Page 93 of At First Dance
“Where are we going?”
He tips his head toward the door, eyes gone midnight. “To park my truck in the back pasture and let the sky do the talking.”
The back field is a dark bowl edged in trees, the creek murmuring somewhere beyond the grass. Fireflies pulsing like slow applause. He kills the engine and climbs into the bed, then offers a hand and hauls me up like I weigh nothing. The quilt spreads, and we stretch out. He’s thought ahead—two Mason jars with sweet tea, a paper bag with peach hand pies tucked inside. Wooing, Wright-style.
“You brought dessert?” I tease.
“Insurance,” he says, arranging the jar near my shoulder. “In case my star lecture bores you.”
“It won’t.” Because he could read a tractor manual in that voice and I’d still show up.
He points out familiar shapes—handle, belt, hunter and dog—and the ones I never learned. “That smudge there? The Milky Way. We only get it on the clearest nights.” His fingers trace the air, not touching me, and still I feel the line down the center of me go warm.
“Make a wish,” I say.
He’s quiet for a long moment. “Not a wish,” he answers. “A plan.”
I turn on my side, pillow my head on his shoulder. “Tell me.”
He slides his palm to my waist and rests it there like an anchor. “Plan: I stop shutting down when I’m scared. Plan: I tell you when I’m angry before I weaponize silence. Plan: I take you on actual dates—not just hauling hay and calling it quality time.”
“What kind of dates?”
“Picnic at the creek. Sunday sunrise in the flatbed. Dance on the back porch to whatever song you want, even if you make me count.” A beat. “Skinny-dip at midnight if you’re braver than me.”
I laugh against his shoulder. “I am.”
“I know.” He smiles, small and real, then sobers. “And I learn the ways to look after you that matter. The practical ones—the meds in the truck, the shade when it’s too hot. And the other ones—the coffee the way you like it, the quiet when you need it, the noise when you don’t.”
My throat goes thick. “Rowan…”
“Say the thing,” he reminds me softly.
“Okay.” I breathe. “I’m scared too. I’ve been managed more than I’ve been loved. I don’t always trust my own instincts. But when I’m with you, I feel… right-sized. Like I’m allowed to be a person first. I want more of that. With you.”
His hand tightens at my waist—just once. “Good,” he says, and the word lands like a vow.
The night settles. Crickets. Creek. Our breathing in time. He turns his face, finds my mouth with a kiss that’s unhurried and sure. Not a grab. Not a dare. A promise. He kisses me like we have time, like we’re going to use it well.
When we finally part, he presses his forehead to mine, voice low. “You deserve more than a man who flinches at his own feelings. I’m not flinching.”
“So noted.”
We lie there until the quilt dampens with dew, until the jars are empty and the hand pies are crumbs. He points out onelast star. I name it ours, to hear him scoff and then relent. On the drive back, his hand finds my knee and rests there. At the fork in the path—left to the house, right to the cottage—we stop where the two pools of porch light almost touch.
“Left?” he asks, not assuming.
“Left,” I say, and he smiles like a man who has decided to let himself be happy.
Inside, he flips on the lamp. No storm cloud, no retreat. He hooks a finger in my sweater hem and tugs me into the kitchen for one more slow turn to a song only we can hear. And when he kisses me good night, it’s with the same certainty as the stars: steady, simple, bright enough to steer by.
Chapter Eighteen – Rowan
The morning feels off-balance before I even open my eyes, like the house shifted half an inch in the night and none of the floorboards told me. I reach to the right out of habit and catch an armful of cold sheet. The space she’s been warming for a week—gone. Not gone-gone, just… up before me. Which shouldn’t rattle me. It does.
Coffee drifts down the hall the same way fog lifts off the creek—slow, patient, inevitable. I pull on sweats and the first T-shirt on the chair, scrub a hand over my jaw, and walk toward the smell.
She’s there. Barefoot. My hoodie sleeves shoved to her elbows, hair knotted up like she did it in the dark and didn’t care if a halo fell out of it. She knows where the mugs live now. The filter. The drawer that sticks. She moves around my kitchen like she’s always had the map.
