14. Nobody Gets This But Me
NOBODY GETS THIS BUT ME
Neither of us sleeps, and neither of us says that's what's happening, and for the record we should be sleeping in shifts — that's doctrine, that's what we did last night, one up, one down, four and four — because his father lands at dawn and dawn is maybe six hours out and neither of us has so much as looked at a cot like we mean it.
The barn at midnight is all small sounds.
Generator doing its steady diesel heartbeat outside.
Owls trading territory up the hollow. The med kit sitting open-topped where he staged it, which I try not to look at, because an open med kit the night before a meeting is a sentence with the verb missing.
My arm's down to an itch under the dressing.
My brain will not sit. I keep walking the same circuit — Shep inside, Bones down, Owen and Hush and a gray van somewhere out there in the dark counties reading Rook's own maps by dome light — and every lap ends at the same place, which is tomorrow, which is a word I can't see the other side of.
The generator hums and the lamp's turned low, and Rook sits at the workbench cleaning the Sig while I lie there watching him, and around midnight I catch it: he finishes the pistol, racks it, sets it down — and then picks it up and starts again. Same weapon. Twice.
Fourteen months in Hell's Reckoning taught me to read big men for weather, and four days with this one taught me the finer signs.
Rook Aldridge doesn't pace, drink, or snap at the kid across the barn when a storm is coming; he cleans a weapon that is already clean.
Tomorrow morning his father is coming up that hollow with a contract in his pocket and a killer in the trees, and the only crack in all that gunmetal is a second coat of oil on the slide.
Watching him, I understand with a force I can feel in my teeth that nobody has ever stood watch over this man.
His whole life has been doors, exits, yards, and the sleeping kid in the motel bed.
Warden built him to keep everybody else's night quiet, and in seventeen years nobody, including the man who built him, seems to have noticed that the watchman was alone the entire time.
It took me four days. I don't know what that says about the rest of them.
"Hey," I say. "Come here."
"Sleep."
"Yeah, no. Come here."
He racks the Sig a second time, sets it down deliberate, and comes and sits on the edge of my cot, forearms on his knees, and in the lamp light the lines of his face are doing something I've decided to call thinking because the alternative words scare me.
"What happens tomorrow," I ask, "when he comes. Actually. You've run it, I know you've run it, you run everything. Give me the brief."
"One of three things happens," he says. "I've planned for two of them."
"And the third?"
He's quiet. And the quiet tells me the third one is the one where somebody's hand comes up, his or his father's, and the family business gets finished the family way, and there's no planning that, there's only finding out what your hand does.
"Okay," I say, because I'm not making him say it. "Okay."
And that's when he does the thing that rearranges me.
He looks at me — the scale look, the one that weighs you and doesn't flinch at the number, the one I've been getting since a fuel island in Wells — and he says, "Ask me."
For a second I genuinely don't get it. Then I do, and everything in my chest drops an octave.
The canyon. Blood on my lip, his mouth an inch off mine, me begging, and him: you're mine to protect right now, not mine to take.
Every single time since then he's run it — set the terms, kept the watch, held the wheel — and even flat on his back under me in this barn he was somehow still the floor I was standing on.
"Rook."
"You had terms read to you once," he says.
"Rested. Fed. A day nobody bled. Tomorrow doesn't qualify and next week may not exist." His voice stays even but there's a seam in it, and through the seam I can see all the way down.
"Seventeen years I've kept one door locked because the man who taught me everything taught me a locked door is the only kind that holds.
I don't want to meet him tomorrow with his lock still on me. So ask me."
There are maybe four people on earth who'd understand what's being handed to me right now, and three of them would faint.
"Yeah," I say, wrecked already. "Yes. Come here, let me?—"
I ask him with my hands. Slow is his language and his weapon so I take it off him and use it on him, stripping him down piece by piece in the low lamp of this dead man's barn while the generator hums and the owls work the hollow outside.
Boots first, then the shirt peeled back so the dog tags spill cool against my knuckles, the blank one turning in the light like it knows something, and I map every scar I first learned in that cabin dark, now with time and lamplight on them, putting my mouth to each one like I'm taking inventory of property.
He lets me. The most dangerous man in four states lies back on the cot and opens his hands flat on the blanket and lets me have him.
I get his belt open and drag his pants down without ceremony, staying face to face because I want his eyes on me the whole time I take him.
With surgical slick stolen from the med kit and a clock still running outside the barn, I work him open on one finger and then two, unhurried but not gentle, while my mouth keeps him occupied and takes him apart from the inside.
He's tight, locked up seventeen years deep, and I talk to him low and greedy until the lock yields: his thighs loosen, a sound I've never heard leaves him cracked and involuntary, and I nearly finish from that alone.
"That's it," against his hip, two fingers now curling, finding the spot that lifts his hips off the cot and shatters his breath—not a comfort, a claim, mapping what's mine—"Yeah. There you are. Nobody gets this but me."
"Micah." His name wrecked to gravel in his mouth.
"Right here."
"Now."
I slick myself, settle between his thighs, line up, and push into him slow, slow, watching his face the whole way down, the stretch of him around me searing and tight, and his eyes stay open.
Every man I've known closes his eyes when something's too much; Rook keeps them open, on me, letting me watch it be too much.
"Okay?" I ask, seated deep and shaking with holding still.
"You're asking me to report readiness," he says, one dry scrap of gallows, and I take that off him too.
I move slow because slow is worse for him, makes him feel every inch, and I set the pace and hold him to it. His hands come up off the blanket at last, one clamped hard on my shoulder, one fisted in my hair, and I get a hand between us to work him in rhythm while I claim what's mine.
"Stay right here," he says—not an order, the asking he never does, his control gone to rags in my hands.
"You're not going anywhere. You're mine now. Look at me. Rook—look at me?—"
He comes with his eyes open, spilling hot over my fist, clenching tight around me, the sound he makes quiet and enormous, like something surfacing after a long time down, and it pulls me over with him; I bury myself deep, deeper than I've ever gone, till I'm flush, and come so hard the barn whites out, saying Rook's name into his mouth like the only word I've got left.
After, I keep him under me longer than I need to, pinning him to the cot with my own weight because I can, my mouth at his throat where the pulse is still going hard.
My dressing has pulled loose again, and everything smells of gun oil and what I did to him when I feel the vigilance finally release.
Seventeen years of sitting toward the door comes off him in one breath, in a barn, beneath a loud kid from Poplar Bluff who was supposed to be a body by now.
He didn't set the watch down; I took it, along with the sounds, the open eyes, and the rank he handed over, and I have no plan to give any of it back.
He doesn't sleep so much as go under, dropped clean out from the bottom of himself, done in, and I let him, because a man asleep under me is a man I'm keeping.
His head ends up heavy on my thigh and I don't move it.
I sit up against the barn wall with the Sig on the crate beside me — not standing his watch for him, standing over what's mine — both eyes open on the dark, all night, till the door's problem becomes mine to answer.
Gray light rises slowly in the high windows, and with it comes the sound of one big-block engine far down the hollow, moving without hurry at the scariest speed there is. Dawn keeps its appointments.