“Sorry?”
“I should have spoken up back there. Waved or something.”
“Oh.”
He came closer, so close she could feel the warmth emanating from him and smell the trace scent of wheat.
“I understand, Rafe. She’s lovely.”
“Gia Composto. Our parents decided we would marry before we could walk.” He leaned closer. She felt his warm breath on her cheek.
“I dreamed about you,” he said in a rush.
“Y-you did?”
He nodded, looking a little embarrassed.
She felt as if she’d just edged toward a cliff; below was a fall that could break her bones. His look, his voice. She stared into his eyes, which were dark as night and soulful and just a little sad, although what he could possibly have to be sad about, she couldn’t imagine.
“Meet me tonight,” he said. “Midnight. At the old Steward barn.”
* * *
ELSA LAY IN BED, fully dressed.
She shouldn’t go. That much was obvious. The bruise on her jaw had healed, but the mark of it remained beneath the surface. Good women did not do the thing Rafe had asked of her.
She heard her parents come home, climb the stairs, open and close their bedroom door down the hall.
The bedside clock read 9:40.
Elsa lay there, breathing shallowly, as the house quieted.
Waiting.
She shouldn’t go.
It didn’t matter how frequently she said it in her head, because not once, not for one moment, had she considered following her own advice.
At eleven-thirty, she got out of bed. The room was still stiflingly hot, but her window looked out on the Great Plains night sky. Her childhood portal to adventure. How often had she stood at this window and sent her dreams into those unknown universes?
She opened the window and climbed out onto the metal flower trellis. It seemed as if she were crawling into the starlit sky itself.
When she dropped onto the thick grass, she paused, waited nervously to be detected, but no lights came on inside. She crept over to the side of the house and retrieved one of her sisters’ old bicycles. Climbing aboard, she pedaled out to the road and down Main Street and out of town.
The world at night was big and lonesome in a way that locals had become used to, illuminated only by starlight, pinpricks of white in a dark world. There were no homes out here, nothing but darkness for miles.
She pulled up to the old barn and dismounted, setting her bicycle in the blanket of buffalo grass beside the road.
He wouldn’t show up.
Of course he wouldn’t.
She could remember every word he’d said to her, few as they were, and every nuance of expression on his face as he spoke. The way his smile started on one side and kind of slid slowly into place. The pale comma of a scar along his jaw, the way one incisor poked out just a little.
I dreamed of you.
Meet me tonight.