Chapter 3 Chapter 3

Wren POV

Roan is still sitting at the edge of the fire pit when I lower myself down next to him, tucking my legs beneath me. The flames throw orange light across the grass, and somewhere behind us the acoustic set from the deck drifts in and out with the breeze. A few sparks lift off the wood and die out before they get anywhere. I like watching them go.

I hand him the bottle and he pops the cap with the edge of his lighter without looking down.

"Thought you were mad at me," he says, taking a long pull before glancing over.

I get why Tyler looked spooked earlier. On paper, Roan reads like trouble built like someone who does actual physical labor for a living, because he does, ink running down both forearms, a jaw that doesn't do much softening. His hair's pulled back tonight, dark and a little too long, the way it gets by the end of a work week. But underneath all of that he's the quietest person I know. Careful with things. Careful with people, even when he's bad at showing it.

"I know you better than that," I say.

"I shouldn't have run him off like that in front of you."

He passes the bottle back and I take a sip I don't particularly want. I've never liked beer. I keep trying it anyway, like eventually my taste buds will catch up with everyone else's. They haven't yet.

"He wasn't my boyfriend."

"No? You seemed pretty into him a few weeks back." A corner of his mouth lifts. "I distinctly remember you telling Mari he had good hands."

"That was before I actually got to know him." I hand the bottle back, our fingers brushing over the cold glass. "There's just nothing there. I don't feel anything. He's fine. He's just nothing."

Roan laughs, short and low, and shakes his head. "Must be going around. That's almost word for word what Sasha said to me last month."

"You two ended things?"

"We weren't really a thing to end. Testing the water, I guess you'd call it." He shrugs, like it costs him nothing, though I don't fully believe that.

"What'd she say?"

He looks out toward the fire for a second before answering. "Had a whole list, actually. Too closed off. Don't talk enough. Work too much. Don't smile enough." A humorless huff of air. "I've heard most of it before."

"You're not closed off," I say. "You just don't talk to hear yourself talk. That's different."

"Apparently it reads the same from the outside." His eyes cut, just briefly, toward the deck, where Deacon's standing near the cooler talking to a woman with dark hair and an easy laugh one of the regulars from the bar, someone who's been circling my brother for months in a way that makes my skin itch on Priya's behalf even though Priya and Deacon have been solid for years and everyone knows it.

I follow his line of sight and get it immediately. "That's not about Sasha at all, is it."

"It's not about anybody." He says it too fast, and I let it go, because pushing Roan on anything he's decided to bury never once worked, not in six years of watching him do it.

"For what it's worth," I say, "you're not what any of them made you out to be."

"Careful. You'll give me complex thinking if somebody actually pays attention."

"I pay attention." It comes out quieter than I mean it to, and something shifts in the air between us for half a second before I cover it by pulling my knees up to my chest.

He notices anyway. He always notices. "Are you cold?"

"A little. Just when the wind picks up."

He shrugs out of the flannel he's got layered over his t-shirt and holds it out without making it a whole production. "Here."

"Then you'll be cold."

"I run hot. Put it on."

I take it, pull it over my shoulders, and the warmth still caught in the fabric does something unfair to my chest. It smells like engine grease and cedar and him, and I roll the too-long sleeves up over my wrists so my hands are free.

"Thanks," I say. "I'll add it to the collection."

"You've still got that collection going?"

"Don't act surprised. You're the one who kept handing things over."

That gets an actual laugh out of him, low and real, and for a second the six-year gap between the kid who used to trail him around the garage asking a hundred questions and the woman sitting next to him now collapses into something that doesn't have a clean name yet. I lean my shoulder into his without really deciding to, and he lets his head rest against mine for a beat before he pulls back to finish his beer, like he caught himself doing something he hadn't planned on.

I've been collecting pieces of Roan for as long as I can remember an old shop rag I turned into a bandana at fifteen, a busted zippo he gave me because I liked the design, one of his flannels that never made it back to him after a winter three years ago. I never thought much about why. I just wanted things that were his.

He's been collecting pieces of me too, I think, lately. He's just better at pretending he isn't.