An Understated Dominance novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Diner

The Silver Spur was a truck stop diner on Colfax with a neon cowboy in the window.

Its pie case rotated slowly under a buzzing light.

I picked it because I'd never been there.

He had never been there either, and for the first time in seven years we sat across a table with nothing to compare it to.

A waitress with a pencil behind her ear dropped two laminated menus on the table.

"Coffee?" she said.

"Please," we said together.

She rolled her eyes and left.

"So," Colter said. "Thea. Tell me about yourself."

"I design backpacks."

"I got that."

"And I'm thirty-two, and I'm very good at being angry."

"I've noticed."

"What about you?"

"I make chairs," he said. "I'm thirty-six. I used to be a claims adjuster, and I'm between jobs."

"That's a terrible opener."

"Is it working?"

"It's absolutely working."

The waitress came back with the coffee.

I ordered a patty melt, and he ordered the meatloaf.

She wrote it down without looking at either of us.

"Do you know what's funny?" I said. "I have no idea what your favorite food is."

"Meatloaf."

"Since when?"

"Since forever. You never ate it, so I never cooked it."

"You gave up meatloaf for six years."

"I gave up a lot of things. I thought it made me easy to live with."

"You were impossible to live with."

"I know," he said, grinning. "I was so quiet."

I laughed so hard that I snorted coffee.

A trucker at the counter turned around, saw me wiping my nose, and turned back.

We ate.

He asked me real questions, one after another, in his low unhurried voice.

What was my first job?

Did I want children?

Why had I never taken a vacation?

I answered because he had never asked.

I told him that my mother had worked two jobs and still lost the house.

I told him that I'd built Fieldwell on the stubborn certainty that nobody would ever make me that afraid again.

He listened without fixing anything.

When I finished he reached across the table, and his fingers closed over mine.

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