him. Could almost see her, looking up at these exact same stars from just a few miles away.
I could go over there, he thought.
The possibility dangled before him, tantalizing. He could picture himself walking around to the front of the house, shivering a little in the cold—as he was starting to do now. Crunching across the trampled, frozen slush in the yard, unlocking the Subaru and warming his hand over the heat vents. Driving into town, to Paula on her porch, looking up at the stars. She could take his hand, take him inside ...
He tingled all over at the possibilities of where that might lead.
His hand hesitated over the buttons. Can I come over? He had only to ask.
Then Paula's next text chimed in: Okay, I'm freezing my patootie off out here. Bed now. Early day.
Yeah, he texted back. The disappointment was keen, but at the same time there was a pleasant anticipation, a Christmas-morning kind of eagerness. Some things were better for waiting. Not seeing her for so long made the entire idea of it desperately pleasing. Right now he felt that he could have basked for days in a single look from her clear blue eyes, drowned in the smell of her hair. He was drowning just thinking about it, in the most pleasant possible way.
I'm really looking forward to this weekend, he texted.
There was a pause that went on long enough for him to wonder if she'd gone to bed, but maybe she was just going inside and taking her coat off, because just when he was about to go inside himself, she texted back, Me too.
As it turned out, even if Paula hadn't invited him to the winter carnival (although he couldn't wait to see her again), Dan wouldn't have had a choice anyway. The kids were wildly excited. There was not even a question of not going.
Somehow it hadn't actually occurred to him that it was going to be a family outing until Gaby stamped into her boots and started bundling Mina into a puffy snowsuit.
"I can take them, if you want a quiet afternoon to yourselves," Dan offered.
He'd started to feel comfortable at the Ruger house to an extent that he wouldn't have thought possible just a week or two ago. He was learning the ropes of both the barn chores and the household routine. The pets had warmed up to him—there were actually four cats, though most of them lived in the barn and were half-wild, glimpsed only from a distance. And the kids had decided he was their new favorite thing, an entire adult of their very own that they could pester as much as they wanted.
Gaby glanced up, smiling, from zipping up Mina's snowsuit. "It's fine. The Keegans will be there too, and I haven't seen Tessa in a while. Mina loves playing with Skye."
"Skee!" Mina declared, as she looked up from fiddling with her snowsuit's dangly wrist snaps.
"In fact," Derek said, turning around from putting ice skates in a bag, "if you want the day off, this would be a good time for it."
"He's right," Gaby said. She fluffed Mina's hair and stood up. "You don't always have to be on duty. You could just have an evening to yourself, drink some beer, watch TV, maybe even go out to a bar or something if you want to."
Dan laughed. "What, and miss the biggest thing to happen in Autumn Grove for the entire month of January? I'd have to be out of my mind."
What he really would have missed, of course, was Paula's warm smile and sparkling eyes. He was wrong, the texts were no substitute. Just the idea of seeing her today was driving him out of his mind.
"There's not going to be room in the Subaru for all of us," Derek said.
"Dan can drive my car," Gaby suggested. "Sandy could go with him. You want that, Sandy?"
"Yeah!" Sandy enthused.
Driving Gaby's little hatchback on the icy winter roads was more challenging than the all-wheel-drive Subaru. Dan followed Derek and Gaby, since he had no idea where they were going, fielding Sandy's enthusiastic chatter until they turned off the main highway past a sign reading GARBER PARK.
In the late afternoon sunshine, it was abundantly clear that this was, indeed, one of the town's big events. The small parking lot had already overflowed, and there were cars parallel parked on both sides of the winding road leading into the park. Dan shimmied into a parking spot a few cars down