26. After the Storm Sloane #2
I put my head on my father's shoulder on the back step of the bar we put our backs into together, and he puts his hand on the back of my neck, light and brief, and this time I don't take it off.
I lean into it. The hand that undid Sister Agnes's hand.
The hand that came at three in the morning.
I let my father hold the back of my neck, and I let it heal the thing I broke when I took it off.
"Mm," he says. And this time it's the best sound he's ever made.
Cole and I have the real one on the third night, when I finally can't stand the couch between us anymore.
I come out to the front room in the dark and he's awake, of course he's awake, sitting up with his back to the wall the way he sleeps, and I don't take him down the hall yet.
I sit on the far arm of the couch in the same dark, the way I did the night he turned the probe, and for a while neither of us fills it, because we're the two best in the world at letting a quiet stand and this one's finally a room again instead of a wall.
"I have to say the whole thing," I tell him. "Not the under-fire version. The whole thing, in the light, with nothing on fire."
"Okay."
"That night in my kitchen. I didn't just push you out — I picked the one lock I knew would open you.
I told you it was the siege talking and I handed you your own decency back sharpened, because you'd promised to honor my no, and I knew you'd keep that promise even hearing the lie underneath it.
The thing that made you safe enough to let in was the exact thing I used to throw you out.
" I make myself keep looking at him while I say it.
I won't be a coward about his face. "And I called you cowboy on my way out the door like the word cost me nothing.
That's the part I can't take back. I'd tell you I did it to keep you breathing instead of to hurt you, and that's true — but a thing can be a mercy and a cruelty in the same breath, and that one was.
I need you to hear me not split the difference. It was both."
"I heard you." His voice is low and even.
"Now hear mine, because walls down means both of us, and I've got one left to put down too.
" He turns the rocks glass that isn't there, the phantom of the tic, and almost laughs at himself.
"When you said I'd been hiding behind your war to keep from the mountain — when you threw Hagen's question back at me — I couldn't fight it, Sloane, because I didn't know if it was a lie or the truth.
Part of me has wondered the whole time if I'm a man who attaches himself to a thing that needs guarding so he never has to stand in the open and grieve.
You found that in me and you used it because it was there to use.
And the worst night of the whole thing wasn't you taken.
It was the hours before, on Eleanor's floor, when I half-believed I'd been a fool — that maybe you were just telling me a plain truth I didn't want to hear.
" He lifts his eyes to mine. "So you didn't just weaponize my decency.
You weaponized my doubt. And the only way I beat it was deciding I'd rather walk through your lie and be wrong than honor it and lose you.
That was the call I made on the floor. I just made it a whole night too late to feel good about. "
We sit with both of it in the dark — no fire, no wall.
"Here's the thing I know now," I say. "We found each other because we were both fluent in walls.
It's the first thing we recognized — you read my bar in a breath, I read you across the room, two people who'd each spent a lifetime knowing three ways out of everything.
And the fluency is the exact thing that almost killed us, because the second it got hard we both reached for the wall, because the wall's our native tongue.
" I get up off the arm of the couch and I cross to him and I sit down close, finally close, in the dark.
"So I'm telling you. I'm done speaking it.
Not because I forgot how — I'll never forget how, neither will you, it's bone-deep in us.
But because every single time from here on I'm going to choose the door instead.
Out loud. Even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard.
That's the promise. Not that the wall's gone — it'll never be gone — but that I'll never reach for it again to keep you out. You get the door. For good."
"For good," he says, and he gets a hand into my hair the way he did the first night, the way he will the last, and he doesn't take, he lets me come, and I come, and the couch stops being a thing between us and starts being a thing we're on together, walls down, in the light that's coming up gray around the blind.
We don't fix all of it that night. You don't. There's August still, and a girl on Eleanor's porch measuring eight miles over and over, and a 3:07 that'll come back, and a country called safe that I'm going to be learning to live in for years.
Healing isn't a door you walk through once.
It's a town you move to and slowly stop checking the locks in.
But the wall between us is down for good, and we both know it, and that's the one I built and the one I get to choose to leave in rubble.
It's almost morning when I think of the last undone thing.
It's wrapped in a blanket in Eleanor's front room, two doors down from a healing girl, set solid where it can't tip — a man named Holt who's been waiting more than a year for the only place he ever asked to go.
Cole left him there to come get me. The living go first, he told me once; the dead understand about the living.
He chose me over a mountain twice now, and both times he called it right, and both times the mountain waited the way the mountain always waits.
It's not going to wait forever. It shouldn't. A promise to a dead brother is the one debt my Cole won't carry one day longer than he has to, now that the living are safe.
I look at him in the gray light, this man who hasn't scattered his best friend because he kept choosing the breathing over the gone, and I know what's coming next as surely as I knew the pour of a Blanton's before he ordered it. He's going to the mountain. Soon. The last undone thing.
And when he goes, he's not going alone. I went over one fence by myself ten years ago and it cost me everything, and I went back over another one alone and it nearly cost me the rest. I'm done climbing things alone, and so is he, and that's the one wall neither of us is ever rebuilding.
I just haven't told him yet that I'm coming. I will. In the morning. Out loud. The way I'm going to do everything from here.