Chapter 17 #2
His mouth is unhurried and certain. His hand spreads warm and broad across the small of my back.
To the side of us, past the mouth of the tunnel, the field burns white and empty under the lights, and we're here in the dark where none of it can reach us.
My fingers curl into the front of his undershirt.
He makes a low sound against my mouth, and I feel it everywhere.
When he pulls back, his thumb stays at my jaw, eyes locked on mine.
"You came," he says, quiet. "You came to watch me."
His hand opens until one knuckle on my chin turns into a palm cupping my face. I lean into the warmth.
"Don't make it a thing."
"Oh, it's a thing." The corner of his mouth tips up. "Give me twenty minutes. Don't disappear on me."
"I won't."
He kisses my forehead, fast, and he's gone. I stand in the gray hum with my fingers pressed to my mouth and the print of his hand still warm at the base of my spine.
He drives us out of the city with one hand on the wheel and the other holding mine across the console, his thumb moving slowly over my knuckles. He turns off the highway onto a road I don't know, and then a smaller one, until the streetlights stop and the trees close in.
"Is this the moment you remind me about stalkers and psychopath documentaries?"
He barks a laugh. "Look who's got jokes tonight." The smile hasn't left his face since the stadium. I still see it, lit up in the moonlight. "You're stealing my job, doe eyes."
"Seriously," I say, laughing. "Where are we?"
"Wren's Wood," he says as he parks. "I used to come here all the time. Not many people are out here this late at night."
The trailhead is a gap in the dark with a wooden sign I can't read. He comes around and opens my door, takes my hand, and we step in under the trees. The world goes quiet in a way the stadium never could.
His fingers are laced all the way through mine, his arm loose. He's walking like there's nowhere on earth he'd rather be and nothing he has to watch for.
I feel it before I understand it. The ease coming off him. The way his shoulders have dropped. He keeps glancing over at me in the dark—small glances—like he can't quite believe I'm walking beside him out here in the open. Every time he does it, his mouth goes soft at the corner.
He's happy.
Not performing it. Just lit up from the inside over the dumbest, smallest thing: a walk in the dark with my hand in his. And it lands on me all at once, what he's been asking for this whole time.
This is what he meant when he said he wanted to date publicly. When he asked to be let into the light.
He never wanted me on his arm in front of cameras. He didn't mean a charity event, or a red carpet, or a gala in a room full of strangers. He meant this. Holding my hand somewhere we don't have to look over our shoulders. Doing the most ordinary thing two people can do.
The smallest thing in the world, and I've been treating it like he wanted to take everything.
I grip his hand a little tighter.
We walk. The path is packed dirt and roots, and somewhere off to the right there's water moving over stones, small and constant, threading underneath everything. The air is cooler in here, damp and earthy, and it carries cedar and something blooming I can't name.
"Footbridge is up ahead," he says. "Or it was. They closed it."
"Closed it?"
"Three years ago. A couple of the planks went soft.
The support beam underneath needs replacing.
The city keeps putting it in the budget and then taking it back out.
" He shakes his head. "It's not even a big fix.
The engineering report's been done since the first year. They just keep kicking the can."
I look at the side of his face in the dark.
"You know a lot about it."
"It's online." He shrugs. "Somebody should fix it, that's all. They'd just need to file under the municipal code. There's a section for deferred infrastructure—" He catches himself. Laughs, short. "Anyway. That’s not the kind of law my father had in mind for me."
I slow down. This is the first time he's mentioned his family, apart from his sister. He deflected the first time I asked, and I haven't tried since.
"Law?" I ask.
"Forget it."
"No." I tug his hand. "Your father wanted you to be a lawyer?"
He's quiet for a few steps. The creek fills the space.
"Calloway and Calloway," he says finally.
"My dad and his dad. There's a seat with my name on it, basically.
Has been since I was a kid." His voice has changed.
Flatter, something pressed thin over the top of it.
"The managing partner is retiring soon, and he’s thinking about the future.
So the offer's back on the table. Again. "
"Is that what you want?"
"I want to play ball." It comes out fast and automatic. "I'm good at it. I love it. But it's never gonna be enough because it's not the firm." He says the firm like it tastes wrong. "He doesn't get mad. That'd be easier. He just looks tired every time we talk about it. Every time."
I can hear how old the bitterness is.
"Have you ever told him?" I ask, stepping over a tree root. "How you actually feel about it?"
His thumb stops moving on my hand.
"It's complicated.” His mouth settles in a grim line.
"It usually only feels that complicated when we haven't said it out loud yet."
He huffs something that isn't quite a laugh.
"There's the bridge," he says, lifting his chin at a dark shape ahead where the path drops toward the water, a low structure with a chain across the front of it.
"See how they've got it barricaded? It’s been like that for three years.
If somebody just walked the report into the right meeting—"
And he's off again, easy, alive, telling me about load ratings and a grant the city left on the table, the flat thing gone out of his voice the second he stopped talking about his father and started talking about a broken bridge he has no reason to care about.
He would be good at something like that, I think. Something he actually cares about.
I don't say it though. I just hold his hand and let him talk. I tuck it away with everything else I'm learning about him in the moonlight.
We walk for a long time. The creek comes and goes beside us. My eyes adjust until the trees are no longer one black wall but individual trunks and branches and the pale undersides of leaves.
And somewhere in the quiet, the want surfaces.
Not for his body. For the other thing. The thing I've been carrying since the trailhead, since his face went unguarded in that tunnel, since I understood that all he ever wanted was the ordinary.
There's a way I could give him a piece of that.
Meet him in the middle. A way to close some of the distance from my side and let him into a part of my life he's only ever climbed out of a window to leave.
I can see the shape of it. I can see it clearly enough that my pulse picks up.
I just don't know how he'll feel about it. I don't know if it's too much, or the exact wrong thing to offer a man like him. But the words are right there, gathering, and I take a breath and turn toward him.
"Do you—"
"Hey." He stops on the path, turning to face me, and his thumb sweeps the back of my hand. "Have you eaten?"
The question knocks the words clean out of my mouth.
"I—" I close it. Start over. "Not really. I was too nervous to eat earlier. I kept thinking someone was going to recognize me."
Something crosses his face, and he lifts our joined hands and presses his mouth to my knuckles. Then he pulls out his phone, thumbs at it for a second, and whatever he sees makes him smile.
"They've all cleared out," he says. He pockets the phone and starts us back toward the trailhead, my hand tucked into his. "Come on. You're gonna let me feed you."
"Where?"
"You'll see." The crooked grin appears. "Trust me?"
The unsaid thing settles back into me, still gathering, still waiting.
I'll find the right moment.
I'm just not sure if I'll find the courage again to ask.