Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Rusty Spur was the kind of bar that had earned its name.
It was a long, low-ceilinged room. The wood of the bar had been worn smooth by ten thousand elbows.
The lighting was amber and merciful. Someone had strung a line of Edison bulbs along the back wall at some point and never taken them down.
Freddie liked the place for the same reason he liked most things: it did not ask anything of him.
He'd arrived with Oliver at half past seven, when the crowd was already thick enough with men from the Purple Heart Ranch that the noise level had shifted from general bar murmur to something with more texture; the sound of men who had known each other in difficult circumstances finding out whether they could know each other in easy ones.
Mostly, Freddie had found, they could. There was something about shared difficulty that either ruined a friendship or made it weatherproof.
The men from the Ranch tended toward the latter.
He knew most of them by face now, several by name.
He exchanged a nod with Kowalski, who'd been three months behind him in the program, and a brief handshake with Marcus Webb, who had the kind of easy authority that made people automatically make room for him without knowing why.
Freddie had had commanders like that. He'd never been one himself.
He was too constitutionally resistant to being the person everyone looked at.
He and Oliver found stools at the end of the bar, away from the loudest of the energy.
Freddie ordered a dark ale. Oliver got whatever was on draft.
For a while, they just sat. This was one of the things Freddie genuinely liked about Oliver Hartley: the man could occupy silence without feeling obligated to fill it.
But Oliver's quiet had a predictable time limit.
"How's everything going?" Oliver asked.
"Fine."
Oliver nodded. He turned his glass on the bar, a slow quarter-rotation. "How's business?"
"Cart's doing well," Freddie added. "Profit margins are up from last month."
"That's good."
Freddie drank.
The bar moved around them. Someone at the pool table made a shot, and there was a brief, cheerful argument about whether it counted. The Edison bulbs caught in the glass shelving behind the bar doubled and tripled. Somewhere a song started that Freddie half-recognized.
"How's it going with Wren?"
Freddie did not choke. He came very close. He managed to redirect the impulse into a controlled swallow and then set his glass down with more precision than was strictly necessary.
"The market committee," he said carefully, "is going well."
"I meant personally."
Oliver looked at him. Oliver had a way of looking at people that communicated, without any particular expression, that he was not fooled by the answer and was not going to pretend he was.
It was, Freddie had decided, probably an asset in veterinary practice.
Animals couldn't redirect with technicalities.
"Nothing's going on," Freddie said. "If that's what you're asking."
"I'm not asking if something's going on. I'm asking how it's going." Oliver turned his glass again. "You look at her like you're trying to memorize something. Like you're trying to drink her in before the drink is gone. But Wren strikes me as the kind of woman who sticks around."
The slide guitar swelled and settled. Someone laughed at the pool table.
Freddie kept his eyes on the row of bottles behind the bar and said nothing, because what he might have said was that memorize was the wrong word, that he'd already memorized her—he'd had seven weeks and considerable proximity and a very good memory—and that the problem was not retention but transmission.
"She's easy on the eyes," he said.
"She is," Oliver agreed pleasantly. "She's also funny and sharp, and she remembers every book recommendation anyone's ever made to her and follows up on them. She's good at making you feel like your opinion matters."
"Yes." This came out flatter than he'd intended.
"I thought you thought she was interested in me," Oliver said. Not a question. He'd apparently been paying attention to things Freddie hadn't realized he'd broadcast.
"I thought—" He stopped. He picked up his mug. "You visit the shop. She seemed—I don't know. Attentive."
"I like Wren. She's great. But she's—" He considered. "She's friendship material, yeah? She's not a good-time girl, she's a long-time girl."
Freddie looked at him.
Oliver shrugged, easy and uncomplicated. "I'm looking for Ms. Right Now. Wren is looking for something that lasts. Those are different searches." He set his glass down. "Besides."
He let it sit there. Freddie waited.
"You haven't moved the cart," Oliver said.
The ambient noise of the bar continued around them. The pool game. The slide guitar. Someone ordering something with ice that clattered against the glass.
"The spot outside Pages had managed to build an intimacy so complete on paper that when it came time to translate it to the real world, he had no idea what language he was supposed to be speaking.
He'd thought at the time that it was specific to Nora. A particular chemistry, an unfortunate mismatch. He'd thought, at the time, that it was the circumstances: deployment, distance, the unnatural pressure of uncertain survival making feelings heightened and declarations easier.
He thought about the letters he had written in his best handwriting on cream paper and slipped through a brass slot before anyone could see him do it.
He thought about standing twelve feet from Wren Banks every single morning, close enough to count the freckles across her nose in good light, and being incapable of saying a single thing that was true.
He thought about the cart. About the position of the cart, and the view it afforded, and the fact that the diner spot did forty percent more volume.
He'd come to Valor City and built himself a new distance to stand behind, and dressed it up in cream paper and literary references.
He'd constructed a version of himself that Wren might love: careful and attentive and well-read, capable of sentences like there is something in the way you recommend a book to a stranger that makes me want to be that stranger.
He'd positioned that version of himself on the other side of a pane of glass where it couldn't be touched, or questioned, or asked to be present.
He was not a man in love writing letters. He was a man afraid of being known, who had found yet another elegant way to be legible on paper and invisible in person.
The slide guitar finished its slow descent and settled into something quiet.
Across the bar, Oliver laughed at something the woman had said, an easy, uncalculated laugh.
Kowalski and Webb had claimed the corner booth and were deep in conversation, Webb's hands moving in the way they did when he was explaining something tactical, Kowalski listening with his chin on his fist. The bar held them all—the easy and the complicated, the recovered and the still-recovering—in its amber warmth.
Freddie finished his ale. He did not order another.
He knew the pattern now. He could see it whole, the way you could see a thing clearly only from far enough back: the letters to Nora, the letters to Wren, the version of himself that lived on paper because paper didn't look at you and want more than you knew how to give.
He sat with this knowledge. He did not move from the bar stool.
He turned his empty glass on the bar, a slow quarter-rotation, which was exactly what Oliver had done, and found that the recognition did not translate into any particular action.
Knowing a pattern was not the same as breaking it.
He had never thought it was. He was clear-eyed about a great many things and found this clarity, more often than not, to be cold comfort.
He thought about Wren reading his letters in the lamplight of the shop after closing.
He thought about the way she'd looked through the bookshop window on Tuesday afternoon, laughing at something Bea had said, one hand pressed to her mouth, the sound inaudible through the glass but the shape of it completely legible.
He thought about what she'd said on the pavement outside the committee meeting last week—I feel like I'm here to heal and rebuild my life too—and the way she'd stopped herself after, bitten her lip, like she'd said more than she'd meant to.
He had wanted, in that moment, to say: Me too.
He had said nothing. He had listened to the rain. He wished more than anything to go back in that moment and do it again. Looking out the window at the full moon in the sky, he realized he had another chance to do it right when the sun replaced the moon tomorrow.