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He was still leaning in the door frame, still watching, still wet, still not saying anything, and the silence between us was the kind that held its shape without anyone holding it up.

I put my hand on the door handle.

“I think I’m done,” I said.

I got out and the cold took me.

The blanket stayed in the truck. I didn’t reach for it. My wet flannel hit the night air and the temperature difference was immediate — the warmth I’d built in the cab stripped away in two seconds, replaced by the sharp, mineral cold of a Montana night in a wet hayfield with the creek running somewhere behind the cottonwoods and the stars out thick enough to read by.

I walked toward the bunkhouse. My boots squelched with every step. The gravel was damp and cold under the soles, and each footfall sent a small sound into the dark that I focused on because it was simpler than focusing on anything else.

His boots hit the gravel behind me.

I didn’t stop. He came around my left side, walking fast, and stepped into my path. Not blocking — redirecting, the way a fence turned a herd, the way a hand on a gate changed the direction of everything behind it.

“You’re not done yet,” he said.

I looked at him. His shirt was still wet. His hair was drying in uneven waves, pushed back from his forehead, and in the starlight his face was all planes and shadows, the dimples gone, the grin gone, everything he showed the world stripped down to the bones underneath.

“I think I am,” I said.

“No.” He held my gaze. “You’re not.”

Two words. The same structure as Off shift, the same quiet delivery, the same certainty that didn’t ask permission. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t charming. He was standing in a wet hayfield telling me I wasn’t done, and the words meant the sandwich and the water and the blanket and the four hours and the two weeks and the thing in the truck that I’d felt and run from, and he knew it, and he was standing there anyway.

He reached for me.

His hand found the back of my neck. His fingers slid into my wet hair, against my scalp, and the cold of his hand met the cold of my skin and both of them were warm, somehow, the way two cold things against each other became something else, something that wasn’t cold anymore.

He pulled me to him and kissed me.

The kiss was not careful. Not gentle. Not the tentative first press of two people figuring out whether this was a good idea. He’d already figured that out — he’d figured it out in the field, standing a foot away with his hand on the truck, and he’d decided no, and then he’d decided something else, and this was the something else.

His lips were cold and his mouth was warm and his hand was in my hair and his other hand found my hip through the wet flannel, not pulling me closer — holding me still. I stopped thinking.

I stopped thinking and I kissed him back.

My hands came up — I didn’t tell them to, they went, the way my jaw had gone when he’d said eat, the way my fingers had gone around the water bottle when he’d said drink — and my hands found his shirt, the wet fabric bunched in my fists, and I pulled him against me and opened my mouth under his and the sound I made was small and involuntary and I didn’t recognize it either.

The field was dark and the creek was running and I was not thinking about Denver or the certificate or the clipboard or the conditions of engagement or the email or the phone or the job or August or the drive back or anything at all.

I was thinking about his mouth.

And then I was thinking about how much I was thinking about his mouth, and how easy it had been to stop thinking about everything else, and how the window he’d opened with two words — eat, drink — had widened to fit this, and how I was climbing through it, and how I didn’t know what was on the other side.

I pulled away.

My hands came out of his shirt. His hand stayed in my hair for one more second — his fingers loosening, the grip softening, the release deliberate and slow, the way someone put down something they intended to pick up again.

I stepped sideways. Out of his reach. Out of the warmth.

“I have to go,” I said.

He looked at me. His chest was moving. His mouth was wet from mine. He didn’t reach for me again.

“Priya.”

“Goodnight, Cash.”