Chapter 14 No Side to Him
Ryan
Pat had the tap running before we were halfway to the bar.
“He knows your order,” Jordan said with a laugh.
“He knows my everything.” I took the stool at the end. The one I’d been sitting on the night Jordan came for me. He clocked it. Didn’t make anything of it. Sat down beside me.
The place was the same as always. Long bar, walls gone brown with age, hockey running silent in the corner. Two regulars at the far end arguing about a referee with their hands. The fryer smell that had been in the walls since before either of us was born.
Pat came down and set the first pint in front of me. Then he looked at Jordan. Took a second placing him, and got there. The kid who’d hauled me out of here that night. He didn’t say it. He put a coaster down in front of Jordan instead, which from Pat was a brass band.
“What’s he drinking,” Pat said. To me.
“He can order.”
“Stout,” Jordan said. “Please.”
Pat went to pour it.
“He didn’t card me,” Jordan said.
“You want him to card you?”
“No. I just thought he might with that look in his eye.”
Pat came back with the second pint and the slow top still settling in the glass. I waited till he set it down.
“Start a tab,” I told him. “Mine.”
Jordan’s head came round. “I’ll get my own.”
“You’re not getting your own.”
“Ryan.”
“You paid the tab last time.” I picked up my pint. “And the cab. And gave me a couch a grown man could’ve filed a complaint about. You don’t get to buy twice. Drink the beer.”
He drank the beer. He didn’t love it. But he let it stand, which was the deal, and he knew it was the deal.
“The couch wasn’t that bad,” he said.
“The couch had a spring with my name on it.”
“You slept nine hours on that spring.”
“I passed out for nine hours on that spring. Different verb.”
He grinned into the glass.
For a while we didn’t say much. Didn’t need to. The day was done and we’d both felt it go. There’s an hour after a shift where the job lets go of you finger by finger, and you don’t talk through it, you just sit somewhere with the lights low and let it happen.
The regulars at the end laughed at something. One of them slapped the bar.
“My dad used to come somewhere like this,” Jordan said. “After. One hour, on the way home. Mom kept his dinner warm and stopped calling when it went to voicemail.”
Something moved across his face and he let it.
The hockey cut to a commercial. Pat brought a plate of wings nobody had ordered, set it between us, and walked off before either of us could say a word about it.
Jordan picked one up and committed to it. Sauce to the knuckle. No napkin discipline at all.
“These are good,” he said, like it surprised him.
“Don’t tell Pat. He’ll get ideas.”
He laughed. The real one. Short, surprised out of him. I liked his laugh. There was no angle in it.
I felt good. Not a complicated good. The simple kind, the kind that ambushes you when you’ve been running on something harder for weeks. Off the clock. Nothing waiting. Jordan beside me wrecking a plate of wings like it was the best thing that had happened to him all week.
It was enough.
Then he went quiet. Turned his glass on the coaster. Once, then again, setting it back in the same wet ring.
I knew that one. I’d watched a hundred people do it across a hundred tables. The wind-up before someone hands you the thing they came to say.
I let him get there.
He put the glass down and turned on the stool to face me. His jaw had a set to it I hadn’t seen on him before.
“Okay. I’m going to say a thing.” He stopped. “And it’s going to come out wrong. I practiced it in the car on the way over and it came out wrong there too, so. Manage your expectations.”
“Reid.”
“Just let me, or I’ll lose it.” He flattened both palms on the bar. Pulled a breath like a man about to go under. The flush started up the side of his neck, the one he hated. “I like you more than just a colleague or a friend.”
I put my pint down.
“And I know how it sounds,” he said, fast, before I could get a word in. “A rookie, mooning over the detective. I know. I’ve heard it in my own head, in your voice, and it’s mortifying. I do that to myself most nights, you’ll be glad to hear.”
“You don’t have to sell it.”
“I’m not selling. I’m confessing. There’s a difference, I looked it up.
” He pressed on before he could lose the thread.
“It’s just. You’re such a good person. A good heart.
” He was talking to the bar now, not to me, the words getting out ahead of him.
“And then you kept doing things like that. You know the night cleaner’s name.
I don’t think one other person in that building knows the night cleaner’s name.
You fixed my collar before Chen’s inspection and made it annoying on purpose so I wouldn’t have to thank you.
You laughed at my parking-enforcement joke.
It was a terrible joke. You laughed because I’d had a rotten morning and you’d noticed. ”
He ran out of air. Looked, for a second, like he wanted the floor to open under his stool.
“I had a list,” he said. “In my head. I just said the list out loud. In a bar. Great.”
I sat there with my mouth open and nothing coming out of it, which for me is roughly a medical event.
Luke had told me. Weeks back. Dry, not looking up from his screen.
The kid’s got a thing for you. I’d waved it off.
Said he was reading shadows, that Reid looked at everyone like that, that he was a puppy with a badge.
Luke had let it drop the way he drops things, which is to say he’d been right and hadn’t bothered to make me say so.
He’d been right.
“Jordan,” I said. Then nothing. I deal in words for a living. I had none of them lined up. “Okay. Hang on. First of all.”
Smooth. Very smooth.
And then Luke was just there. Behind my eyes, no asking. Not a thought I reached for. He arrived on his own.
Luke at the next desk with his sleeves shoved up. His forearms. The back of his neck where the hair went soft, the part of him I kept catching myself watching and pretending I wasn’t. His hands flat on the wood when he read a thing twice. The way the room never quite started until he was in it.
His mouth around my name. Once. In a dark kitchen, low, like it got out before he could stop it. I’d been carrying the sound of it ever since.
That was the whole of it. No speech. No list. Luke had never once sat in front of me and said a sentence like the one Jordan just said.
And it was more than this. More than anything anyone had ever declared at me across a table.
Whatever ran between me and Luke didn’t need the words.
It was in the coat on the chair. The keys he took out of my shaking hand.
The glass of water he set down beside the whiskey and never mentioned.
A hundred small things with no words on them, and I’d take any one of them over the finest speech anybody ever made me.
My chest pulled tight.
Oh.
There it was. The thing I’d kept just off to the side of my own eye for weeks, square in front of me now, with his name on it.
And what I wanted, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time, was to be wherever he was.
Him at the stove. Him reaching past me for a mug.
That was the whole of the want, and it was enormous.
I’d called it other things for weeks. Kept clear of it on purpose. Because some part of me had known that if I ever looked at it straight, it would look exactly like this.
It did.
And under the worst possible circumstances, with a good kid beside me waiting to be turned down, something lifted in me.
Stupid and warm and certain. I was in love with Luke.
For once in my life I knew a thing about my own heart and it wasn’t a fault.
It was the best thing I’d been told all year, and I was the one who got to tell it.
I found my voice. It came back steadier than I’d left it.
“Look at me a second.” He did, barely. “What you just did takes more guts than anything I’ve pulled off this year. I’m not being kind. I talk for a living and I couldn’t have said that. Not ever.”
“Here it comes,” he said. “I can hear the but warming up.”
“There’s no but. There’s a someone.” I turned the rest of the way toward him. “And I didn’t know it for sure until about a minute ago. You knocked it loose. So if it’s worth anything, you’re the reason I finally know my own head. That’s more than most people manage with me in a year.”
He nodded at the bar. Worked his jaw. The flush had gone blotchy and miserable.
“Lucky someone,” he said. He went for the smile and got about half of it.
“You already know who,” I said. Not a question.
“I’ve had a guess.” He turned his pint a quarter on the coaster. “He looks at you like you’re the last light on in the building. Has since about week one. I told myself it was that, or I was inventing it to feel less stupid.” A breath. “Guess I wasn’t inventing it.”
“You weren’t. You’ve got a good eye. That makes a great cop.”
“Cool. Love that for me.” There was no real bite in it. When I knocked my shoulder into his, he let it land.
“Hey,” I said. “I mean it about the guts. Don’t let anybody shrink it. Especially not you, at two in the morning, doing my voice in your head. That guy doesn’t get a vote.”
That got a real one out of him. Short, wet, but real.
“You’re still buying,” he said.
“I’m still buying.”
He huffed a laugh and reached for a wing, and for a second the worst of it was behind us both.
My phone lit up on the bar.
Unknown number. Then it resolved.
Inspector Murphy.
I had it to my ear before the second ring.
“Carlson.”
“It’s Hawley.” Murphy’s voice was flat and held down, the way it went when he was carrying something and didn’t want you to hear the weight of it. “St. Michael’s. Forty minutes ago, give or take. Get there.”
I was already off the stool.
“How bad.”
“Get there. I’ll have it all for you when you’re standing in front of me.”
I pulled cash out and put it on the bar. Too much. Didn’t care.
Jordan’s hand caught my sleeve. “Go. I’ve got the rest.”
I went.