Chapter 23
REBECCA
Iwoke up happy.
That was the first thing—not the ceiling, not the rent number, not the reflex inventory of what I owed and what I'd earned and what the gap between them looked like this morning.
Just happy. Clean and uncomplicated, the way happiness was supposed to feel and almost never did, like a room with all the furniture moved out and the windows open.
I lay still for a moment and let myself have it.
The suite was full of morning. The harbor light came through the balcony doors in long, pale bars, catching the dust in the air and the last waxy pooling of the candles and the cream cardigan still on the floor where Tommy had pushed it off my shoulders.
The sheets were the kind of sheets that had a thread count I didn't know the vocabulary for—heavy and smooth and cool in the way that only expensive things were cool, like they'd been engineered specifically for the morning after something good.
Tommy was asleep.
I turned my head and looked at him the way you looked at someone when they couldn't look back—taking my time, making a record of it. The way his chest rose and fell. The jaw I'd first kissed on a sidewalk like a woman who did things like that, which I hadn't been and, apparently, now was.
Three days.
I'd known this man three days, if I counted today.
I pressed my face into the pillow and smiled at it like an idiot.
I slipped out of bed to use the bathroom and stood in the doorway of it for a moment, because the bathroom at The Palmetto Rose was not a bathroom I could walk into without registering it.
It was enormous. White marble, floor to ceiling.
A soaking tub on a raised platform that could have fit three people and a guitar.
Towels on a heated rack—I touched one and it was warm and the thickness of it was obscene, the kind of thick that meant you'd been wrapped in something that cost more than my weekly grocery budget.
The mirror above the double sinks was lit from behind and made everything look like a magazine.
I stood in front of it in Tommy's t-shirt and looked at myself and thought: this is the same face.
The same face that was in the bathroom of that apartment on the third floor with the yellow curtains and the flickering bulb.
The shower was a glass enclosure the size of my bedroom, with a panel of controls on the wall that looked like something from a spaceship. Multiple knobs. Multiple heads. A digital display showing a temperature in a number I didn't recognize because it was in Celsius, which I didn't use.
I stood in front of it for a full thirty seconds trying to work out which knob was the water.
I found it, eventually, through a process of cautious elimination, and stood under a rainfall head the size of a dinner plate and let the water come down hot and even.
I thought about the shower in my apartment, which sometimes ran cold after four minutes and made a sound like it was personally offended by the request.
This was a different world.
I'd known that. I'd known it walking through the lobby last night.
I'd known it when the dinner table had appeared and disappeared without any human being making themselves visible.
I'd known it in the helicopter, over the Atlantic, with the moonpath on the water below us and Tommy's voice in my headset saying things about his father that I understood were not things he said.
But knowing a thing from the outside and living inside it were different operations.
I was living inside it this morning, in a marble shower with a digital temperature display, and the distance between this and the fruit fundraiser I'd run in ninth grade to pay for the choir trip to Orlando—sixty-three individual door-to-door sales of citrus packages, two months of saving the proceeds, three days in a Holiday Inn with four girls to a room and a continental breakfast I'd eaten like it was the last food on earth—was so large I couldn't see across it.
I got out. Wrapped myself in one of the obscene towels. Went back to the bedroom.
Tommy was awake.
He was on his back with his hands behind his head, watching me come out of the bathroom with an expression of contentment so complete it was almost architectural, like a man who'd built something and was pleased with how it was standing.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning." I climbed back into bed. He pulled me in against his side without ceremony, the way he did everything, like the decision had been made some time ago and the execution was just housekeeping.
We lay there for a while.
This was the part I hadn't expected—not the suite or the helicopter or even the sex, which remained in its own category of evidence—but this. The lying there after. The ease of it. The way the silence between us had texture and warmth and didn't require managing.
"I want to take you somewhere," he said.
"Where?"
"Texas. Marfa. I want you to meet someone."
I turned my head to look at him.
"Your mother," I said.
"Yeah."
I lay there with that for a moment. The weight of it—the deliberateness of it, the intimacy of being invited into the room where his mother was—landed somewhere real.
"We could fly out today," he said. "Be there tonight. Back tomorrow."
He said it the way he'd said come find me at The Palmetto Rose and the way he'd said my treat at Proof and the way he said most things that involved the logistics of his life—easy. Uncomplicated. Like the only question was whether I wanted to, not whether it was possible.
And there it was.
The thing that had been sitting at the edge of my happiness all morning, patient, waiting for the right moment to make itself known.
"I have to work," I said.
"Okay." He didn't miss a beat. "When's your next day off?"
"I work a double today. And tomorrow. Day off after that."
"Then we go the day after tomorrow."
"Tommy—"
"It's a quick trip. In and out. I'll have you back before—"
"I can't just fly to Texas."
A pause. Small.
"Why not?"
I sat up. I needed to be sitting up for this. I needed to not be tucked under his arm when I said it because being tucked under his arm made everything feel possible and I needed to think clearly about what was actually possible.
I also needed to not say the thing I was actually thinking, which was that I had never been on a plane.
Not once. Not a regional puddle jumper, not a connection through Atlanta, not anything.
The helicopter last night had been the first time I'd been off the ground in anything, and I'd been blindfolded for the drive to the field and Tommy's hand had been the only thing between me and the terror of not knowing what came next.
A plane to Texas was a different proposition entirely, and I couldn't say that out loud because it was one more thing on the list of things I didn't know how to do that he'd figured out so long ago he'd forgotten it had ever required figuring.
"Because I have a schedule," I said. "Because some people have to keep a schedule.
Because I have a double shift today that I cannot miss because I have rent coming due and groceries to buy and—" I stopped.
Breathed. "Because my whole life right now is built around not falling behind, and I am finally, for the first time since I got to Charleston, starting to not fall behind, and I cannot just—get on a plane to Texas like it's a walk to the Battery. "
He sat up, too.
He looked at me with the level, patient attention that I normally found steadying and right now found slightly maddening because I wanted him to understand that I was serious.
"I'll pay for the ticket," he said.
There it was.
I felt it land the way Clayton's words landed—quiet, precise, in exactly the soft place.
"I know you will," I said.
"Rebecca—"
"I know you will. That's the problem, Tommy.
That's—" I pulled the sheet up, a reflex I recognized as armor even as I did it.
"You say things like I'll pay for the ticket and come stay at my hotel and you buy flowers and you arrange helicopters and—I know that's just another day for you.
I know the math is different. But from where I'm standing it looks a lot like—"
"Like what?"
"Like charity."
The word sat between us.
Tommy's face didn't do anything dramatic. It didn't flinch or close. But something moved behind his eyes—something that wasn't quite hurt and wasn't quite frustration and was somewhere between them, the expression of a man who'd been misread and was deciding how to respond to it.
"It's not charity," he said.
"It feels like it."
"I know it does." He said it level. "And I understand why. But it's not."
"We've known each other three days."
"I know."
“Three days, Tommy. I don't—I can't let someone I've known three days start paying for things. That's not—that's not who I am. I've been taking care of myself since I was old enough to work a shift, and I'm not going to stop because some man decided—"
"Some man." His voice was still level but there was something under it now. "Is that what this is?”
"I didn't mean—"
"Because I'm not some man, Rebecca Lynn. I think you know that."
I looked at him.
He was right. I knew that. I'd known it since he crouched on a restaurant floor for me, and I'd been knowing it more with every hour since, and the knowing was exactly the problem because it made the fear underneath all of this so much larger than it would have been with some man.
"I love you," he said.
The room went very quiet.
"Tommy—"
"I know what I'm saying. I know how long it's been. I know what it sounds like." He held my gaze. "I love you. And if we're going to be together—and I intend for us to be together—then anything I have is ours. That's not charity. That's just what it means."
I pressed my lips together.
My eyes were doing the embarrassing thing and I was not going to let them.
"Are you feeling it, too?" he asked. "Tell me, honestly."
I looked at the partial harbor through the balcony glass. The pale morning water. The palmettos.
"Yes," I said. Quiet. True. "I love you, too. I don't know how that happened so fast, but it did and I—yes."
"Then—"
"But that doesn't fix it." I turned back to him.
"Tommy, I buy my clothes at Walmart and the only hotel I ever stayed in before last night was a Holiday Inn in Orlando that I sold sixty-three bags of fruit to afford.
I don't know how the shower works in there.
I didn't know which knob was the water. And you—" I gestured at the room, the suite, the whole of it.
"You live here. In this. Like it's nothing.
Like it's just—where you happen to be this week. "
He was quiet.
"I need time," I said. "I need time to figure out how we exist in the same world. Because right now, I feel like you're in one and I'm in another and the distance between them is—it's a lot. It's more than a helicopter ride."
"I grew up with nothing," he said. "I told you that."
"I know you did."
"I know what the knob feels like."
"I know you do. But you figured it out a long time ago and I'm figuring it out right now, in real time, this morning, in your bathroom, and that's—" My voice caught.
I steadied it. "That's embarrassing, Tommy.
That's genuinely embarrassing, and I don't want to feel embarrassed around you, and right now I do, a little, and I needed to say that. "
Silence.
He looked at me for a long moment. The level, patient look. Then something in it shifted—not softening exactly, but opening, the way windows opened.
"You have nothing to be embarrassed about," he said. "Not one thing."
"I know that up here." I touched my temple. "I'm working on the rest."
"We can work on it together."
"That's what I'm afraid of," I said. "That together starts to mean you doing things for me and me letting you because it's easier than not letting you, and then one day I look up and I don't recognize myself anymore.
I've seen what that does to people. My mama let my daddy carry everything and when he couldn't anymore she didn't know how to stand up straight without him. "
Tommy was very still.
"I'm not your daddy," he said. "And you are not your mama."
"No," I said. "But I'm also not going to find that out by accident."
The silence stretched.
Outside, the harbor was going gold in the morning light. A pelican crossed the window slowly, improbably, like punctuation.
"I have to go to work," I said.
"I know."
"I have a double shift."
"I know that, too."
I looked at him. He looked back. The tension between us had a different quality now than it had had in the night—not the good tension, not the one that resolved into touch. This one had edges.
"I still love you," I said. "That part didn't change."
"Good," he said. "Because that part didn't change for me either."
But he didn't reach for me.
And I didn't reach for him.
And the morning sat between us, warm and complicated, full of things that had been said and things that were going to need more time than we'd had yet to settle into the shape they were going to take.
I got up.
I found my clothes.
The cream cardigan was still on the floor where he'd pushed it off my shoulders the night before, and I picked it up and held it for a moment and thought about the woman who'd walked in through that door in it twelve hours ago, who'd stood in the lobby with her grandmother's earrings and her thrift-store boots and thought: this is what I've got and it's enough.
It was still enough.
It just had to be enough on my own terms.