Chapter 7 Not Right Now #2
“You didn’t know. That’s the whole of it.” His thumb moved on the handle. “You ran, and I let you go. Going after you would’ve just proved you right to run. So I stood here and let you teach yourself the wrong thing for a week.”
“That’s very calm of you.”
“It wasn’t. At the time.” He said it to the counter. “Don’t mistake quiet for calm. You’ve been doing that with me since the day they put us across a desk from each other.”
We stood in it. Neither of us had anywhere to put our hands.
“My head’s a mess,” I said, when I couldn’t take the quiet.
“I’m not playing for sympathy. It’s the fact.
I don’t know why I kissed you. Twice now.
I’ve turned it over till I’m sick and there’s no clean answer in there.
” A breath. “I want one. I want to look at it instead of running. But I’m looking through all of this.
The file. My father. And I don’t trust a single thing I feel right now to be the real shape of it. ”
He was very quiet.
“And there’s the half I keep skipping,” I said. A short laugh that went nowhere. “I asked it sideways before and you let it slide. So straight, then. Was there ever anything on your side, or am I opening a vein over one drunk man’s mess in a kitchen?”
He set his mug down.
Then he reached across the counter and put his hand over mine.
He didn’t say a word. His hand just covered the back of mine, warm, sure, and he looked at me while he did it, and his eyes had stopped doing nothing. They were doing everything. Steady and dark and fixed on me like I was the only thing in the room worth the looking.
My heart came up off the floor of me and slammed.
I didn’t move. I was afraid if I moved he’d take it back, and I’d learn it had been a mercy, a hand laid on a man who needed one. So I sat with his hand over mine and my pulse going like I’d run the last block, and I let it be true for exactly as long as he let it.
His thumb moved once across my knuckles. Just once.
A long while passed. Longer than a hand needs to make a point.
Then he took it back.
“I don’t know either,” he said. Quiet. Level.
“If you want the honest answer, that’s it.
I don’t have this filed any cleaner than you do.
” He picked the mug back up, like the hand had never happened, except we both knew it had.
“And you’re right about the timing. You’ve got Internal Affairs on one side of you and your family on the other, and you can barely sit up straight.
Maybe we leave it. Until the ground stops moving.
Then we look, if there’s still something to look at. ”
It was the reasonable thing. The decent thing. He was handing me the exact room I’d come out to ask for.
My heart dropped through the floor.
“And in the meantime,” I said. “We what. Share a sink and a wall and pretend nothing happened last night.”
“We do what we’ve been doing.”
“What we’ve been doing is killing me.”
“I know.” He said it plainly, no softer for being true.
“We’re partners, and we live in four rooms, and one of us is in trouble he can’t talk about.
So we keep the coffee going, and we get you through the week, and we don’t make a wreck we have to work next to.
” He held my eyes. “I can do that if you can. It’s not what I’d pick. It’s what’s in front of us.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It won’t be simple. I didn’t say simple. I said it’s what’s in front of us, and we’re going to have to live in it either way.”
I’d braced all morning to be the one holding the line.
To be the one saying not now, not like this.
And here he was saying it for me, gentle, and all I wanted was to take it back.
Take his hand back. Tell him I was sick of waiting, that the ground was never going to stop moving and I was tired of standing on it by myself.
“Don’t,” I started. “I.”
“Don’t what.”
The line was right there. Don’t wait. I don’t want to wait. It sat behind my teeth and I couldn’t get it past them, because every reason I’d just listed to keep him clear of all this was still true, and saying it would only drag him in.
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re right. Sensible.”
“Sensible.” Something dry under it. There and gone.
His phone went off in his jacket.
He pulled it out, looked, and the whole register of him changed. The man at the counter folded away and the cop came up in his place.
“Hawley.” A beat. His eyes cut to the middle distance. “When. Right, I’m up.” Another beat. “Twenty minutes.”
He hung up. Already moving. Mug to the sink, jacket squared on his shoulders.
“Work,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Then go.”
He stopped at the door. Looked back, not all the way around.
“Eat the rest of that toast,” he said. “And Murphy still wants you in his office. End of the week. Whatever else is on fire, you walk in there on your feet. Don’t let any of this cost you that.”
Then the door, and the latch finding home, and the bad stair on the landing giving under his weight. Gone.
I sat alone in the kitchen with two mugs and a headache and the print of his hand still on the back of mine.
His coffee sat where he’d left it, half gone.
I don’t know why I picked it up. I just did.
Turned it in my hands. The rim was still faintly warm on one side, the side he’d drunk from, and I put my thumb there without deciding to, on the curve of china his mouth had touched a minute ago, and held it there like a man who’d lost the run of himself entirely.
I didn’t have a name for any of it. Thirty-one years able to file anyone in under a second, and I sat in my own kitchen with another man’s coffee cup against my thumb and couldn’t have told you the first thing about what I felt, or wanted, or why my chest had caved when he said the smart and gentle thing instead of the other one.
He’d touched my hand. He didn’t know either. He wanted to wait.
All three true. None of them lying down together.
I set the cup down. Careful, like it might go off.
I washed both mugs and stood them in the rack. It was the one thing in the room I could do start to finish without getting it wrong, and I needed one of those this morning.
Then I stood at the window a minute. Gray sky, the wet street three floors down, a streetcar grinding past with two faces in it going somewhere ordinary. I watched it out of sight.
Sitting in things had never once moved a thing an inch.
My phone was on the side table, plugged in to charge. Of course it was. He’d found the cord, matched it, set it where I’d see it. I picked it up. The headache pulsed under everything else.
There was a knot of all this I couldn’t touch. The file. The room across the city. The slow clean machine taking me apart where I’d never get a hand on it. I couldn’t fight that. Not from a desk. Not from here.
There was one thing I could.
I went into the contacts I never open. Past the women’s names, the ones who’d come if I called and never see a thing I didn’t show them. Past the lawyers. Down to the floor of the list, where the family lived.
My uncle’s office. My father’s direct line, the one I’d never once dialed. My mother.
My thumb sat over my mother’s name. She was the soft one, the one they sent in first because they knew I’d pick up.
Call her and she’d be glad and a little teary and have my father on the line inside a minute, warmed up and waiting.
That was the whole trick of her, and she’d run it anyway, because she loved me, and the loving had never once stopped her handing over the phone.
I took my thumb off her name.
Not yet. Not unwashed and shaking, with him still on my skin and a hangover where my judgment should be. A man like my father can hear all of that down a line from a mile off, and I wasn’t handing him a single inch I didn’t have to.
I carried the phone to the bathroom and set it on the edge of the sink. Turned the shower on. Stood there while the water ran cold, then warm, then hot enough to hurt.
I couldn’t touch the file. I couldn’t take back the kiss. The only wreck left in the building that had my own hand in it was the one with my name on the front of it, and I was going to have to walk back into that house to do anything about it.
I got in the water and started there.