She needed a less pushy internal narrator.
What’s your point?
There. She had no rejoinder for that. She finished getting ready and then walked outside the motel room, looking down at her phone.
Okay, she texted.Ready to honky tonk.
He pulled up less than ten seconds later. “I don’t thinkhonky-tonkis a verb.”
“I disagree.”
The only light was from the parking lot lamps that poured harsh blue light straight down from above, and no one looked good in that light.
Except Logan managed to look like the bad boy date she’d never had come to get her for an evening out.
She felt like the good girl. The lamb being led to the wolf’s den. Not a forty-year-old woman who knew well the ways of the world, and men, even if just in the abstract sense.
It was not a line of thought she wanted to be having about him. She didn’t want to be pondering his adjacency to the big bad wolf in any regard, thank you.
“I’ve picked out a true dive bar to give you the full experience.” He looked her over in a way that made her feel touched. “You might be overdressed.”
Great, so she’d made the wrong call after all that. “I didn’t know, and I liked the color, so…”
“You look beautiful.”
The way he said it, rough and low and like time had suddenly gone slow, made her stop. Made her take a hard breath in.
He shouldn’t be saying that to her. They were friends, if they were even that, and they didn’t go commenting on each other’s looks. She didn’t want to be validated by a man, anyway. She was supposed to be validating herself.
Those words weren’t supposed to make her hot, and restless, and happy all at once, but they did.
The fact was, Logan was a man who dabbled in debauchery (his words), and so didn’t his opinion on her beauty mean something?
Will had always said she was beautiful.
But until this week (she wasn’t thinking about that), he hadn’t had practical experience of other women. Logan did.
He thought she was beautiful, even if she was overdressed.
She realized she’d been standing there saying nothing for too long. “Thank you.”
She should have scolded him. Or something. But she didn’t. Or maybe she should say it back? He was beautiful. But it felt too weird to say, so she just didn’t.
Instead she got into the car and tried not to project any of the flustered feelings rolling around inside of her onto Logan, because while she might appreciate the compliment, she really didn’t need him to know how much.
“So, where is this place?”
“Up the road apiece.” He looked at her. “There’s a mechanical bull.”
“I’m not having a midlife crisis. You must have me confused with my husband.”
“Is a midlife crisis necessary to ride a mechanical bull?”
“You don’t have to have a midlife crisis to act a fool in a bar, but it helps. You can also be twenty-one. But I’m not twenty-one, either.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t want to be twenty-one again.”
“Really?”
