One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of commitment.”

“I’m afraid of rhinestones.”

“What did they ever do to you?” I ask, taking a deep breath and releasing my hair. It sticks to my neck again, but not as badly this time.

“To start with, they’re damned liars,” he says as we walk from the dance floor. His hand finds the small of my back as we move. I wonder if it’s sweaty. If it is, it doesn’t seem like Seth notices.

I step past a hay bale and give him a what are you talking about look.

“Pretending to be diamonds, but what are they, just bits of glass? Plastic?” he goes on. “It’s all trickery and falsehoods.”

“I had no idea you felt so strongly about rhinestones,” I tell him.

“Neither did I,” he admits.

It takes us another ten minutes to leave, because small town square dancing isn’t the sort of event you can simply walk out of unless your house is on fire. Small talk is mandatory, and I think it might actually be a crime in these parts to leave an event without saying goodbye to everyone else in attendance.

Finally, we make it to the coat rack. Seth holds mine while I put it on, dons his own, takes my hand.

Pulls me in the opposite direction of the main door, toward the back of the barn.

“C’mon,” he says, walking toward a door that says EMPLOYEES ONLY. “I want to see your mural.”

“I thought you’d seen it.”

“I didn’t know you’d painted it.”

“Does it matter now that you know?”

Seth nods to the bartender, then pushes open the EMPLOYEES ONLY DOOR and leads me through into a dark room, lit only by a bright green EXIT light.

“And now are we doing espionage?” I ask, blinking in the near dark.

“No, I’ve seen a storage room before,” he says.

We go through the other door, and then we’re out in the cold. I take a deep breath and enjoy it, my coat open and my scarf loose around my neck.

We walk over to the side of the barn, frozen dead grass snapping softly under our feet, cold breeze blowing through my hair, tugging at my skirt. Still casually holding hands even though we’d be warmer if they were in our pockets.

“What are you doing tomorrow night?” he asks, after a moment.

“I’m busy,” I say.

“How busy?”

“Quite.”

“With what?” he asks, looking over at me. He’s frowning slightly, mock-offended.

“I have plans,” I tease. “They don’t concern you.”

“All right, but are they better plans than going to Snowfest in Grotonsville?” he asks.

The last Saturday of every month, the next town over has a wintertime street fair. All the restaurants and shops stay open. There are hot chocolate stands, pie carts, soup vendors, and horse-drawn carriage rides.

“They’re more inescapable,” I tell him, still walking through the grass. “Olivia and Michael are having my whole family over for dinner so they can announce that she’s pregnant.”

“In that case, sounds like you can skip it,” he says.

“But then she’ll never make me the godmother,” I say. “She might even bar me from the baby shower planning committee.”

Seth stops, my hand still in his, and gives me a one-eyebrow-raised look.

“Just kidding, there’s no way she’ll let me off the hook for that,” I say. “What, the four of you didn’t throw an elaborate baby shower for Daniel?”

“We had a party and bought them baby stuff,” he says. “Though Charlie made us promise not to have games or make her open presents in front of everyone.”

I just sigh.

“I like her,” I say.

“How about Sunday?” Seth asks.

“I could make Sunday work.”

“And Monday?”

“You’ve never read a self-help book, have you?” I tease.

We’re on a slight rise, off to the side of the barn, the mural of a frog jumping onto apples lit by floodlights.

“Are you implying that my self needs help?” Seth asks.

“I’m implying that all the books about dating tell you to wait some number of days before asking for another date,” I say. “You don’t want to be too eager. Then your date might think you like them.”

I read a handful of those books early in my detox. I didn’t think much of them.

Seth just snorts.

“Fuck that,” he says. “I like you and I’m eager to go on another date. Tell me about the mural.”

I have absolutely no idea what to say, other than it’s a mural and Marcy commissioned it, and I feel like I’m twenty again and trying my way through art school, feeling like everyone around me had a deep explanation for their abstract triangles that were actually representative of their struggles to come out to their family, and I was over there painting rainbow guinea pigs because I thought they looked nice.

I clear my throat.

“Well,” I begin, pointing at the side of the barn. “That’s a frog, and it’s jumping into that basket of apples. Probably because it likes apples.”