Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leo was losing a fight with his own hair in the rearview mirror when Dawson knocked on the rental’s window.
He flinched. Dawson stood on the other side of the glass, one eyebrow raised, watching Leo with his fingers still raking through the mess the post-practice shower had made of his curls.
The gel was gone, and his hair was doing whatever it wanted, which was curling at the temples and making him look seventeen.
His shirt was wrinkled from sitting in his cubby all day.
He hadn’t had time to make himself look presentable, and his mother would rather have died than let him walk into a restaurant looking like this.
Good thing she was in Miami and not standing in a parking lot in Wisconsin because, for the first time in a while, Leo didn’t feel like fixing it for her.
He opened the door and got out. Smoothed the shirt down. It didn’t help.
“You look fine,” Dawson said.
“I look like I slept in my car.”
Dawson’s gaze traveled from Leo’s hair to his wrinkled collar and back up. “Nobody in there’s going to care.”
“I care.”
“I know you do.” Dawson was already walking toward the entrance. He hadn’t changed either, but Dawson was the type of guy who was comfortable in a t-shirt that accentuated every muscle and faded, stained jeans. Leo fell into step beside him and tried to stop touching his hair.
Maria’s was small. Eight tables, four booths along the windows, a counter with a register, and an empty glass case that probably held slices during the lunch rush.
Red-and-white checkered tablecloths. A jukebox in the corner, likely original to the building and older than anyone working there.
A woman behind the counter called out, “Sit anywhere, hon,” without looking up from the pizza she was boxing.
Leo headed for a booth near the window, then changed course to a two-top against the wall.
Smaller. Closer. He sat before he could think about why he’d made that choice, and Dawson pulled out the chair across from him without comment.
The table was small enough that their knees bumped underneath, Dawson’s leg solid against Leo’s, and neither of them moved.
Dawson picked up the menu, scanned it for about two seconds, and set it back down. “The margherita’s good. So’s the sausage and pepper.”
“You didn’t even open your menu yet.”
“It hasn’t changed since we started coming here when I was twelve.”
Leo glanced at the menu again. Half the items had names that felt like inside jokes: the Lakeshore Special, the Packer Backer, something called the Full Pull that was just a pizza with everything on it. “What’s the Full Pull?”
“Everything. It’s a lot.”
“I’m hungry.”
Dawson’s mouth twitched. Not a smile, but close, on a face that didn’t give them away for free. “Then get the Full Pull.”
The woman from the counter came over. She was maybe sixty, aproned, her gray hair pulled back in a clip. Her eyes landed on Dawson, and her whole face changed. “Dawson Mercer. Haven’t seen you in here on a weeknight in forever.”
“Been busy.”
“Well, your brother’s keeping us in business with the calzones, so at least one Mercer’s showing up.”
She patted his shoulder and turned to Leo. “I’m Maria. Don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.”
“Leo. I’m, uh, new in town.”
“I figured. I know all my regulars.” She pulled a pen from behind her ear. “What can I get you, boys?”
They ordered. One Full Pull, two Spotted Cows. She went back to the counter, and the quiet settled in.
This was the part Leo was bad at. Not the talking—he could talk to a wall and make it interesting.
The part where he wanted the other person to talk back.
Dawson sat with his forearms on the checkered cloth, fingers laced, at ease with the quiet.
Leo watched the tendons shift when he moved his hands.
Grease in the creases of his knuckles that soap couldn’t reach.
“So,” Leo said. “You’ve really been coming here since you were a kid?”
“It was a family tradition. Mom and Dad used to bring us after church on Sundays.”
Leo waited for more. Dawson took a sip from his water glass that had appeared at some point and didn’t elaborate. Right. This was going to be work.
“What’d you get? When you were a kid.”
“Pepperoni. Every time.” Dawson set the glass down. “We took turns picking. Wyatt always got sausage, I always got pepperoni, and Ethan changed his mind every week and then spent the whole meal saying he should’ve picked something else.”
Leo grinned. “Let me guess—middle brother.”
Interest flickered across Dawson’s face. “How’d you know that?”
“Only child. I spent a lot of time watching other people’s families.” He hadn’t meant to say that, and he covered it with a drink of his beer. “Ethan sounds like every middle kid I’ve ever met.”
He’d meant it to be light. It came out with an edge he hadn’t intended, and he watched Dawson register it. Those brown eyes held steady, and Leo could feel the next question forming, the obvious one, the one that would open a door Leo kept bolted shut.
“What about you?” Leo said before Dawson could ask. “Three brothers, same garage. That’s a lot of Mercers in one place.”
“Works out fine.”
“You ever want to do something else?”
Dawson considered this for longer than most people would. “No,” he said, and it sounded like the truth.
Their knees were still touching. Neither of them had moved since they sat down, and Leo had lost the thread of what he was about to say twice now because Dawson had shifted his weight, and the pressure of his leg against Leo’s changed.
Warmer when he leaned in to reach for his water.
Gone for half a second when he sat back, long enough for Leo’s breath to catch before the contact returned.
Leo picked up his beer to give his hands something to do and took a drink he didn’t taste.
The pizza came. The Full Pull was enormous, an overloaded disk of meat and vegetables and cheese that hung off the plate. Leo stared at it.
“You said you were hungry,” Dawson said.
“I said I was hungry, not that I was feeding a family of six.”
Dawson pulled a slice and folded it. Leo grabbed a slice and tried the same fold. Toppings slid. He caught a sausage round before it hit the table.
“You fold it, or you wear it,” Dawson said.
“Thank you for that wisdom.”
“Anytime.”
They ate. Leo put away two slices and started a third before he admitted the Full Pull might have been ambitious. Dawson was on his fourth and showed no signs of slowing down.
“At The Penalty Box,” Leo said, leaning back. “Every time I’ve been in there, you’ve got a book.”
Dawson glanced up. “Yeah.”
“What do you read?”
Dawson wiped his hands on a napkin. Took his time with it. “Crime stuff. Thrillers.”
“Like what, Grisham?”
“Connelly. Michael Connelly.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Not surprised.”
Leo raised an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It wasn’t a jab at you. He’s just one of those not many people know about.
” Dawson’s mouth did the almost-smile thing again, and Leo caught it this time—the dry humor that lived underneath the silence, surfacing in small, unexpected flashes.
“He writes about a detective in LA. Guy works cold cases. Methodical, patient, pulls everything apart until it makes sense.”
“And you like that.”
Dawson shrugged. “I like when problems have answers.”
It was such a specific thing to say that Leo stopped chewing.
He’d expected a brush-off or a one-word answer, and instead Dawson had handed him a piece of himself without seeming to notice he’d done it.
Leo wanted to push, to ask what problems didn’t have answers in Dawson’s life, but he could feel the boundary sitting there between them, clear as glass.
“I read on planes,” Leo offered. “Mostly whatever’s on the bestseller rack at the airport.”
“That’s not reading. That’s killing time.”
“Wow. Okay.”
Dawson’s eyes warmed. The shift was small, just the corners crinkling, but Leo felt it the way he’d felt the knee contact—disproportionate, too big for the gesture. “I’ll lend you one,” Dawson said. “If you want.”
“Cool. Which is your favorite?”
“You definitely need to start with the first one.”
“Looking forward to it.”
The pause that followed felt different this time. Less like a gap and more like a rest in music. Leo turned his beer glass on the checkered cloth, leaving wet rings.
“Your parents,” Dawson said. “You said they put all their energy into you.”
Leo’s hand stilled on the glass. He’d walked right into that one. He’d thought the deflection had worked, that they’d moved past it, but Dawson had just been waiting. Patient. Like the detective in the books he read.
“Yeah, well.” Leo flashed a smile he knew was good, the one that worked in interviews and postgame press.
“They’ve always supported me. Sometimes, I wish they’d back off a bit, especially my mom.
She’s overbearing and thinks it’s totally normal to call my agent when she thinks I’m getting screwed over. ”
Dawson said nothing. He didn’t nod, make a sympathetic noise, or offer the kind of platitudes most people reached for when Leo hinted at the edges of his family.
He sat there with his beer and his steady brown eyes, and the absence of reaction was so disorienting that Leo almost kept rambling about how damned tired he was of her meddling, but he wasn’t going to give Dawson even more reason to be annoyed by him.
He picked up another slice. “This pizza is unreasonably good.”
Dawson let him change the subject. But the way he let it go—no push, no sympathetic head-tilt, a quiet acceptance of the wall Leo had put up—made Leo wonder if Dawson recognized the move because he used it too.
The door swung open, and Leo heard Charlotte before he saw her. “Daddy, I want the one with the little tomatoes.”
Ford came in with Charlotte at his side and a woman behind him.
Not a girlfriend. The distance between them, easy but defined, said two people who’d worked out where they stood a long time ago.
The woman was tallish, dark-haired, wearing a light jacket over a sweater and no makeup, and she reached for Charlotte when she let go of her dad’s hand.
“Go find us a table, bug,” the woman said, and Charlotte bolted for the booth by the jukebox.
Ford spotted Leo and changed course. “Vargas. Hey.” He clapped Leo’s shoulder on the way past, easy and warm. Then he saw Dawson, and his eyebrows went up a fraction. “Dawson. Didn’t know you two knew each other.”
“He’s fixing my car,” Leo said.
“The deer thing, right?” Ford shook his head. “How’s the car coming?”
“Getting there,” Dawson said.
The woman had followed Charlotte to the booth but turned at the sound of conversation. Ford waved her over. “Nadine, this is Leo Vargas. New winger. Nadine’s Charlotte’s mom.”
Nadine shook Leo’s hand. Her grip was firm and brief, and she studied him with the same assessing directness Charlotte had. “The one from Florida.”
“Does everyone in this town know that?”
“Word gets around.” Ford grinned.
Nadine gave Dawson a nod. “Hey, Dawson.”
“Nadine.”
“We’ll let you eat,” Ford said. He glanced between Leo and Dawson, paused for a half-second longer than necessary. “Glad you’re getting to know people. It makes a difference.”
“Starting to figure that out,” Leo said.
Leo watched Ford settle into the booth—Charlotte next to Nadine on one side, Ford across from them, already leaning in to hear whatever Charlotte was telling him about the pizza she wanted.
Maria was at their table before they’d even picked up menus.
If he didn’t know better, Leo would think they were a happily married couple out for dinner as a family.
Ford passed a napkin across to Charlotte without being asked, and Nadine caught his eye and mouthed something that made him nod.
Leo turned back. Dawson was watching him.
“What?” Leo said.
“Nothing.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Yeah, because it’s true.”
Leo huffed a laugh. He nudged the last two slices toward Dawson’s side. “Finish it. I’m done.”
“We’re going to need a box,” Leo said.
“Maria’ll bring one. She always does.”
Leo was running out of reasons to stay. From the booth, Charlotte’s voice carried over the jukebox, recounting a story she’d told at school, Ford’s quiet laugh underneath it.
The counter woman was boxing up orders for a couple by the door.
The light outside had gone amber through the windows, the last of the September sun stretching long across the parking lot.
Leo didn’t want to leave. The realization sat in his chest, simple and unwelcome. He wanted to stay at this too-small table with their knees pressed together, listening to Dawson say three words for every ten of his, watching those almost-smiles surface and disappear.
“This was good,” Leo said. He turned his beer glass on the table, watching the condensation trail. “The pizza, I mean. But also—this.”
Dawson’s hands went still on his napkin.
Leo could’ve left it there. Could’ve let “this” mean whatever Dawson wanted it to mean, kept the escape hatch open.
But Dawson had sat across from him for an hour, given him dry humor and real answers, and hadn’t tried to fill the silence with bullshit.
Leo was tired of pretending this was about a car.
“We should do it again,” Leo said. “And not because I owe you anything.”
Dawson held his gaze long enough that Leo’s pulse picked up. Then he nodded, once, the way he did everything—unhurried, deliberate, like he’d thought about it and decided.
“Yeah,” Dawson said. “Okay.”
Dawson pocketed his phone. “I should get going. Early morning.”
“Yeah, me too. Practice at seven.”
Neither of them moved. Three seconds, four. Dawson’s knee shifted against Leo’s and then pressed back, deliberate. The breath Leo took was too sharp for a restaurant, and he knew Dawson heard it.
Dawson stood. Leo flagged Maria down for the check and a box, and when it came, he paid without making a thing of it. That was the deal—Leo was buying. Dawson dropped a ten on the table for the tip while Leo packed the remaining Full Pull into the box.
They headed for the door. Leo held it open, and Dawson walked through without slowing down, close enough that Leo caught the smell of grease and soap as he passed.
The parking lot was half-empty, and the evening had gone cool around the edges. Their vehicles sat three spaces apart.