Chapter 31
Thirty-One
Cal
Old Corliss mill, out past the feed store, smoke showing.
Which sounds like something until you’ve run this crew long enough to know the Corliss mill’s been empty since before I had a driver’s license, and the only things living in it now are pigeons and whatever the pigeons are scared of.
We roll anyway. You always roll. A nothing that turns out to be a something is how people end up on the evening news.
I ride the rig with my gear on and my head two miles back the other direction, sitting on a bakery counter.
That’s the whole trouble right now. I keep having to haul myself back into my own body.
We pull up, we pile out, we do the whole dance, and I’m running it on the autopilot I’ve had since I was nineteen, checking corners, calling clear, smooth as anything, while about eighty percent of Cal Shaw is still upstairs over Rise & Shine with an omega gone soft and heavy against his arm.
It was raccoons. A family of them nesting in the old dye room.
Somebody dumped a smoldering barbecue in the lot next door, the wind carried the smell over, and Mrs. Petrangelo called it in like the place was Chernobyl.
Ten minutes, start to finish. We stamp out a sad little heap of charcoal, shoo the raccoons out a broken window, and stand around in a dead building full of sixty years of dust and pigeon mess, heroes of the hour.
Eli finds me by the loading dock, staring at nothing.
“You’re off,” he says. Not a question. Eli doesn’t spend breath on questions he already knows the answer to.
“I’m great,” I tell him, and give him the grin. The good one. The one that’s talked me out of speeding tickets and into more beds than I’ll cop to in daylight.
It bounces right off him. It always does. Eli’s the one man in the county fully immune to my entire deal, which is probably a big part of why he’s prime and I’m not.
“You called the same corner clear twice,” he says. “Rhett had to sweep the far room himself. You want to tell me, or you want to stand here and lie to me some more? Either’s fine. Just pick one so I know what kind of shift I’m having.”
That’s about forty words, which for Eli is a speech, which is how I know he’s genuinely worried.
I can’t say the real thing to him, not here, not standing in a raccoon-wrecked ruin at five in the evening.
She’s pulling away.
I felt it start the morning after. We came off her heat wrung out and stupid-happy, all four of us knotted up in that nest like a litter, and I floated back to the station on it, so full of the thing I’ve wanted for six years I couldn’t see straight.
Then I went by the shop the next day, just to get a look at her face.
The door was open, the ovens were going, and she smiled at me over the counter.
It was a good smile. It was also a wall.
I know a wall when it goes up. I’m the guy people put up the fewest of, so I’ve made a study of the ones who put them up at all.
She was polite. Asked after my day. Slid me a cinnamon roll on the house and called me sweetheart, easy and warm, the exact voice she uses on Mr. Delgado when he shuffles in for his decaf.
Two days before that she had her nails in my back sobbing my name into a pillow.
Now I’m getting the Mr. Delgado voice, and it’s the coldest thing that’s ever happened to me in a warm room.
And under it, when I leaned in for the roll, I caught the other thing.
The city.
I don’t have a better word for it. Her scent’s always been an open kitchen door on a cold morning, sugar and orange and good bread.
Now there’s a thread running through it that doesn’t belong, cool and closed, the smell of a woman with a bag half-packed in the back of her head and one foot already aimed at the door.
I’ve caught it before. On guys about to quit the crew.
On a girl I dated a while back who moved to Denver three weeks after she started smelling like that.
It’s what a person smells like once they’ve decided, way down under the part that does the talking, that they’re not staying.
Wren’s got an exit in her pocket. I’d bet the house on it.
I don’t give Eli the raccoon part or the Denver part. I just say, “She’s got one foot out the door,” and he goes still.
“You sure?”
“I can smell it on her, Eli.”
He doesn’t argue. He can’t. He’d have caught it too, closer up, and now he’s running it behind those quiet eyes, the same math we’ve all been doing since day one, except somebody just made the numbers a lot worse.
And there’s a meaner number under all of them, the one I only run when nobody’s looking.
Say she stays. There’s still a version where she picks the pack for Eli’s steadiness and Rhett’s mouth, and takes me as the guy who came bundled with the set.
I want this one enough that being the spare would take an actual piece out of me.
That’s a flavor of scared I’ve got no practice at.
Rhett wanders over, stripping off his gloves, mouth already loaded with a raccoon joke. He gets one look at the pair of us, and it dies on the spot.
“Who died?” he says.
“Nobody,” says Eli.
“She’s leaving,” I say, because somebody has to, and it’s never going to be Eli. Rhett deserves to hear it from a brother, not catch it off her himself and put it together alone in the dark. “Or she’s thinking hard about it. Hard enough it’s gotten onto her skin.”
So there we are. Three grown men in a collapsed textile mill, having just heroically defeated a barbecue, looking like somebody canceled Christmas and kicked the tree on the way out.
The ride back is quiet. Our rig’s never quiet.
Nobody can see my face right now. Eli’s driving, Rhett’s got his forehead against the window. So I let myself sit with the part that’s been eating a hole in me since the mill.
I don’t know how to fix this.
That’s new. That is a brand-new sensation for Cal Shaw, and I hate it down to my goddamn socks.
My whole life, when a thing’s gone sideways with a person, I’ve had a move.
Turn the warmth up. Crack the joke. Be so easy to have in the room that the problem just melts off in the good mood.
It has never failed me once. I’ve coasted my whole life on the dead-reliable magic of being a man people are glad to see walk in.
And it’s useless here. Spectacularly, top-to-bottom useless.
Because I could go over there tomorrow and turn it all the way up.
Grin, charm, be the sunniest son of a bitch in the state.
And I know exactly how it plays. She’d give me the Delgado smile, slide me another roll, set one more brick on that wall, because a woman this scared does not need one more charming man making the whole thing look easy.
That’s the opposite of the medicine. My entire toolbox is a hammer, and this is not a nail.
This is a woman halfway to a bus, and the thing that keeps her isn’t going to be a better punchline.
It’s room. It’s patience. It’s three men who let her be scared without crowding her, who prove by not pushing that she’s safe to pick us or safe to walk, either one.
Eli’s been telling me this for weeks in his six-words-a-day way, and I finally get it now, sitting in the back of a fire engine with my one good trick taken off me.
So that’s what I’m going to do, God help me.
I’m going to hand the woman I’d walk into a real fire for the exact thing I’m worst at on this earth.
Space. I’m going to sit on my hands, keep the grin holstered, let her come to us or not, on her own clock, at her own speed.
While a huge dumb part of me wants to sprint across that street, sling her over my shoulder, and haul her back to the nest where she smelled like she’d finally landed somewhere.
“Quit white-knuckling the seat,” Rhett says, not turning from the glass. “You’re making the truck nervous.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not, and I’m not, so.” He finally looks over, and for once there’s nothing behind it, no bit, no angle. “We give her room. All three of us. Nobody pulls anything stupid and grand.”
He’s looking dead at me on the stupid-and-grand part. Fair. I’m the reigning champion of stupid and grand.
“Room,” I say. It comes out rougher than I mean it to.
“Room,” Eli says from the front. And that’s it. That’s the plan, the whole of it. Three alphas agreeing to do absolutely nothing while the best thing that ever happened to any of us sits over her shop deciding whether to get on a bus.
Back at the station, I peel off my gear, and I do not go by the bakery, even though it’s on my way, even though the light’s on and I can see her through the front glass, moving around in there, brown hair sliding loose out of its bun, wiping down that counter I have not managed to stop thinking about for days.
I stand in the dark across the street like a man with no sense left, and I let myself look for a slow ten count.
Then I make myself turn and walk in the other direction.
It’s the hardest, dumbest, kindest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’ve got no promise it’ll work, and there’s not one person on earth who can hand me one.
Turns out this is what it feels like to want a thing you can’t charm your way into.
Turns out it feels like standing out in the cold with your mouth shut, praying that when she finally picks, she remembers to pick me too.