Chapter 17 Something to Keep #2
He spread his hand there, and then leaned in and set his forehead against the same spot, careful of everything, and just stood there a second breathing me in, and I put my arms around him and we stood in the kitchen tangled up while the kettle climbed toward a boil.
“I keep doing the math,” he said, into my chest. “Three of them. I keep getting to three of them and stopping.”
“Ryan.”
“Just let me explain it once and then I’ll drop it.
” His arms tightened, careful of the ribs even now, even angry.
“Three men did this. On a street three blocks from here. And took nothing. And you came home and told me to manage my expectations, and I’ve spent every hour since trying not to think about how it would have gone if there’d been four.
Or if they’d had more than a bat.” He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes had gone bright and hard.
“What were they actually there for. Because it wasn’t your wallet. ”
There it was again. He’d circled back to it the way he circled back to everything, patient, certain, a man who’d built a career out of asking the same question until the room got tired and gave him the truth.
And I did the thing I’d done the night before and would keep doing, the thing that was going to cost me everything before the week was out. I lied to the person I loved with the steadiest face I own.
“Wrong street, wrong hour,” I said. “Some people do it to do it. Not everything has a reason that makes the world make sense. I’ve stood over enough of it to know that’s the worst part, that sometimes it’s just bad luck wearing boots.”
He looked at me for a long moment. The kettle clicked off behind him and neither of us moved for it.
“You believe that,” he said. Not quite a question. “Or you’ve decided to. I can’t always tell with you which one it is.”
“I’ve worked a lot of these.”
“That’s not the same as believing it.” But he let it go, the way he kept letting it go, because he’d decided to trust me and trust meant he stopped pulling when I asked him to without my having to ask.
He turned and poured the water. “Sit down before you tip over. I’m making you something with protein in it and you’re going to eat it and not fight me. I’m keeping a chart now.”
“You keep saying that. There’s no chart.”
“There’s a chart. It’s in my head. It’s very damning.
” He set a mug down in front of me, then stood behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders, light, careful of the marks, and bent and kissed the top of my head, and then the side of my neck, slow, where it wasn’t bruised.
“You scared me,” he said, low, against my skin.
“I’m not going to keep saying it. But you did.
And I get to be a little ridiculous about feeding you for a few days. That’s the deal.”
“That’s the deal,” I said.
His mouth moved along the line of my throat, unhurried now, and his hands slid down off my shoulders and over my chest, careful, learning the parts of me that didn’t hurt, and the morning tilted, the way it does, out of comfort and into something warmer.
I turned my head and found his mouth with mine, and he made a low sound into it, and the mug sat steaming and forgotten on the table.
“You’re meant to be resting,” he murmured against my lips, not stopping, his hand flat and warm low on my stomach.
“This is restful. I’m sitting down.”
“You’re a liar.” But he was smiling into the kiss, and his fingers had found the waist of the borrowed sweatpants, and the whole tender careful sweetness of the last hour was turning into something with a pulse in it. “We can’t. Your ribs.”
“My ribs have opinions. I’m overruling them.” I caught his wrist, turned in the chair enough to pull him round and down toward me, careful, both of us careful and neither of us stopping. “Come back to bed. We’ll be slow. I’m extremely good at slow, I’ll have you know, I’ve been told.”
“You’ve been told.” He laughed, breathless, letting me draw him in, his knee coming up onto the chair, his hands in my hair. “By whom. I’ll need names. For the chart.”
“Come to bed and I’ll tell you my whole sordid history.”
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever”
My phone rang.
It was face-up on the counter, and it lit and buzzed and turned itself into the loudest object in the room, and I knew the weight of it before I saw the screen, the same way I’d known in the laneway which sound the boots were going to make.
He stilled against me. I felt him feel me go still under him.
The screen said Inspector Murphy.
For one second I didn’t move. His hands were still in my hair and his mouth was an inch from mine and the kettle was cooling and the whole good morning was sitting in the room with us, and the phone buzzed a second time, steady and insistent, and I watched the cost of the next hour walk in the door without knocking.
“You should get that,” Ryan said quietly. He’d already pulled back an inch, reading my face, reading the change in it, the detective coming up under the lover the way it always did. “It’s early for Murphy.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I reached past him and picked it up.
“Hawley.”
“It’s moving.” Murphy didn’t waste a hello when the ground had shifted. He just started, fast and flat, the register he kept for the days a thing came loose. “There’s a window and it isn’t wide. I need you here.”
Ryan had stepped back to give me the call, but not far, and I felt his attention go to a point on me, the warmth of a minute ago gone, the cop rising in him the way it rose in me too, trained, automatic, impossible to switch off.
“How long’s the window,” I said. Level. Nothing in it.
“Hours. We plan it now and we.” A beat. “I know what the doctor told you. I wouldn’t pull you off the couch if it could keep.”
“It can’t keep.”
“No.”
“Half an hour,” I said, and hung up, and stood in a cooling kitchen with the man I loved watching me put my face back together.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. He just looked at me, the question already loaded behind his eyes, the timing of it laid out in his head the way he laid everything out. Early. Urgent. A window. A man getting up off doctor’s orders to go and stand in a room he wasn’t being told about.
“Work,” I said.
“Work,” he repeated.
“Murphy needs a statement witnessed and signed. One of my past cases. If it isn’t done in front of the right person it bounces, and he wants it clean.
” The lie came out smooth and whole, and I hated how good I was at it, how the years of keeping things shut had taught me to hide a truth inside a single sentence.
“Couple of hours. Desk stuff. Won’t be long. ”
He held it. I watched him turn it over and find the seams, because there were seams, and he was built to find them. Desk stuff doesn’t have a window that shuts in hours. A signature doesn’t take a man off bed rest at a run. Paperwork doesn’t put that voice in Murphy’s mouth.
He had all of it. I saw him have it.
And he set it down.
“Okay,” he said.
That was the worst lie of the lot, because it was the one he believed least and forgave anyway. He handed it back to me wrapped in trust, a man who trusted nobody choosing to make an exception of me, and it went down onto the pile of things I was going to have to answer for.
“You’re sure you’re up to it,” he said. Not the case. The body. He came and put his hand flat on my chest again, the good side. “Your arm locked up twice. If it goes, you call me, I don’t care what’s on the desk. I’ll come and get you.”
“I’ll call you.”
“And you eat.” He was already moving, pressing a banana and a granola bar into my hand at the door like I was heading into a double shift instead of walking out on him. “Take these. Don’t argue.”
Even the nagging was a kindness I hadn’t earned that morning. I let him fuss. I got my coat on over the marks and over the lie and over the best morning I’d had in more years than I wanted to count.
“Luke.” He caught my arm at the door. The soft thing back in his face, the shy thing, the thing he’d worn when he woke up. “Be safe and come back home. That’s the whole message. Sign your form, come home, and we’ll do the rest of the morning we didn’t get to.”
Come back home. Like it was simple. Like it was a thing I got to keep.
I should have told him then. I’ve stood in that doorway since, more times than I’ll admit to, with a clean run at it.
Three sentences. It wasn’t muggers. It’s a case I can’t talk about.
And it runs straight through your family.
Three sentences, and the whole of it would have been his, and what came after might have been a kinder story.
I didn’t say them. I told myself a few more hours. I told myself Reeves, the window, the man at the top, the case before the comfort, protect him until it’s done. Every word of it true. None of it the reason.
“I’ll be back as soon as possible,” I said.
He kissed me at the door, careful of the split lip, soft and certain, and let me go. I went down the stairs and out into the cold with his come home still in my ears.