Chapter 31
MAGS
I step back.
That's all I do. One step. He reads it as the invitation it is and crosses my threshold. I close the door behind him and now Luke is in my apartment in the September dark and neither of us has said a word yet.
He sets his hat crown down on my counter. Faces me. Hands empty.
He looks like a man who drove here knowing exactly what he came to say and is prepared to stand here all night saying it.
I cross my arms.
"You watched me go still," he says.
Not a question.
"Yes."
"In front of sixty people." His voice is level. "While Cutter put that photograph on the table."
"I know what I saw, Luke."
"I know you do." He meets my eyes and holds them. "I'm not here to tell you what you saw was wrong. I'm here because it wasn't the whole picture and I didn't give you the rest of it fast enough. You were already in your truck."
"I was in my truck," I say, "because I have been in that room before. Different man. Different city. Same single second of someone running the math on whether I'm worth the cost." I keep my voice even. "I don't wait around for the answer anymore."
Something moves through his face. Not defense. Heavier than that.
"That's fair," he says.
Which is not what I prepared for.
"I'm not asking you to forgive the pause," he says. "I'm asking what you need. Not what I can fix. What you need."
I look at him.
He is standing in my apartment on a Sunday night with nothing in his hands and he is asking me a question I have not been asked before by someone with something to apologize for.
Adam didn't ask. Franklin didn't ask. They explained.
They justified. They built cases for themselves with exhibits and closing arguments and I sat across from them in various kitchens absorbing their evidence for why I should believe them.
Luke is not building a case.
He's just standing there.
"I needed you to step forward," I say. "In that room. I needed you to not go quiet."
"I know."
"That's it. That's the whole thing. I needed you to not disappear for one second in front of sixty people and you did and I don't know what to do with that."
"I know." A beat. "I'm sorry."
Not qualified. Not followed by a but.
I turn away from him and walk to the kitchen window. Below, the alley is dark.
"It's been nine days," I say, to the glass.
"Yes."
"Nine days and six texts and three voicemails and none of them explained the pause."
"No. They didn't."
"Why not?"
A beat. Long enough that I turn around.
He's looking at me with something in his face that has no name in the vocabulary I built for him in June.
Not the careful stillness from the gate. Not the private mouth from Duke's. Something quieter and heavier and harder to hold.
"Because explaining it meant telling you something else first," he says. "And I wasn't ready to tell you that until I'd handled it. And I knew if I told you the explanation without handling it first, it would read like I was using it to buy my way back in."
I stare at him.
"You were protecting the integrity of the grovel," I say.
"I was protecting the integrity of the grovel," he confirms, without any apparent embarrassment.
"That is," I say slowly, "genuinely the most Luke McAllister sentence I have ever heard."
The corner of his mouth moves.
"Is that a good thing?"
"I haven't decided yet."
He accepts that with a nod and does not push.
This is the part that keeps undoing me. He never pushes. He lays something down and steps back from it and lets me decide what to do with it. I spent three months learning to expect pressure and maneuvering from men who claimed to care about me.
Here is this infuriating grumpy rancher standing in my kitchen and he will apparently wait as long as I need him to.
I pull out a stool and sit down at the counter.
He doesn't move toward me. He stays where he is, a careful ten feet away, and I look at him across that distance, and I feel the weight of everything I have been carrying since August seventh and I think: I am so tired of carrying it alone.
"There's something I need to tell you," I say.
"Okay."
"I've been sitting on it for a while. I wasn't ready to tell you until I'd handled it myself." I watch him register the callback. His jaw shifts. "So you're going to have to not do anything alarming when I say it."
"Define alarming."
"Loud. Sudden. Large gestures of any kind."
"Mags."
"I'm serious, Luke, I need you to be very calm and not?—"
"Mags." His voice drops. Quiet and solid, the voice he uses when a horse is braced and he needs it to come down. "I'm right here. Tell me."
I look at my hands on the counter.
"I'm pregnant," I say.
"Since July. Your cabin. The blue dress experiment.
" I make myself look up. "I know the failure rates and I know the timing and I did the math and I've been to the doctor and everything is fine and the due date is mid-April and I've already decided I'm having the baby, and I made that decision before I'm telling you because I needed it to be mine first and?—"
He sits down on the floor.
Not the stool. Not the chair. The floor, right where he's standing, back against my kitchen cabinets, long legs bent in front of him, one hand pressed flat to the linoleum, looking at something only he can see.
I watch him.
No panic. No grief. Nothing cold or contractual. He is sitting on my kitchen floor because something came into him that was too big to hold standing up, and his eyes are wet at the corners, and his hand is flat on the floor like he needs to feel the ground under him.
I get off the stool.
I cross the kitchen and I sit down beside him on the linoleum with my back against the cabinets and my knees up, and we sit there in the September dark, and after a long time he says, quiet and rough:
"Took me a month to get my nerve up to touch you."
"Yes," I say. "Here. This kitchen. Maps everywhere."
He turns his head and looks at me. Something shifts at the corner of his mouth, the tiniest smirk.
"I'm so glad you brought me a burger and fries."
His exhale is almost a laugh. Almost.
"A baby," he says.
"Mid-April."
"Yours."
"Ours," I say, "if you want it to be. But mine, regardless. I need you to understand that part."
"I understand that part."
"Good."
We sit there. His shoulder is an inch from mine and he is not moving toward me and I am not moving toward him and I am acutely aware of the heat of him in the narrow space between us, of how easy it would be to close that inch, and I don't, and he doesn't reach for me, and that restraint is its own thing, something deliberate and careful that I register in the center of my chest.
"I told Viv," I say. "Only Viv. I needed to tell someone, and she was the right person."
"That tracks." A beat. "You made the decision before you told me."
"Yes."
"Because you needed it to be yours first."
"Yes."
"Good," he says. Quiet. Final. Like it is the only correct answer and he has never been more certain of anything.
I don't have a word for what that does to me.
"The livestock association meeting," I say. "That pause. What were you doing?"
He's quiet for a long moment. And here it is, the one thing he won't give me yet, the edge I can feel under the patience, the thing he is holding back with both hands.
"I need one more day," he says. "And then I'll tell you everything. I'm asking you to trust that there's a reason it has to be in that order."
I should say no. I have very good evidence-based reasons to say no. A documented pattern of men asking me to extend one more unit of trust before the full picture arrives.
"One day," I say.
"One day."
"And then I get everything."
"Everything. No edits."
I look at the middle distance. Eleven is on the eastern ridge tonight, the pack working back through the drainage, and tomorrow I have to file the warning shot report with Briggs, and Cutter's operation is patient and organized and has now escalated to putting a rifle on a woman in a field, and I am pregnant and sitting on the floor of my kitchen with a man I haven't forgiven, and it is entirely possible I am losing my scientific objectivity.
"I didn't ask you to leave," I say.
"No. You didn't."
"That's not forgiveness. I want that on the record."
"Noted."
"I'm still angry."
"I know."
"And you're sleeping on the couch."
"I know that too."
I push up off the floor. He stands in the same motion, that rancher's economy of movement, and for a moment we're close in the kitchen, close enough that I can smell the barn and the cold night air still on his jacket, close enough that if he moved one inch, I wouldn't stop him. He doesn't move.
"Mags."
"What?"
"I'd like to be the kind of man you actually tell things to." His eyes on mine, steady. "I'm going to earn the next thing you tell me."
I look at him for a long moment. My knees are not entirely reliable right now.
"The couch has a blanket," I say. "Willa left it."
"Of course she did."
I go to my room and close the door. I don't look back.
I hear him move to the couch, hear the quiet weight of him settling, and I lie on top of my covers in the dark and think about a man on my floor with wet eyes and one hand pressed flat to the ground like he needed proof the world was still under him.
He didn't panic.
He sat down.
Those are not the same thing, and I am a scientist and I know how to read data and I lie there for a long time, not sleeping, noting what I have observed.