I turn.
She's on her porch in a t-shirt and a pair of cutoff sweat shorts and bare feet, and her hair is down. Loose and a little wild, the way it falls when she takes it out of the braid at night.
She's looking at me across the yard. "Rogue."
"Hadley."
She doesn't say anything else for a few seconds. "I saw you walk by."
"I was makin' the rounds."
"Mmhm."
She still doesn't move and I don’t either.
The yard between us is gravel and dust and about forty feet of nothing.
"You headin' inside?" she asks.
"Was."
"All right."
She doesn't say come over.
She doesn't say don't.
She just stands there in her shorts, t-shirt, and her bare feet on her own porch boards, and she looks at me.
I think about Phantom's voice on the phone earlier.Don't wait her out.
My heart's doing something it hasn't done in a long time. I notice it about halfway across. The kind of pounding that lets a man know he's about to do a thing that matters, and that the thing could go either way.
The closer I get to her porch the louder I can hear it.
Forty feet shouldn't take this long to cross. Tonight it's taking the whole length of my life.
I've spent a decade being careful with this woman before I even knew she existed. I've spent two months being careful with her since she got here. And now I'm walking up to her porch in the dark to find out if all that patience was worth a damn—or if I'm about to push her one step too far and watch her step back.
I don't know which it is yet.
I know that if it's the second one—if she takes that step back from me tonight—I'm not going to get a second chance at this. She'll lock that door inside her she just barely opened today, and a man like me doesn't get to knock on it twice.
I climb her porch steps slowly.
She doesn't move. She stays right where she is at the rail with her hand on the wood and her eyes on my face.
I stop two feet in front of her.
The light from her kitchen window is gold and low and lands on her shoulder. Her hair smells like the lavender soap she keeps by her sink.
"What're you doin', Hadley?"
Her eyes don't leave mine. "I don't know. You tell me."
"That's not how this works."
She tilts her chin up half an inch—the same small defiance I saw her give Todd on the porch yesterday morning, only this one isn't for him. This one's for me.