Chapter 15
REBECCA
The city outside my window went through all its nighttime changes and I watched none of them.
I was otherwise occupied.
We talked between. That was the thing I hadn't expected—not the sex, which was its own category of surprise, but the talking. The way he moved between the two without seam, like conversation and touch were the same language in different registers.
He'd pull me close and we'd lie there in the small lamp light and he'd ask me something real, something that required an actual answer, and I'd give it to him, and somewhere in the middle of the giving he'd find a way to make me forget what I'd been saying.
It was a very effective technique.
I told him about Key West—the first night, the beach, the color of the water I'd cried at because it was so beautiful and I hadn't expected to feel so small in front of something that had nothing to do with money. He listened the way he always listened, fully, his hand moving slow up my spine.
"You cried," he said.
"A little."
"At the ocean?”
"At the color of it. I'd never seen that color outside of a photograph." I paused. "That probably sounds—"
"It sounds like someone who was seeing something for the first time."
"Most people have seen the ocean."
"Most people have looked at it." He turned his head to look at me. "You saw it."
I didn't know what to do with that, so I kissed him instead, which was becoming my preferred response to things he said that I didn't have words for.
He let me. Then he pulled back and looked at me.
"What else haven't you seen yet?"
I thought about it seriously, because he'd asked seriously.
"Mountains that aren't mine," I said. "The Rockies.
The kind that are still snow-capped in summer.
I've only ever seen the Smokies, and they're beautiful but they're—they're green.
Soft. I want to see something that looks like it doesn't care whether you're there. "
"The Rockies care even less than that," he said. "They're indifferent. It's rude, honestly."
I laughed.
"Valentine doesn't have mountains," he said. "Just sky. The biggest sky I've ever seen anywhere, and I've been a lot of places. You go out there in August and lie in the bed of a truck and the stars are so thick they look like something spilled."
"That sounds like home," I said. Which was what I'd said in the donut shop, and I meant it the same way.
"It was," he said again. Same past tense. Same something underneath it he didn't open up.
I didn't push.
I'd learned by then that there were rooms in him he'd let me into in his own time and rooms he'd keep closed until he'd decided, and pushing on the closed ones would only tell me what I already suspected—that there was something large in there that he carried carefully and alone.
I understood that. I had rooms like that, too. Mine just had less square footage.
We were quiet for a while. His hand found my hair.
"Tell me something no one knows about you,” he said.
"About what?"
"Anything."
I looked at the ceiling. The water stain was invisible in the low light.
"I'm ninety-four dollars short on rent," I said.
"Or I was, before tonight. I'll make it by the end of the week, probably.
But I've been doing math in my head since I got to Charleston the way some people do breathing.
Just—constantly. In the background of everything. "
He was quiet.
"I know that's not romantic," I said.
"It's honest."
"It's exhausting, is what it is." I turned onto my back.
"I've been poor my whole life, so it's not—it's not new.
I know how to do it. I know all the tricks.
Buy the store brand. Eat before your shift.
Keep your thermostat two degrees lower than comfortable and put on a sweater.
Know which grocery store marks down the meat on which day.
" I paused. "But knowing how to do it doesn't make it not heavy.
It's heavy. It sits in your chest and it's just—there. All the time."
He didn't say anything for a moment.
I braced for the thing people sometimes said.
The well-meaning thing. The have you tried or the you could always or, worst of all, the version where they offered to help and it came out sounding like pity dressed in generosity's clothes, and I'd have to figure out how to decline without making it a thing.
"I know that weight," he said.
I looked at him.
"Not the same version," he said. “My daddy left when I was young and my mama held seven boys together on what the ranch could bring in, which wasn't always enough and was never reliable.
I know the thing you're talking about. The background math.
The way it's just—running. All the time. Under everything else."
"Seven boys," I said.
"Seven."
"Your poor mama."
The smile came, real and warm. "She'd agree with you." It faded at the edges, the way it did when he talked about her. Into something gentler and more complicated. "She's—she's not well. Now. It's a brain thing. She forgets."
I didn't say I'm sorry, because I'm sorry was what people said when they didn't know what else to say and he didn't strike me as a man who needed the filler.
"Does she still know you?" I asked instead.
He was quiet for a beat. "Some days."
"Then, you're lucky," I said. "For the some days."
He looked at me. Something in his face shifted—not breaking, just opening, the way a window opened to let air move through a room that had been closed too long.
"Yeah," he said. "I am."
He kissed me then—slower, more deliberate, the kind of kiss that wasn't going anywhere in a hurry because it didn't need to. The kind that was its own destination.
Later, when the city had gone its deepest dark and the church bell somewhere over on Meeting Street had counted an hour neither of us acknowledged, he was on his back and I was tucked against his side and we'd been quiet long enough that I'd almost thought he'd fallen asleep.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Mm."
"What do you actually do?"
A pause. Not the pause of someone who didn't hear. The pause of someone deciding.
"I told you. Consulting."
"You told me a word," I said. "That's not the same as telling me."
He was quiet. I felt his chest rise and fall once, slow.
"I work for people who need problems solved," he said. "The kind of problems that don't have a standard solution. I go where they send me, I assess what I find, and I fix it, if I can."
"That's still not very specific."
"No."
"Is it dangerous?"
Another pause. Longer.
"Sometimes."
I let that sit. I didn't like it—the vagueness of it, the careful edges—but I understood, the way I understood the rooms he kept closed, that pushing would only get me the shape of the door and not what was behind it.
"Are you in danger now?" I asked. "In Charleston?"
He turned his head and looked at me.
"Not tonight," he said.
Which was not the same as no. I noticed that. I filed it somewhere I'd come back to later, and I let it go for now because his hand had moved to my waist and the lamp was low and the city outside my yellow curtains was doing its slow, dreaming thing, and later could be later.
"The consulting," I said. "Does it pay well?"
“Well enough.”
"I'm not asking because—"
"I know why you're asking." He said it without edge. "You're asking because you're a woman who thinks about money honestly and you wanted to know the landscape."
I looked at him. "That's exactly why."
"It pays plenty,” he said. "More than I need.
Which is a strange thing to get used to, coming from where I came from.
Having more than you need." He paused. "We were genuinely poor when I was young.
After my daddy left, my mama held the ranch together on not much and made it look easier than it was.
Then when I was maybe fifteen, sixteen, somebody came out and walked the back forty and said there might be something underneath it.
Turned out there was. Oil. Not a gusher—nothing dramatic—but enough.
Enough that the math changed overnight in the way math sometimes does out in West Texas, where the ground decides it's done being poor before the people do.
" He was quiet a moment. "Strange thing, that.
Watching your mama cry at a kitchen table because, for the first time in her life, the number on the paper had room in it. "
"Did it fix things?" I asked.
"Some things," he said. "The ones money could fix. The others it just—illuminated. Made clearer. Turns out money doesn't solve what's already broken. It just stops you from having to ignore it."
"Yes," I said. Quiet and immediate. "That's exactly it. That's the thing I don't know how to explain to people who didn't grow up that way."
"Scarcity mindset," he said.
"Is that what it's called?"
"That's what somebody called it once. A shrink the Army made me see. Smart woman."
I was quiet for a moment, turning that over.
"The Army," I said.
"Mm."
"That's the first real thing you've told me about yourself."
"Is it?"
"Your name, the Army, Valentine Texas. That's the whole inventory."
"I also told you I pack extra guitar strings."
"That's a character detail, not a biography."
He smiled. It came out into the dark above us, slow and private. "Fair."
"Will you tell me more?" I said. "Eventually?"
He turned his head again. Found my eyes in the low light.
"Yeah," he said. "Eventually."
It landed like a promise. I decided to hold it like one.
The last time was slow.
It was the deep end of the night and we were both tired in the good way—the hollowed-out, quieted way that came from hours of talking and touching and the warmth of being awake with someone when the rest of the world was asleep.
He pulled me over him without urgency. His hands moved like he had all the time there was.
Like there was nothing past this moment that needed tending to.
I sank down onto him and we both went still.
Just that, for a moment. Just the feeling of it. The closeness of it.
His hands moved to my hips, light.
We moved together, slowly. Not building toward anything.
Just moving. Just the steady rhythm of two people who had found a thing that worked and saw no reason to rush it toward its end.
His thumbs traced circles at my hip bones.
My hands rested flat on his chest, feeling his heart under my palms, steady and real.
He watched my face the whole time. That focused, serious attention that had undone me in the restaurant, in the donut shop, in this room the first time. I had stopped trying to look away from it.
Outside, the first birds started.
Not dawn—not yet—just the earliest ones, the ones that got going while the dark was still deciding. A single note, then another, then something that almost resolved into a song and didn't quite.
I listened to them and I listened to his breathing and I felt the warmth of his hands and I thought: I don't know this man.
I thought: I want to.
I thought: That is the most frightening thing I have ever said to myself, and I am saying it, anyway, which maybe means I am braver than I knew.
The feeling built slowly, and when it came, it came without fanfare—just a long, quiet wave that moved through me and left everything clean in its wake. He held me through it. Then he followed, soft and deep and saying my name once, just once, the way you said a thing you meant.
We lay there, after.
I traced a scar on his shoulder with one finger. He let me. Outside, the birds had found their full song. The dark was going gray at the edges of my yellow curtains.
"You should sleep," he said.
"You should, too."
"I will."
"When?"
"Soon."
I looked up at him. "Are you always this evasive?"
"Yes."
"Is it annoying?"
"Probably."
"It is," I said. "For the record."
"Noted."
I settled back against his chest.
I thought about ninety-four dollars, and then I thought about the way he'd said I know that weight, and somehow the ninety-four dollars felt different than it had.
Not smaller—the number was the number, it didn't care about context—but less alone.
Less like a private burden I was carrying in a room by myself and more like something that had been witnessed, which was different. Which was, it turned out, a lot.
The birds got louder.
I closed my eyes.
Tommy Dane was still mostly a mystery, and I was still mostly broke, and my rent was due in fewer days than I wanted to count, and somewhere outside my window, Charleston was beginning its quiet process of becoming morning.
I fell asleep in the gray light with his heartbeat under my ear, steady as a chord I already knew.