Page 18 of Cruel Summer

“Where did you learn to… I didn’t…” She stopped talking when she met his eyes, which might as well have been two chips of ice.

So cold, when his body was so…hot.

“You really want to talk about where I learned to dance?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“That guy could be an axe murderer,” he said, his voice hard.

“I don’t think he was.”

“So confident?”

“You don’t get a lot of Jonathans in khakis committing serial murders.” She laughed. “Jonathans in khakis who are also real estate agents.”

Suddenly his stern face shifted and he laughed, but just a little. “A real estate agent. Wow, Sam.”

“We were just dancing,” she said.

“Nobody dances at places like this just to dance.”

The air between them seemed to contract, and she looked away. “I do. I did. I never got to do that. I never…”

She was unbearably aware of his hand holding hers. It was rough. Much rougher than she’d imagined—not that she’d imagined how his hands were. His hold around her waist was tight, and suddenly dancing seemed like an absurd thing people did.

With strangers. With friends.

Why did they do it?

She would never hold his hand walking down the street. Would never let him wrap his arm around her. But put them chest to chest and set it to music and it was supposed to be just fine?

“I’ve never done this,” she finished, the words a whisper. “We never went out dancing.”

“What a fucking idiot.”

She looked up at him. “It’s not Will’s fault. It’s like, we were never into that kind of thing. You know, when we were kids and in youth group and stuff, that was all associated with partying . We went to the school dances, but after that…no. Then when we were older, we had kids anyway.”

“Did you ever ask him to take you?”

She shook her head. “I was fine without it. I only did it tonight because he asked me, and I wondered why I never did it.” She looked up at him. “There are so many things that I just never did, so it never occurred to me that I could start if I felt like it.”

She wanted to look away from him. But she couldn’t. His eyes were glittering blue in the dim lighting, and she was forced to take in the differences between him and the man she’d been dancing with before.

He was taller. Broader. Harder.

It was like being held against a mountain with fire at its core.

A volcano.

Everyone knew a volcano was dangerous.

Yet here she was. Pressed against the masculine equivalent.

She felt his fingers move where he was holding her, his palm on her lower back. She was acutely aware of the shift. Of the way his calloused skin caught against the silken fabric of her dress.

Her breath caught in her throat in response.

She couldn’t not think of him as a man.

Jonathan had been a symbol. Of a moment, a rebellion, an opportunity. An experience.

Logan was a man.

She’d watched the way women acted with him.

She’d…

He gripped her hand just a bit tighter. His thumb moved over her knuckles. That didn’t seem like a strictly necessary part of the dance.

The song ended, and she stepped back on an exhale.

“Okay, I’m tired. I didn’t get a nap in earlier,” she said.

He looked at her long and hard. “All right, we’ll head back.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I… Yeah.”

She looked over at the table she’d shared with Jonathan to find it empty, a check with a long white receipt sticking out of the top.

“Let me just make sure he paid,” she said.

She walked over to the table and picked up the little leather bifold and saw that he had indeed paid and signed. She’d found a unicorn. A man who’d actually just been nice for nothing. At least, that was what reading about the dating scene had led her to believe. Not that it had been a date.

“Good to go,” she said, straightening and walking through the courtyard with Logan, keeping a few feet of distance between them.

The car was parked at the far end of the lot.

“Why did you…why did you come here? Did you need to order dinner or…”

“I came because you said you were here. I didn’t like the idea of you being here alone.”

“Why?”

“Reasons like the one I walked in one.”

“Me dancing with a perfectly nice man?”

“A stranger.”

“Oh, so all the women you hook up with aren’t strangers?” She hadn’t meant to fire that barb at him, but lord, it had been easy.

As if the years of it had been sitting right there in the back of her mind. The memories of him at a few weddings they’d all been at, him and the bachelorette party girl on Orcas Island. The stories her own husband told.

His admittance of occasional debauchery.

“It’s different and you know it.”

“Every woman who has sex with you is praying to the gods you aren’t a serial killer looking for a new flesh suit, so the fact that you think it’s okay for those women to go out and determine their own risk level but it isn’t okay for me smacks of penile hypocrisy.

” She laughed. “And I am sick to death of that.”

“It is different,” he said, “because you’re you. Samantha, you haven’t left the damned house in twenty years.”

“I have! I’ve been on plenty of vacations. You’ve…” She stopped herself. She had to stop herself. “I’ve left my house, you condescending dick.”

“With Will. With the kids. With protection. You haven’t been out on your own, and I feel like you need the same damned primer on safety that my nineteen-year-old does.”

She took a step back, fury making her inarticulate.

“I… I am not nineteen. I am not a kid. I am a grown woman, and I know what happens out here in the big bad world. I am not naive enough to believe a man in a restaurant in Flagstaff, Arizona, is my soulmate because he bought me three margaritas and some chicken nachos.”

He let out a short, one-note laugh. “Well, good to know.”

They stopped in front of the car, in front of the passenger’s door, and he reached out and opened it. “Get in.”

She replayed the words that she’d just said out loud back in her head. “Well, and I have a soulmate, so even if he bought me a whole tequila factory, he wouldn’t be my soulmate. So we’re clear.”

He just stared at her for a long moment, the competing light from the full moon, white and ambient, clashing with the pink neon coming from the restaurant, chiseling sharp angles in his already sculpted face.

“Get in the car, Sam.”

She could fight him, but why?

He was mad at her, but why?

She was a lot madder at him than she should have been.

So she got in the car and let him drive the two minutes back to the motel without making commentary on anything.

“Knock when you’re up,” he said, pulling up to the front of her room.

“No set time?”

“No.”

She got out of the car. “See you tomorrow.”

Then she walked to her room, used the key card to get inside, and closed the door behind her, the relative silence pressing in on her. She could still hear road noise. The sound of the pipes. What she hoped was a TV in the room next door.

She focused on those things, on those sounds, as she got ready for bed.

Anything except focusing on what had happened tonight.

On the truth that was just beneath the surface of it all, waiting for her to unearth it.

Instead, she got into bed and pulled the covers over her head.