Chapter 4 #3
"I'm saying it." Dom's eyes moved over Jonah's face, once, the way Jonah had seen him read a scene, taking it all in, cataloguing — except this wasn't a scene, this was Jonah, and the reading felt like a hand.
"You covered for me. Kid your age, two days in, and you put yourself in front of the thing instead of running from it.
Nobody's done that for me in a long time.
" A beat. The dryers thumped. "I don't know what to do with you. "
And Jonah — God help him, Marisol help him, somebody help him — leaned in.
It wasn't a decision. Decisions had steps.
This had no steps. His whole body just tipped a few degrees toward the warmth like a plant toward a window, and Dom didn't pull back, Dom's eyes dropped to Jonah's mouth and stayed there a half-second too long, and the six inches became three, became the kind of distance that only means one thing, and Jonah could feel the warmth of him now, could feel the exact moment the air between them stopped being air and became a decision they were both about to make—
The buzzer went off.
Jonah's machine. The wash cycle, ending, a flat electronic bleat exactly like the alert tone at the station, and they both flinched at it like they'd been caught, which they had, by a Whirlpool, and Dom was up off the counter and two feet away before the sound finished, one hand dragging down his own face, and the flat was back, slammed down over everything, the window shut, the storm checked.
"It's late," Dom said. To the dryers. Not to Jonah. "You've got shift tomorrow. Go home, Rask."
Rask. Back to Rask. Not the kid, not even a name — the surname, the uniform, the distance. Dom was already turning away, already reaching for his own laundry half-folded, putting the whole apparatus of who they were supposed to be back together with his steady, steady hands.
"Dom—"
"Go home." Quieter. Almost pleading, under it, though Jonah would spend the rest of the night deciding whether he'd imagined that part. "Please."
And there it was again. Please. As if there were still a version of this where please worked.
Jonah went home. He got his half-washed laundry out of the machine and he drove home through the empty two a.m. streets and he did not turn on the radio, and he sat in his car in the lot outside his building for a while not going in, and he understood — completely, finally, the way you understand a thing in your body instead of your head — that Marisol had been exactly right, and that it hadn't made one bit of difference, because you could hand a man the whole temperature of the stove, every degree of it, and it did not cool the stove down even a little.
He wanted. That was the thing he couldn't put back in the box now.
He'd wanted a lot of things in his life — to be good, to be fast, to be enough, to save the one he hadn't — but he had never in his life wanted a person the way he'd wanted, on a laundromat counter at two-thirty in the morning, for a buzzer not to have gone off.
He got his phone out. Thumbed to Marisol's name.
Typed you were right and looked at it, and deleted it, because if he sent that she'd know, and if she knew she'd worry, and worse, she'd be kind about it, and Jonah could survive almost anything except somebody being kind about the thing he was most afraid of.
He put the phone face-down on the passenger seat.
The thing was — and this was the part he'd never say to Marisol, to anyone — the wanting scared him less than the other thing underneath it.
Because Jonah knew himself. Jonah knew what he did with people who let him close enough to see the wreck.
He circled them. He made himself useful to them, indispensable, a wall for them, the way he'd been useful and indispensable and a wall for exactly one person once, right up until the night being a wall wasn't enough, and then he'd spent seven years becoming a professional at being there in time so that it would never, ever not be enough again.
And here was Dom Cassar, a beautifully organized wreck who let nobody close, cracking open one careful inch at a time, and every protective instinct Jonah owned had stood up at once and said him.
Be his wall. Be the thing he doesn't have.
And that wasn't safe. That was the least safe thing about the whole situation, safer men than Jonah had drowned trying to be somebody's wall, and Jonah had the water in his lungs to prove it.
This is a problem, Jonah thought, which was funny, because it was the exact thought Dom had been having about him for four days, and neither of them knew they were thinking it in the same words on the same nights, two people building the same fire from opposite ends and each of them calling it, privately, a thing they had to put out before it took the house.
He looked at the dark windows of his building and didn't go in yet.
Somewhere across the city Dom was probably doing the same thing — sitting somewhere, not sleeping, folding the night into a shape he could carry.
Jonah hoped he was. Then he hated that he hoped it.
Then he stopped being able to tell the two feelings apart, which was, he was starting to learn, just what this was going to be like now.
He went inside. He didn't sleep.
He had shift in six hours, with the man who signed his life.