With a frown, she put her purse back down and stood, waving her hand at Mike and Dylan, who both followed her lead and soon Mike found himself sitting next to Dylan, who plopped on the couch with a poof that made Mike cough a bit, flour now sprinkling his forearm. He gave Dylan a c’mon, are you kidding me? look.
“What? I get artistic in the kitchen.” Dylan self-consciously wiped his face, looked at his palms, and grimaced at the white powder.
“You cook like a four year old with an Easy Bake oven and a fan.”
“Hey!” Laura said firmly. “Me. Remember me?” Sheepish, they both had the sense to dip their heads before giving her their eyes. Mike suppressed an urge to shove Dylan. Unfortunately, Dylan had the impulse control of Bill Clinton in a room full of interns and couldn’t hold back his nudge. Mike simmered. Not worth it. Not worth it. Not worth it.
His eyes settled on Laura.
Worth it.
Dylan blinked, his eyelashes white. “Yes.” His voice came out like silk. “Of course we do.”
“Then shut up and stop the childish crap and hear me out.” She wasn’t angry now—her voice was preternaturally calm, and it creeped Mike out. Like she was detaching. Detaching not in some Buddhist sense, but detaching from them. From the relationship. From the possibility of what he knew, deep inside, was achievable.
So that creepy feeling needed to be respected.
And so did Laura.
“You know that what you did was wrong. You know that you should have told me.” Ah, here it comes, he thought. Good. Let’s get this out in the open so we can deal with it like adults.
“We don’t need to talk about this right now,” Dylan jumped in. Mike’s hands twitched. If he strangled him would it be justifiable homicide? Instead he shoved him, hard, and stepped on his foot.
“Ow! Hey! What was that about?” Dylan crossed his leg up and massaged his instep. More flour. Jesus.
Mike gestured toward Laura while disdainfully brushing flour off his arm, carefully aiming it toward Dylan. “Let the lady talk.”
A grateful look from Laura was his reward. “We do need to talk about it. Now. So settle down there, buckaroo.”
Both men flinched, Mike’s entire body turning into a lightning rod during a storm, directing all the electricity in the air through his nose, making his scalp stand on fire. Dylan just gawked at her, wide-eyed.
Instantly on alert, she seemed to realize something had happened, but Mike knew she wouldn’t understand. “Did I just say something wrong?” she asked.
He leaned forward, wishing he could touch her, soothe her. Knowing he couldn’t. Not yet. “No, no. Nothing wrong. It’s just—that’s what Jill used to call Dylan when he was, well, when he just was. Buckaroo. We haven’t heard it in nearly two years.”
That face. Her cheekbones were so perfect, soft curves blunting hard bone, her eyes serene, questioning, and hard all at once, brows knitted in confusion and wariness, in something more— a look of evaluation, of surmising what was critical and worth knowing, to apply to some emotional calculus he didn’t understand.
Buckaroo.
How one word could so easily change everything. Dylan swallowed so hard Mike could feel the click in his throat, and then he realized he had to break the tension, he had to make this all make sense, because Laura and Dylan weren’t going to do it. All those years of Jill and Dylan carrying the emotional water in the relationship had made him stale. Soft. Lazy.
Time to step up.
Literally. He stood, took two steps and reached for her shoulder. The sweater was warm, she was warm and soft, and she smelled like something sweet, a vanilla-scented perfume that made half the words fall out of his head before he could say them, replaced by a desire to embrace her and just stand there, bathed in her. Warmed by her.
Holding back that impulse was 100 times harder than not shoving Dylan had been. “Laura, it’s fine.” She tipped her face up, head at an angle, eyebrows up and questioning. Is it really? her face seemed to ask.
“I know,” she answered. He froze. Expecting to comfort her, to reassure her, instead she came out with the one answer he’d least expected, the one answer that made his heart swell and his mind nearly crack in half. For Laura knew herself far better than he had ever imagined.
And that made this all the more compelling.
“If there is any hope here,” she said, talking to him but also giving her eyes equally to Dylan, who now stood next to Mike, “we need to get two things straight.”
They nodded.
“No more lies. None. That doesn’t mean we need to spill everything about ourselves into one big baggage pile-up right here and right now—”