Chapter 6: One A.M.

Jarrett didn't say a word on the drive home.

His knuckles were white on the wheel for forty minutes.

Odessa went to her guest house with her secret whiskey under one arm.

She gave us both a look that said to be adults.

I tried to sleep and could not.

At one in the morning I came down to the kitchen in his old black t-shirt, which hung to my knees.

He was at the table in the dark.

He had the bid in front of him and a glass of water he hadn't touched.

"You can't prove you exist," I said.

"What?"

"That's what he whispered to me."

"I heard it," Jarrett said.

"You were behind me."

"I'm not deaf."

I filled a glass at the sink and drank it standing up.

My hands were shaking, and it wasn't fear.

I had stood in a room of four hundred people and said the true thing out loud.

For the first time in three years, the thing in my chest wasn't shame.

It was heat.

I put the glass down and turned around.

He was watching me.

The kitchen was dark except for the light over the stove, and it turned his shaved head to bronze.

I had stuck the contract to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a cow.

NOTHING IN THIS AGREEMENT OBLIGES EITHER OF US TO TOUCH THE OTHER.

I tore it off the door.

I held it up so he could see.

"It says nothing obliges us," I said.

"It does."

"Nothing obliges me to stand here and not touch you."

His grey eyes didn't move off my face.

"No," he said, very low. "It doesn't."

I dropped the paper and crossed the kitchen.

He stood as I reached him, and he was so tall that I had to tip my head all the way back.

I put both hands flat on his chest, over the henley, over a heart going as hard as mine.

"I'm angry," I said.

"I know."

"I want to do something about it."

"Then do it," he said.

I went up on my toes and kissed him.

It was nothing like the courthouse.

His mouth opened under mine, and he made a rough sound in his throat that went straight down my spine and lit between my legs.

His hand found the back of my head and held it.

I dragged his henley up with both fists, and he let me.

I put my mouth on the hot skin of his stomach and then his chest, and he swore softly.

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