I pulled my Camry into a spot near the old feed store, killed the engine, and sat there a second with my hands still on the wheel. The Bluetooth earbud in my right ear was playing something soft—Hozier, maybe—and I let it finish before I popped the door open.

The group was already gathered by the benches, a mess of teenagers and young adults in faded jeans and work boots, some leaning against trucks, some sitting on tailgates. A few heads turned when my door shut.

I crossed the lot, boots scuffing against the asphalt, and slipped in beside them like I'd been there a thousand times. Because I had.

There was a group of them—four, maybe five—talking and laughing, hands in pockets, boots scuffing the pavement. One of them had a girl practically hanging off his arm, but he wasn't looking at her. He was mid-laugh, head tipped back, and even from here I could see the way his shoulders shook, the way his chest moved under the flannel he wore loose over a white tee.

He was big. Tall in a way that made the guys next to him look smaller, broad in a way that made the truck he was leaning against look almost proportionate. Dark hair, pulled back in a short mullet that shouldn't have worked but did. A goatee and mustache, trimmed neat. Silver hoops glinting in both ears.

And when he turned his head, laughing at something one of his friends said, his eyes caught the low sun and I saw them.

Light grey. Like storm clouds. Like cold water.

My bell bottoms brushed the tops of my boots, and I felt the familiar weight of my silver hoops against my neck, the layered necklaces stacked just so. The nose ring I'd gotten last summer, the one May had helped me pick out, caught the light.

I wasn't—I don't go up to random men. That's not me. I'm a homebody. I go to school, I go to work, I go to church, I come home. This—standing in a parking lot on a Friday night with the bass thumping and the smell of summer blowing in—this was already more than I usually did.

But I looked again.

And he looked up.

Right at me.