Chapter 7 #2
She didn't move. Her hand rested on my chest, her fingers quiet. She was looking at the ceiling rather than at me, which I suspected was a deliberate act of mercy. Giving me somewhere to be that wasn't under her direct attention while I found the words.
I found them, but it took a minute.
Raised by a single mom on the north side of Stockton. My father was gone before I was walking. My mother worked two jobs and cooked bad chicken and believed in me with a specificity I'd spent years trying to be worth and a few more trying to outrun.
The diagnosis came in my senior year. Stage three pancreatic cancer. The medical debt started before the treatment did, and it grew faster than anything I could manage legally.
I'd started with construction work, which was honest. Then added bar security. Then, when the bills outpaced both, I found the underground fighting circuit operating out of a warehouse that should have been condemned, one that paid four times in a night what I made in a week on a site.
I told Nadia about the fights without dressing them up. The early ones I won. The latter ones I threw because throwing fights to order paid better than winning them.
I'd stopped thinking too hard about the difference between legal risk and moral risk somewhere around the fourth month of watching my mother lose weight faster than the treatments could account for.
I was twenty-two when they arrested me. The doctors had given my mother eight months. I served eighteen in county. Not so much for the fighting as for the betting operation behind it.
The part I didn't say out loud, but couldn't keep out of my voice, was that I'd told my mom I'd be back Thursday. I hadn't made it back on Thursday. By the time I got out, she was gone.
I stopped talking.
The room was quiet except for Sofia's cat clock on the wall and the garden sounds through the window screen.
Nadia hadn't moved. Her hand was still on my chest. I could feel my own heartbeat under her palm, which seemed like unnecessary information for both of us.
Then she turned her head and looked at me.
Not with the wavering expression I'd braced for. Not pity, not the horror of realizing she'd made a mistake. Instead, she looked at me the way she'd scrutinize a delivery invoice. Directly, without flinching, taking in what was actually there rather than what she'd expected to find.
"How old were you when she was diagnosed?"
"Seventeen."
She nodded once. Something moved across her face that I didn't have a name for yet.
"The fighting," she said. "You were good at it?"
Of everything she could have asked. "Yeah. Until I started losing on purpose."
"The throws? That's what got you arrested? Not the fighting itself?"
"Illegal betting operation. I was part of the machinery," I said, the shame as fresh as ever. "I knew what I was doing. That's not something I get to walk away from."
She was quiet for a while. Her thumb moved once against my ribs, a small unconscious motion, and I wasn't sure she was aware she'd done it.
"Did she know?" she asked. "Your mother. What you were doing to pay the bills."
I thought about that sunny kitchen. The bad chicken. The way she'd folded laundry while she talked so she didn't have to look at me when she said the things that mattered. "She knew something was wrong. She didn't ask what. I think she'd decided not to."
"Because she needed the money."
My half laugh came out bitter, and I shook my head as much as the pillow allowed. "No. Because she needed me to still be her kid." I looked at the ceiling. "It's different."
Nadia was quiet for long enough that I turned to look at her.
She was still watching me. In the pink glow of the lamp, her expression had settled into something I could finally read. As if she'd been handed a piece of information that rearranged something she'd been looking at from the wrong angle.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That can't have been easy." She waited a beat before carrying on. "I'm glad you told me."
The words were simple, and she meant every one of them.
"I know what I am," I said, rolling onto my side so we were face-to-face. "So if you want out, now's the time. You're successful, stable, you have your act together. I'm three years out of county lockup and one lousy decision away from wrecking my second chance."
"I don't see you that way."
"Then how do you see me?"
She took her time with it. "I see someone who shows up every day for an elderly woman who isn't even family.
Someone who works hard and makes his team laugh and looks at me like I'm the only person in the room.
Someone who scares the hell out of me because I'm pretty sure I could fall in love with him if I'm not careful. "
I had the words. That was the thing. They'd been sitting in my chest since four o'clock that morning, when she'd shifted in her sleep and grabbed a fistful of my shirt like I might leave my own bed. All I had to do was say them back.
"Nadia." Her name came out fine. The rest didn't come out at all. Somewhere between my chest and my mouth, the sentence hit a wall I hadn't known I'd built, and what made it through was, "I'm not going anywhere."
She watched me. The lamp put its pink light on the side of her face, and I watched her take what I'd said, hold it up next to what she'd said, and measure the gap. She looked like a woman doing math.
"That's a different answer than the one I gave you," she said.
"It's the one I've got." Then, because she'd earned it and because lying to her after the last hour felt impossible, I added, "It's not everything. It's the part I know how to say."
Her thumb moved against my ribs again. This time I was almost certain she knew she was doing it.
"Okay," she said. "Then that's the one I'll take." She let a breath out. "For now."
"For now," I agreed, and felt something in my chest unclench that had no business unclenching, because she'd given me a pass and I'd taken it.
She settled back against the pillow, her eyes still on me. "I want to be clear about something."
"Okay."
"I refuse to sneak around like I'm ashamed of you. I've spent six months pretending I don't watch you across every event in this town, and I'm done with that part."
She held my gaze. "But I'm not ready to give this a name. I have a business that lives or dies on what people in this town think of my judgment. I have a family that depends on that business. Whatever this is, I need to walk into it with my eyes open. Not fall into it."
"That's fair."
"That means no labels. Not yet. We see each other, we figure out what this is, and when one of us knows something, we say it." Her chin came up a fraction. "Can you live with that?"
"Yeah," I said. It came out fast. Easy. With more relief in it than I would have preferred to show her.
She caught that, too. I watched her catch it, watched it go into the file she was keeping, the one with my record and my dead mother and the answer I hadn't been able to give her. She said nothing about it.
"Good." She yawned and settled against my chest, fitting there in a way I refused to examine. "Then I'm staying tonight. Your cats and I have made our peace."
"They're not my cats. They're Sofia's."
"Either way, they're witnesses," she murmured, her voice already going soft at the edges. "They've seen everything. They'll keep it to themselves."
I held her as her breathing evened out, staring at the ceiling, my hand moving slowly over her hair.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Sofia, telling me to stop grinning at the ceiling and go to sleep because I had work in the morning. I wondered if the old girl ever slept. I texted back a smiley face and set the phone down before she could start a conversation.
The lamp hummed. The cats watched. Nadia's hand had found its way back to my ribs, holding on in her sleep the way she had the night before, like she'd grabbed something and had no intention of letting it go.
I'd had the words. They were still there, sitting in my chest, no smaller for having stayed put.
I told myself I'd say them when saying them wouldn't send her out the door. That the words would keep. That a man who'd waited six months could wait a while longer for the right moment.
It sounded reasonable.
Most things do, at two in the morning, when the person you're selling them to is yourself.