Once More, At Midnight

I know this moment. She’d lived it thirteen summers ago, though without the baseball bat that time. Just sixteen, awake with the thrill of secret love, she had flown outside under the light of this very moon to her lover’s arms. She recognized him now, thought he’d thrown no stones at her window and showed no intention of running eagerly across the lawn to meet her halfway.

Tonight Gus merely watched her as she descended the porch steps and walked toward him slowly, feeling vaguely as if she’d fallen asleep at the table and was dreaming this whole thing.

She walked until she saw his face clearly, stopping a few feet away.

His eyes roamed down her body, taking in the loose, mussed hair, sleeveless nightshirt, bare legs. Then his gaze wandered up again while hers traveled over a muscular frame dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. They studied each other unabashedly, like naked lovers viewing their partners for the first time.

She felt the old heady recklessness that had pumped her full of life every time Gus met her at night—despite rules, despite curfews, despite being too young to deal with any consequences. The struggle to suppress the feeling seemed, rather, to inflame them more. For a moment, she wanted to forget everything, every excellent reason for keeping her distance from him now, and simply fall into a wordless kiss.

The idea that she might be willing to ignore the fact that he had a fiancée repulsed her. She had been a lot of things—selfish, dishonest, shallow at times—but she had never yet been an adulteress.

“You’re trespassing,” she informed Gus in a voice roughened by suppressed emotion.

He glanced to the makeshift weapon in her hand. “You’ve got a bat and a sister who’s the sheriff—you want me gone, do something about it.”

“What are you doing here?”

A long moment passed before Gus answered. She wasn’t sure he was going to respond at all, but then he smiled, and in that second he looked like the old Gus—cocky, irreverent, bad.

“The same thing all ex-cons do, Lilah,” he said in a silky voice intended to travel no farther than her ears. He took three lazy steps toward her, and the glint in his eyes was positively sinful. “I’m returning to the scene of my crime.”

“What crime would that be?” Lilah said, her heart beating against her chest as she strove to appear calmer than she felt. “I thought your crime was drag racing along Main Street.”

“You mean when I crashed my car into Old Man Hertzog’s grocery?” Gus leaned indolently against the doorframe. He crossed his arms, as relaxed as if they chatted about old times every night around midnight. “Not the crime to which I refer,” he said, a corner of his mouth hooking into a half smile. “I’m talking about the crime that happened a couple years earlier than that. The crime of falling for the sheriff’s niece.”

“It’s almost midnight,” she protested, mindful of Sara and Bree asleep—she hoped—upstairs. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I was never supposed to be here. Didn’t bother you before.”

“Seems like stating the obvious to say we’ve both changed since then.” She tugged at the hem of her tank top, ineffectively trying to make it stretch past the short tap pants she slept in during the summer. “What do you want?”

In lieu of answering, he poked his head over hers and looked around the kitchen. “Invite me in, Lilah. Do you know I’ve never seen the inside of this house before?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why? Afraid I won’t like the decor?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come in this late,” she clarified tightly. “My sister…”

The gray eyes she used to get lost in so easily narrowed and turned cold. “Never liked me,” he finished for her. The relaxed smile around his lips tensed—not much, but enough for her to notice. “I have my own shower at home now, and my clothes are almost always clean. I don’t think I’ll offend anyone.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it!” Her face felt hot, but the bare wood of Sara’s kitchen floor sent a chill through her bones.

There was no point in contending that she’d never been offended by him, not by his clothes or his family or by any of the other things that had shamed him in his youth. There was no point, because it wasn’t true.

The first time she’d seen Gus, she’d been curious and a little scared. At the age of ten, she’d moved with her sisters from Seattle, Washington, to Kalamoose, North Dakota. The girls’ parents had died in a plane crash on their way home from a second honeymoon. Up to that time, the Owens sisters had lived a sheltered, gentle life. Raised by parents who had loved each other and adored their children, Lilah and her sisters had had no reason to expect anything but the joy to which they were accustomed. Lilah wasn’t sure about Nettie or Sara, but the accident that took her parents’ lives had changed something in her, something deep and crucial.

She wasn’t sure she could articulate the change even now, as an adult; she certainly hadn’t been able to do it as a child. All she knew was that her parents had left full of happiness, that they’d expected the best from life and had suffered the worst; they’d been torn from their kids, and at some point before they’d died there must have been a moment, a cruel and heartaching moment, when together they’d known, they’d never see their girls again.