After graduating college, Austin Curtis returns home without really knowing what to expect. Time has helped her mature, but through the years she spent away from Tulsa, there was a nagging in her mind about how she left everyone...more specifically...
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Austin watched as Soda and Ponyboy each turned out of the driveway and embark in different directions down the street. After dinner, Soda stayed long enough to hang out with Gracie and Darry before they turned in for the night, and was now headed back to his own home. Ponyboy had gotten a call from Sherry to meet her at an all-night diner with a group of friends, and he was more than excited to accept the invitation. With her brothers either asleep, headed home, or going to meet a girl, Austin allowed herself to relax into the curve of the couch for a second until the thought of being alone in the house made her restless. The flush of the guest bathroom toilet alerted her to the presence of only other person awake in the house.
"Are you leaving?" she asked once she noticed Dallas had put his boots back on and approached the door.
"I was planning on going home. It's already ten."
"Oh, okay." With a sigh he sat himself down across from Austin and looked her in the eyes.
"Unless you have a better idea." For a second, he could see her smile like she would when they were young. The expression which lay over her face in that moment was one he'd seen through stolen glances so many times before, and it was one of the many looks of hers that he'd fallen for.
"I don't, but I feel like going somewhere."
"Alright then, grab your coat." Austin furrowed her eyebrows in confusion as Dallas stood and plucked the keys to Austin's truck from where they rested on the coffee table. "What? You think I'd let you wander outside at night alone? Things have changed for the better around here, but some things have gotten worse. We both know your brothers would kill me if something happened to you." She hid the smirk on her lips as she grabbed her coat, and tried not to think about how that was the closest she was going to get to Dallas saying he cared about her. Even if it wasn't much, it was more than she would have gotten back in the day, and now he was even easier to see through.
It took less than ten minutes for Dallas to make the short drive from the Curtis house to Lake Yahola. It was a drive he had taken frequently when living in Darrel Senior and Sue-Ella's care, and the lake had become something special to him after they died. There was a scarcely visited area of the lake where the Curtis parents had taken Dallas and their biological children for picnic lunches and touch football games on the weekends and during the weeks whenever there was a break from school. He never told anyone how he went to the special spot the evening he learned of their passing. He never told anyone how often he still came here to think, to blow off steam, or even express his grief over having lost all he had—Darrel and Sue-Ella, his own parents' love, Johnny, and Austin.
Despite how dark it was outside Austin knew where she was based on memory. Her parents had begun taking her and her brothers to the lake on Sundays to visit their grandparents when they were very young. After their grandparents passed, the family kept the tradition, and for a while Dallas was a part of that tradition.
