CHAPTER 29 #2
He looked at her. The lamp shook a little in a draft and the gold light moved over the freckles she hated and the wet shine on her cheekbones, and he could no more have told her to go than he could have unmade the years between them.
“I can't,” he said. “But you can. You can walk out that door and I won't stop you, and I won't hold it against you, and I'll—” his voice frayed, “I'll understand it better than anything else you could do. So you tell me, Laney. You tell me yes, or you tell me to take you home. Either one. But you choose it.”
She didn't go home.
She fisted her hand in his shirt the way she had by the ditch the night of the dance, the way that undid him every time, and dragged his mouth down to hers.
It wasn't gentle. This had none of the slow unhurried reverence of the line cabin that first night, the lamp lit so he could see her, a decade's worth of want spent careful and whole.
This was the other thing entirely. This was grief with hands.
She kissed him like she was angry at him and angrier at herself, like she meant to find the truth in his mouth since he wouldn't say it, and he kissed her back the same — clutching, desperate, his pulse slamming up under his jaw where her thumb pressed it, his whole body crowding toward the warmth of her like a man who'd been cold so long he'd forgotten the word for it.
Her hands were already at his buttons. His were already in her hair, the braid coming loose, copper spilling over his fingers.
“Yes,” she said against his mouth, ragged, before he could ask again. “I'm sure. Don't — don't let go.”
“I've got you.” It came out wrecked. He got her shirt over her head and pressed his open mouth to the freckles at her shoulder, the salt of her, the heat. “Right here. I've got you, I've got you—”
His thumb found the pale crescent scar on her left thumb the way it always found his own scar, and held it, pressed it, an anchor for both of them.
She made a sound he felt more than heard.
They went down onto the rough bunk in the lamplight with too much fear in it and not enough words, his old shoulder twinging when she pushed him back and her hand going gentle there out of long habit, careful of the surgical ridge even now, even like this, and that gentleness in the middle of all that desperation almost finished him.
“Laney.” Her name was the only thing he could say. “Laney, look at me. You with me?”
“I'm with you.” Her eyes opened, clear and green and present, no doubt in them now, only this, only the terrible clean honesty of two people reaching for each other through the wreck. “I'm here. Are you?”
He was. For once in his whole running life, he was nowhere else.
He took his time with her even now, even ragged — couldn't help it, couldn't take her like she didn't matter when she was the only thing that ever had.
His mouth at her breast, her belly, lower, until her precise clinical mind broke all the way down into fragments, his name and yes and please and nothing else, her hands fisted in his too-long hair, her thighs trembling against his jaw.
When he came back up she pulled him in with both hands and a sound like a sob, and he braced over her, and asked it one more time because the floor of him wouldn't let him not.
“Tell me yes.”
“Yes.” Fierce. Wet-eyed. Sure. “Yes — don't let go.”
He didn't let go. He filled her slow and then not slow, and she rose to meet him, and they moved together in the shaking lamplight, her heels pressing him deeper, her breath breaking warm against his throat with every stroke, both of them gripping like the only way through this was straight through the center of it.
Mine to stay for, something said in him, possessive and terrified, the inversion of his whole running wound — and right behind it the cold thing came, dropping through his chest like the floor of an elevator gone: you'll break this like you break everything, and the only mercy left in you is to be gone before she sees it coming.
His hands tightened on her without his asking them to, gripping like he could hold off the rest of it by holding her harder, and he pressed his forehead to hers to make the run of it stop, her tears wet against his own, and he didn't know whose were whose.
“Stay with me,” she breathed, and he couldn't tell if she meant tonight or always or just this next second, and he couldn't promise her any of them, so he didn't promise.
He just held on. He held on until the holding broke them both apart and back together, until she shattered with his name in her mouth and he followed her over with hers in his, and the lamp guttered and steadied, and the cabin was quiet except for two people breathing like they'd run a long way and gotten nowhere.
---
After, it should have fixed something.
Nothing was fixed. He lay with her copper hair across his chest and her hand over his heart, and the terror came back sharper than before, honed on the closeness, because now he knew exactly the shape of what he stood to lose and exactly how little he trusted himself not to lose it.
The good things in his life had only ever been on loan, he thought, staring at the rough planks overhead.
You signed for them knowing the note would be called.
The better they were, the sooner it came due.
It was supposed to be the cure for a night like this, wasn't it.
Reaching for the one body that felt like home.
But all it had done was sharpen the cut.
There was a quiet in him now, a smooth low hum where the noise should have been, and he'd learned a long time ago not to trust his own quiet — it was the kind of silence that settles over a house in the last hour a man still lives in it, before the boxes, before the door.
He lay still under it and waited for the floor to drop.
The change in him reached her. Of course it did. She read bodies the way other people read weather.
“You went somewhere,” she said quietly, not lifting her head.
“No.” The lie, easy, automatic.
“Beck.” Just his name. Soft. The guard-down word.
And here it was again, the door standing open, the whole truth right there — it was Tom on the bridge, I swerved to save him, that's the man you think left you for nothing — and he opened his mouth to finally, finally say it, and somewhere in the back of his skull the runway shimmered, jet fuel and hot tar, the heat bending the air, and the old reflex moved faster than the truth and capped it clean.
“It's nothing,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
She went still against him, and it was the wrong kind, nothing like the soft loosening of sleep.
It was the other stillness, the door-easing-shut kind.
She didn't argue. That was what gutted him — she didn't fight him, didn't push, just lay there reading the closed thing in him the way she'd read it at the truck this morning, and after a while she eased out from under his arm and dressed in the dark, quiet and precise, and he let her, because stopping her meant explaining, and explaining meant the bridge, and he was a coward to the bone and always had been.
At the door she paused. He saw her outline against the night, Banjo's silhouette out at the truck, the cold mountain dark behind her.
“I came up here tonight,” she said, not turning around, “because some part of me hoped you'd give me a reason to be wrong about you. Just one.” A breath through her nose, hard. “You almost did.”
Then she was gone, and her taillights swung red across the planks and went down the bench, and he was alone in the lamplight with the smell of her still on his skin and the bridge still locked behind his teeth.
---
The ticket glowed on the nightstand.
He'd taken his phone out without remembering doing it, and there it was, the confirmation page lit blue in the dark, a seat held out of the regional airport, a comeback ride and real money and a town that didn't know his name.
He could be on that runway by dawn. He could walk across the cracked asphalt with the heat coming off it in waves, jet fuel and tar and the clean nothing of leaving, and bend the world soft, and be wheels-up before anybody on Red Mesa woke to find him gone — gone the way he'd gone before, with no goodbye, the only thing he was ever any good at.
I'm the Calhoun who leaves, he thought. I should leave before I break this worse.
It even sounded like mercy. That was the devil of it.
It always sounded like mercy when he told it to himself — leaving as kindness, the door as a gift, sparing them all the slow disappointment of staying by getting it over with quick.
He'd believed that lie ten years ago with a ring in his glovebox and a note on her pillow. He half believed it now.
He didn't pack. He sat on the edge of the bunk where the warmth of her was still in the blanket and he didn't pack a single thing, and he didn't delete the ticket either, and somewhere those two facts canceled each other out and left him exactly where he'd been all day — at the crossroads with the engine ticking, nose-out, neither here nor gone.
He reached up and closed his hand around the medal.
Eleanor's St. Christopher, worn smooth, patron of travelers, the saint you carry so you'll make it home.
His mother had pressed it into his palm the week before she died and told him a man can travel his whole life and never once arrive, and he hadn't understood her then and he understood her now and it didn't help.
The ticket's blue glow lay on the dark nightstand.
His thumb moved over the medal — patron of travelers, of the ones who go and the ones who come back, the same little saint for both.
And for the first time in ten years of always knowing which way the door pointed, Beck Calhoun sat in the dark with the runway shimmering behind his eyes and could not tell, could not for the life of him tell, whether the saint at his throat was pointing him out or pointing him home.