doing something wrong," I say.
"Or pretending, or performing, the way I used to perform everything.
The right boyfriend, the right party, the right outfit for the camera.
But it's not happening. I feel more like myself when I'm with you.
" I look up. "That's the part that scares me.
Not the woman thing. This part. How easy it is. "
Maggie swallows hard. "It scares me too," she says. "For different reasons."
"Because I'm leaving."
"We're not doing that tonight," she says. "Tonight there's no LA and no calendar and no probation officer." She reaches across the table and her fingers find mine. "Tonight there's just this, us. If we think about the consequences, we might as well part ways now."
I look at her hand in mine, then meet her eyes. We don't share a hobby, or a city, or a tax bracket. She built something beautiful with her hands. The only thing I built is a follower count full of stupid selfies. I have nothing in common with her and probably never will.
If she'd passed me in LA I wouldn't have noticed her.
I'd have looked straight through a woman in a plain linen shirt and gone on with my day, never knowing what I'd missed.
I only found her because I was sentenced to find her.
What are the odds, of all the people in the world, that the judge sent me to the one person who could give me butterflies?
There's a word for this, but I don't believe in it. Or didn't. I'm less sure now.
Maggie's thumb moves once across the back of my hand and I come back to myself.
"Maggie," I whisper.
"Mm."
"Can we go inside?"