“Stop talking like that, Mom,” her daughter said. She looked nice enough. For a sixty-year-old woman in metallic cropped cargo pants, that is. “You’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Big talk from the woman who dumped her mother in assisted living fifteen years ago. But whatever.

“We’re just getting ready for dinner, want to join us?” Mrs. Patterson offered.

“I have study plans at the library,” I said. I hated to lie to her, but one way or another I was going to find a way to finish things for Kori.

I rounded the barn looking for Shay, but he was nowhere to be found, the manure pile he typically cursed, removed.

“Shay!” I screamed, startling a flock of chickens.

I came full circle before I saw him. Well, saw him getting his groove on to his iPod. I tried to hold back from laughing, and snorted instead. Embarrassingly enough, he heard that and none of my earlier screaming. Not a stitch of humiliation about my catching him either. In fact, he kept right on dancing.

Unbelievable.

What is it about guys? They have no shame about dancing. They either dance or they don’t dance; actual ability never plays a role in the decision.

He pulled the earplugs out. “Hey, you. Didn’t hear you come up.”

“Not with that thing cranked up.” Seeing him dancing had caught me off guard. Laughing had dislodged my focus. “Good music?” I asked.

“Yeah, s’all legit.”

I knew I was stalling. I was just scared I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. But there was an even greater fear—that if I didn’t do it now, I never would and I’d be stuck feeling hollow forever. It was that fear that shoved me from behind, knocking the words out, pushing me over the edge. “So, are you doing anything?”

His eyebrows gave a little hop. “Now?”

“Now.” My own brazenness startled me. “Tonight.”

“What have you got planned?”

“I want to get a tattoo,” sprang to my lips. If not now—when? Right?

He grinned, casing my body for good spots to suggest, no doubt. “Something small and tasteful? Hidden where no one will see?”

Kori didn’t do anything small, tasteful, or where no one could see. “Probably not.”

He laughed and said, “So you need me to take you?”

I nodded, and said, “And after, we’re going to dinner.”

His eyebrows shot up, more surprised by this than my decision to get inked. “Like … a date?”

“Yeah, a date. I’m going to take you to the best pizza place in Colorado, and you’re going to pay.”

“M’kay.” He rubbed his palm over his naked chest, disrupting the pattern of glistening sunlight and derailing my train of thought in one fatal swoop. “Mind if I shower first?”

Visions of waterfalls danced in my head.

“Not at all.”