He chuckled. “Not so much.”
“I think your circumstances were pretty...unusual.”
“Maybe,” he said.
Her eyes fell to his hands, the way they wrapped around the beer bottle. They were scarred, rough looking. Workingman’s hands.
“When do your cattle come?”
“Next couple of weeks,” he responded. “Just about got my fence ready.”
“Good,” she said.
She didn’t know what else to say.
Suddenly she wanted to say more. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to put her hand out and cover his.
She wanted to find a connection between the two of them that was more than just words.
He cleared his throat and knocked the rest of his beer back. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, Pansy,” he said, standing up.
“Oh,” she said. “Are you...”
“Just figured I’d let you get on with it. You didn’t come here to talk to me. See you around the homestead.”
He tipped his hat to her, and walked over toward the jukebox. Someone had put a few quarters in, and Garth was singing about the friends he had in low places, which was bringing people up from the tables and out onto the little makeshift dance area.
A couple of the girls that had been talking to Logan broke away and went toward West, one of them reaching out and brushing her hand over his chest.
Pansy’s ears burned.
It was easy for that girl to touch West. She just reached right out and did it, and Pansy sat there frozen, her hand welded to her beer bottle like it was a claw.
He took hold of the girl who had touched him, and she giggled as he pulled her up against his body and spun her out onto the dance floor. Pansy looked at those big hands holding the other woman’s hips and something burned in her heart that she didn’t feel all that often, but she recognized all the same.
The ache to be held by arms she knew would never hold her.
It was so different this time than it had been when she was a girl. So much so that she felt guilty calling it the same thing. But it was.
She felt lonely. Bitterly so. Sitting in this room full of people, watching West touch that other woman so effortlessly. Watching her touch him back, smiling big and bright and easy, not at all worried what people might say or do if they saw her with him.
Isn’t that just an excuse at this point?
She gritted her teeth against that internal comment.
It was a valid enough excuse. Things were different for women. And things were different for her because she was local. She had to watch what she said, and watch what she did. She had to be mindful of everything all the time.
But right about now the only thing she was mindful of was the deep ache inside of her chest. Blinking hard, she got up from the table and walked out of the bar alone. Going out drinking had not been a very good idea. She was leaving in worse shape than when she’d arrived, and she didn’t know how to untangle all the emotions inside of her. And she wished to God that she just could make them all go away. That she could find a way so to just not have them.
But she had wished that off and on since childhood, and she had yet to find a way to make it so.
So she would just do what she always did.
Find a way to deal with it herself.
Because eventually that ache would fade. That loneliness. It wouldn’t go away, but it wouldn’t be the only thing she felt, not for too long at a time.
So she would find solace in that. Since she wouldn’t allow herself to find solace in West.
* * *
WHEN HE LOOKED up again she was gone. He had walked away from her for good reason. Because sitting at that table in that quiet little corner, it had been easy for him to forget all the reasons he wasn’t going to go there. Most especially with her brother—or whatever he was—in the room. But then he had gone over, and the touch of the woman he was currently dancing with had failed to spark even a quarter of the interest that a mere glance from Pansy managed to conjure up. And he didn’t know what he had expected her to do, but he hadn’t expected her to leave.
“Thanks for the dance,” he said to his partner. “I gotta go.”
“Why?” she asked, looking petulant.
Well, he felt pretty petulant, come to