Chapter 7 Not Right Now
Ryan
I woke with my pulse in my teeth.
For a second that was all there was. The headache behind the eyes, a slow split down the middle of my skull. Then the light found the gap in the curtains and laid a blade across the ceiling, and I shut my eyes against it, and that was a mistake, because the dark behind my lids had pictures in it.
The kitchen table. The bottle gone. His hands turning mine over under the lamp.
My mouth on his.
I lay very still, like still would un-happen it.
The cut on my finger had a clean wrap. I didn’t remember that part going on.
I remembered the rest. Rolling up off the bed into him.
A hand on his jaw. Kissing him like the room was going down.
The look on his face when I did it. Then nothing, the good clean nothing the drink gives you right before it hands you the bill.
A cupboard shut, soft, down the hall. Water in the tap. The clink of a spoon against a mug.
He was up. Twelve feet and a thin wall away, making coffee, and at some point I was going to have to walk out there and be a person in front of him.
There was a version of this where I didn’t.
Where I gave it an hour, let him leave for the station, never put my face near it.
There was a version where I came out loose and easy.
God, what a state. I don’t remember a thing past the second drink.
He’d let me have it. We’d file the whole night under weather and never speak of it again.
I’d done that my whole life. Smiled, shrugged, walked off light, never once caught holding anything heavier than a grin.
My head pounded. Under it, a week old and still going, my father’s voice on the phone, low and patient. Under that, the folder with my name on it, getting rebuilt across the city in a room I’d never see.
No door anywhere that didn’t have someone behind it I couldn’t beat.
I got up. The room tipped, then held. I pulled on yesterday’s shirt and didn’t bother with better. Then I went out to face him, because the only thing worse than facing him was another hour in a bed full of what I’d done.
The apartment smelled of coffee.
He’d cleaned the kitchen. Some time after I went down he’d done the dishes and wiped the table and bagged a week of takeout, and there was nothing left of the worst of it. Just a kitchen. And him in it.
Hawley stood by the counter with a mug. Dressed for work. He looked up when I came in and his face did nothing at all, which from him is its own kind of bracing.
I stopped in the mouth of the hall. “Morning.”
“There’s coffee.”
“Oh yeah.” My voice came out wrecked.
He poured one and set it on the counter between us. Made it the way I take it. I crossed and picked it up and held it and didn’t drink, because my stomach hadn’t decided yet whether it was going to be a stomach.
“Sit before you fall,” he said.
I sat. He stayed standing on the far side of the counter, a careful arm’s length of laminate between us.
“How’s the head.”
“Like someone parked on it.”
“You ate nothing yesterday and drank most of a bottle.” He filled a glass at the tap and pushed it over. “Water first. The coffee won’t forgive you on an empty tank.”
I drank it. Every cell that had spent the night marinating put a hand up. He watched to be sure I finished, then dropped two slices in the toaster without asking.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Dry. No butter. You’ll keep it down.”
I turned the mug on the counter. There was a question I’d been carrying since I opened my eyes, and it came out before the smarter part of me could stop it.
“What did I say last night.”
He looked at me.
“I run my mouth when I’m gone. Always have.” I made myself hold his eyes. “So. What did you get.”
He took his time. “Enough.”
“Hawley.”
“You talked about your father.” Flat. Watching me. “You said he pulls. That you never feel a hand on you, you just look up one day and you’re standing where he wanted.” A beat. “You said some other things.”
“What other things.”
“You said the ground was ahead on points.” He didn’t soften it and he didn’t make a meal of it. He set it on the counter between us and let me look at it. “Some nights, was how you put it.”
My face did something I couldn’t stop. I picked the coffee up so my hands had a job.
“That’s a figure of speech,” I said.
“Is it.”
“It’s a thing people say.”
“People say a lot of things at two in the morning they spend the daylight calling figures of speech.” His eyes didn’t move off me. “I’m not going to push it. I’m telling you I heard it, and I won’t pretend I didn’t.”
I didn’t have anything for it.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” I said.
“Good.”
“I mean it.”
“I believe you.” He let it sit. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t hear it.”
The toast popped. Neither of us looked at it.
“You going to put it in a report,” I said.
“Put what in a report.”
“The ground thing. I’ve got Internal Affairs taking me apart by the inch. A note from my own partner that I was sitting at my own table talking about ground at two in the morning is exactly the kind of thing that ends a man’s career and gets everyone calling it a kindness.”
“I’m not Internal Affairs.”
“You’re a cop with a duty to flag it.”
“I’m a man who poured you a glass of water.” Flat. He didn’t blink. “I’m not building anybody a case against you. Not them. Not the brass. Not your father. If I ever put a word about you on paper, you’ll hear it from my mouth first.”
That landed somewhere I keep covered.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay.”
“God.” I scrubbed my face. “I gave you all that.”
“You gave me pieces. I didn’t ask for them.” He pushed the toast onto a plate and slid it across. “Eat.”
I ate a corner. It was sawdust, but it stayed down, and the worst of the swimming eased off a notch.
“You went down hard,” he said. “Whatever else happened down there, you were past being responsible for much. The booze gets a vote.” He turned the mug a quarter. “You don’t have to drag any of it into the daylight if you don’t want it there.”
There it was. The door, held open for me. All I had to do was step through it light, the way I’d stepped through a hundred.
I looked at the coffee. I looked at him.
“I was drunk,” I said. “I barely.”
It stopped. Right there in my mouth. The lie, dead on the runway.
Because he’d been right there with me. He knew to the inch how gone I was and how gone I wasn’t. I could sell a story to a room full of brass and have them shake my hand for it. I could not sell this one to the man who’d carried me up the hall.
“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that. That’s not what I came out here for.”
He went still. Waiting.
The mug shook. I set it down. “I’m in the middle of all of it, and every way out has one of them standing in it. I can’t get a clean breath, Hawley.”
“What’s going on with your family.”
“Nothing you want any part of.”
“I already heard some of it. Two in the morning, remember.”
“You heard the edges. The edges are bad enough.” I dragged a hand down my face.
The gauze caught on stubble. “There’s a name behind mine.
Money. The kind of name that doesn’t lose at anything, ever.
That’s the whole of what you get this morning.
The rest stays in a box. People who get near it end up paying for it. ”
He took that in. Didn’t reach for it.
“This name,” he said. “The kind I’d know if you said it out loud.”
“You’d know it.”
“And your father wants you where.”
“Out of the job. Back in the fold. A suit that costs what you clear in a month, a desk with my name on a brass plate, shaking hands with people I’d cross the street to dodge.
” I pushed the mug a few inches. “He’s patient about it.
That’s the part that gets under you. He never asks twice.
He just moves the ground till you’re standing where he wanted and can’t work out how you got there. ”
He didn’t push. He’s the only man I’ve met who can let a thing go and have it land harder than the next question would.
I made myself look at him.
“I remember kissing you,” I said.
His face didn’t move. The room went quiet enough to hear the fridge.
“Last night. When you were getting me to bed. I remember it, and I’m not calling it the whiskey, because it wasn’t, and you’d know I was lying.
” My pulse climbed. “You were trying to put a drunk man down for the night, and that drunk man grabbed you. You didn’t sign on for that. It wasn’t fair, what I did.”
Something crossed his face. Dark. Fast. His jaw set, and he opened his mouth.
“I’m not a scumbag,” I said, before he could land it.
“I know it looks like one’s résumé. The first time I kissed you I bolted out my own front door and stayed gone a day.
Last night I did it drunk and went down before you could get a word in.
If I were you I’d have me filed under the worst kind of man there is.
The kind who reaches for whatever’s warm and bolts before the bill comes.
” I held his eyes. “I’ve acted like that man.
I haven’t been him. I need you to have that, even if it’s the only part you keep. ”
A door slammed two floors down and feet went off down the stairwell.
He took a breath. When he spoke it came out lower.
“You want to know what I thought,” he said. “That first night. When you ran.”
“Hawley.”
“I read people for a living. Eight years of it. It’s the one thing nobody at that station argues.
” He turned the mug, not looking at it. “And I stood in this kitchen after you’d gone and thought, I read it wrong.
A month of him across a desk, and I got the one thing wrong that mattered.
” He set the mug down. “So don’t tell me what I did or didn’t sign on for.
You’re not the only one in the room who’s spent a week not sleeping. ”
That shut me up. All the way up.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“No. You ran before you could.”
“I’d have stayed.” It was out before I could weigh it. “If I’d had the first idea there was a chance you. I wouldn’t have gone out that door.”