Chapter 18 #2
“I hear you,” I said, because I did. They weren’t wrong, exactly. I did have a tendency to absorb things where Becca was concerned. I always had. “But it’s different now. Better. We’re actually talking.”
“Talking,” Jude said.
“Talking.”
“Like, talking, talking, or—”
“Jude.”
“I’m just clarifying the nature of the talking.”
“We’re talking,” I said. “That’s where we are. And I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you, though?” Asher said, but he said it without heat, almost fondly, the way he asked it when he already knew the answer wasn’t entirely yes and was willing to let that be enough for now.
“More than I did,” I said. “Which is something.”
Asher studied me for a long moment, looking for the thing underneath the thing, the way he’d been doing his whole life. Whatever he found must have satisfied him, because he let out a slow breath and reached for his beer.
“Alright,” he said. “Good enough.” He looked around the table. “Can we please play poker now, because I have been holding a genuinely excellent hand for the past ten minutes and I would like the opportunity to take your money.”
“You’re bluffing,” Jude said immediately.
“I am absolutely not bluffing.”
“You always say that when you’re bluffing.”
“And yet,” Asher said, with great patience, “statistically, I cannot always be bluffing. At some point, the math has to work in my favor.”
“The math has never worked in your favor,” Cade said.
“That is genuinely hurtful,” Asher shot back, huffing a soft laugh.
“It’s also accurate,” Jude said.
“I have won money at this table,” Asher said, with dignity. “Multiple times. There are witnesses.”
“You’re all terrible,” he said. “Every single one of you. I invite you into my home, I make my special garlic bread—”
“The garlic bread was good,” Jude offered.
“Thank you. I make excellent garlic bread, and this is the thanks I get.” He straightened his cards with great ceremony. “Fine. Raise.”
Cade folded without ceremony. Jude saw it and raised again with the pleasant expression of someone who genuinely didn’t care either way.
I looked at my cards—a pair of sevens and nothing useful—and thought about Becca in the trailer park, and the look on her face when she’d taken the smoothie from my hand like she’d forgotten what it felt like to let someone take care of her, and I called anyway.
Asher laid down three kings with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had been waiting a long time for this moment. He looked around the table. He said nothing. He simply began collecting the pot with the unhurried precision of someone savoring every second of it.
Jude threw a pretzel at him.
“I told you,” Asher said serenely, not even flinching as the pretzel bounced off his shoulder. “I told all of you. Statistically. The math.”
“Don’t,” Cade said.
“I’m just saying—”
“We know what you’re saying,” I said. “Deal the next hand.”
Asher dealt, still smiling to himself in a way that was going to take at least another beer to outlast.
From upstairs, faintly but distinctly, came the sound of two eight-year-olds giggling. Nobody bothered to do anything about it.
We played another two hands, which Cade won both of with quiet efficiency, having apparently been biding his time all evening and simply waiting for the right moment to stop being polite about it.
Jude accused him of counting cards. Cade denied it in a way that didn’t entirely rule it out.
Asher made a second plate of garlic bread on the grounds that the first one hadn’t survived long enough to be properly appreciated.
We ate it standing around the kitchen counter while Jude told a story about a call from earlier in the week that had started as a noise complaint and escalated in ways that defied straightforward explanation.
It ended with everyone laughing hard enough that Asher had to wave us quiet in case it woke the kids.
It didn’t wake the kids. They were already awake. We could hear them.
By the time we called it, the beer was gone, and the pretzel bag was empty.
We filtered out into the cool night air in the loose, unhurried way of people who had nowhere urgent to be but were starting to feel the lateness of the hour.
Cade’s truck was parked at the curb, Jude’s just behind it.
Asher stood in the doorway with his arms folded, watching us go with the expression of a host who considered himself to have performed admirably under difficult conditions, which in fairness he had.
Jude pulled his keys out and spun them once around his finger. “Same time next month?”
“Already looking forward to taking your money again,” Asher said, from the doorway.
“You got lucky,” Jude shot back. “Home field advantage or something.”
“I got skills,” Asher said. “There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t,” Cade said. “Not in poker. It’s just the luck of the draw.”
Jude grinned, clapped me once on the arm, and headed for his truck. “Tell Becca I said hi,” he called back, without turning around, in a tone carefully calibrated to be just innocent enough that I couldn’t object to it.
“Drive safe,” I said.
He waved without looking back and got in.
Asher pushed off the doorframe and looked at me for a moment, the porch light catching the red of his hair.
“You know we’re just—”
“I know,” I said. “I know you’re worried, and I get it. It’s okay.”
Something in his expression settled. He nodded once—the older brother version of everything he hadn’t said all evening, I mean it, go in carefully, I’m on your side even when I’m annoying about it—and stepped back inside. The door closed behind him. The porch light stayed on.
I turned toward my truck and found Cade leaning against the hood of his, arms folded, watching me. He’d been so smooth about hanging back, I hadn’t even noticed.
“Hey,” he said, quietly enough that it didn’t carry.
I stopped. “Hey.”
He looked at me for a moment, just looked, the way he did when he was deciding how to approach something. Then, carefully: “Have you two talked about it? The proposal. The parking lot.”
I felt my jaw tighten slightly before I could stop it. “No.”
“You going to?”
“That’s the plan.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. Then, quieter, “Thanks for keeping it to yourself. I know Jude would’ve—”
“I know,” Cade said simply. He didn’t elaborate, didn’t make a thing of it, just accepted the thanks with a quiet steadiness that told me he’d understood exactly what it would have cost if the others had known.
Jude would have meant well. Asher would have meant well.
But meaning well and handling it well were two different things, and Cade had understood that without being asked.
“It wasn’t mine to share,” he said. “Still isn’t. But you need to. You know that.”
“That’s the plan.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “Tonight, hopefully.”
Cade was quiet for a moment, watching me in that steady, unhurried way he had. “You nervous?”
I let out a short breath that was almost a laugh. “Yeah,” I said. “A little.”
“A little,” he repeated, in a tone that suggested he thought the number was higher than that.
“Okay, more than a little.” I looked out at the dark street.
“I don’t know how to start it. We’ve been—” I paused, trying to find the right word for what we’d been doing.
“Circling it. Both of us. Things have been good lately, and I don’t want to drag us back to an uncomfortable place, but it’s also just—sitting there.
Between us. Every time we’re in the same room. ”
Cade nodded slowly. “She knows it’s sitting there, too.”
“I know she does.”
“So you’re both just waiting for someone to go first.”
“Basically.” I looked back at him. “Which is not ideal.”
Cade unfolded his arms and pushed off the hood of his truck, unhurried. He thought for a moment, the way he always did before he said something he meant.
“Here’s what I know about Becca,” he said finally.
“She doesn’t avoid things because she doesn’t care about them.
She avoids them because she cares too much.
” He paused. “So if you go first—and I think you have to go first—don’t make it a big thing.
Don’t set it up like a conversation she needs to brace herself for.
Just—say it like it’s something that needed saying.
Because it does.” He looked at me steadily.
“She already knows how you feel, Levi. She just needs to see that you’re not going to make it harder than it has to be. ”
I stood with that for a moment. The street was quiet around us, the night still, the occasional far-off sound of the town settling in.
“When did you get wise?”
“I’ve always been wise,” Cade said. “You just don’t usually ask.”
He pulled his keys out and moved toward the driver’s side door. He paused with his hand on the handle. “You’re good for her,” he said, without looking at me. “Whatever she’s going through right now—and I mean that in every sense—you being there matters. Don’t undersell it.”
He got in. The engine turned over. He lifted two fingers off the wheel as he pulled away, and then his taillights were diminishing down the street, and I was standing alone in Asher’s driveway.
I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to, hands still in my pockets, turning over what he’d said. Don’t make it a big thing. Say it like it’s something that needed saying.
I could do that. I was fairly sure I could do that.
I got in my truck. The drive home was quiet, the town settled and still at this hour, the occasional lit window passing in the dark.
The radio was low. I didn’t change the station.
I was thinking about what Jude had said earlier—settled, in a way you haven’t been for a while—and turning it over, testing it against whatever was actually true.
It was true. Something had loosened in me over the past few weeks, pressure I’d been feeling for so long I’d stopped noticing the weight of it, and I knew exactly where it came from, and I wasn’t quite ready to say it out loud yet, even to myself, but I knew.
The trailer park came into view, the gravel drive pale in the headlights. I pulled in slowly and cut the engine. The park was quiet, the river audible beyond the tree line, low and steady. A few windows still glowed. Becca’s was one of them.
I sat for a moment in the dark of the truck and looked at it, the warm light, the faint shadow moving behind the glass that meant she was still up, still awake, still there, and felt something settle in my chest that I was getting better at not talking myself out of.
She was in there. We were talking tonight. She’d promised, and she didn’t make promises she didn’t mean; she never had. That was one of the most specific and reliable things I knew about her.
Whatever had been sitting between us unfinished and unsaid—tonight was when we were going to get to it. I could feel it the way you felt a change in the weather before it arrived, in the quality of the air.
I got out of the truck quietly, the gravel soft under my boots, and stood for a moment in the cool dark.
I thought about what Cade had said. Don’t make it a big thing. She already knows how you feel. She just needs to see that you’re not going to make it harder than it has to be.