14. Rowe
ROWE
I've walked past Cole's trailer four times.
The first time, I told myself I was checking on Cleopatra's hay net.
The second time, I was looking for a lost lead rope.
The third and fourth times, I didn't bother with excuses.
I just walked past, turned around at the mess area, and walked back, my heart pounding like I was eleven and about to steal bread from the commune kitchen.
This is insane. I plan murders with these men. I cannot knock on my brother's door and say the words glory hole out loud.
I stop in the dirt in front of his steps. His trailer door is cracked open, and I can hear the rhythmic thunk of a blade hitting wood inside, which means he's throwing at the target board mounted on his closet door again, which means he's bored, which is the most dangerous state Cole exists in.
I think about Wren's mouth.
The way she said it, blushing so hard. I could kneel on the other side and you could just—and I'd never—my hands would never—
I knock.
The thunk stops. The door swings open, and Cole leans out, a throwing knife loose in one hand, floppy black hair falling over one eye.
“Well.” He looks me up and down. “You knocked.”
“That's what doors are for.”
“You've never knocked on my door in your life. You send Logan, or you text, or you stand fifty feet away and wait for me to notice you like a haunted scarecrow.” He props a shoulder against the frame, and I see the exact moment he clocks that something's off about me.
His eyes narrow. The grin starts building. “What do you need?”
“Nothing.”
“You knocked on my door for nothing.”
I hesitate for a second longer. “I need a favor.”
“Oh, this is delicious.” He flips the knife once, catches it by the blade. “Look at you. You're doing the thing with your jaw. You only do the thing with your jaw when you have to say something you'd rather Logan set you on fire than say.”
I start turning. “Forget it.”
“No, no, no.” He hops down the steps and plants himself in front of me, as close as he's allowed, which is closer than most. “You came to me. Not Logan. Not Jonah. Me. Which means it's either knife-related, or it's depraved, and you have a whole wall of your own knives, so...”
I stare at a point over his shoulder. The Big Top ripples in the morning wind. In the monkey tent, Pip is screaming at Squeak about something.
“The old boards,” I say. “From your act. The ones you retired when you built the spinning wheel.”
Cole narrows his dark eyes. “What about them?”
“You still have them?”
“Equipment trailer, back left, behind Jonah's spare chains.” He tilts his head. “Why does the animal tamer need a knife board?”
My throat works. The words are right there. I could still walk away. I could tell him I want to build a new enrichment structure for the monkeys, and he'd believe me, and I'd go back to my trailer and stare at Idaho and think about her mouth for the next twelve days and do nothing about it.
“I need to cut a hole in one,” I find myself saying.
Cole blinks. “A hole.”
“A hole.”
“What kind of hole?”
“You know what kind of hole.”
Silence. One second. Two.
Then his face does something I've only seen it do around fresh blood—it lights up from the inside, unholy, delighted, every tooth on display.
“No.”
“Cole—”
“A glory hole. You're asking me to help you build a glory hole. Out of my knife board.” He presses a hand flat against his chest. “This is the greatest morning of my life. I need to sit down. I need a cigarette. I need to write this in a journal so future generations—”
“I'll ask Jonah.”
“You will not ask Jonah.” He's already moving, herding me toward the equipment trailer with his hands without touching me, the way all of them have learned to steer me over twenty years.
“This requires an artist. This requires someone who understands that the hole is a frame, Rowe. Placement is everything. Height is everything.”
“Please stop talking.”
“I will never stop talking about this. Not ever. When I'm eighty, this is the story I'm telling at your funeral.”
The equipment trailer smells of machine oil and canvas. Cole hauls the boards out from behind Jonah's chains one by one—big slabs of poplar, four feet by seven, scarred with two decades of blade strikes, the faded silhouette of a woman's outline still ghosted on the oldest one in chipped paint.
“Not that one,” I say.
“Agreed. Weird energy.” He flips the next board around.
Clean-ish. Solid. A constellation of knife scars across the top third and nothing below the waist. He raps a knuckle against the wood.
“This one. Good thickness. She kneels on the far side, you stand on this side, and nobody's driving a splinter into anything load-bearing.”
I make a strangled sound.
“What? It's carpentry now. Be professional.” He drags a sawhorse over with his boot, lays the board flat, and produces a pencil from somewhere inside his jacket the way he produces knives, like his clothes are lined with pockets that open into another dimension. “Alright. Height.”
“What?”
“Height, Rowe. Where's your dick? Stand up straight.”
“I'm not—”
“Do you want this to work or do you want to be up on your toes like a ballerina while the love of your life waits on the other side of a poorly measured plank? Stand. Straight.”
I stand straight. Cole squints at me with the exact focus he uses lining up a throw at a moving target, holds his pencil out at arm's length like a painter, and marks a spot on the board.
“Give or take an inch for whether she's kneeling on a cushion. She's getting a cushion, by the way. You're not putting that woman's knees on a trailer floor, we're not animals.”
“I know she's getting a cushion,” I mutter.
“Good man.” He marks the center point, then draws the circle freehand, one clean motion. He's done a lot of things freehand that shouldn't be possible. “Jigsaw's in the red case. Get it.”
We work.
Cole cuts the hole while I brace the board, sawdust spraying everywhere, and then he hands me the rasp and makes me round the edges myself.
I file the rim of the opening smooth, then smoother, then sand it with three grades of paper because the thought of one rough fiber of wood anywhere near her face is unacceptable.
And the whole time, I'm thinking about it.
The board upright in my trailer. The lamplight low. Her voice on the other side, that quiet register, telling me she's ready. The warmth of her waiting where I can't see her, only feel—
“Brother.”
“What.”
“Not that I'm judging, because God knows this is a judgment-free workshop.” Cole gestures at me with the rasp, and his grin has gone sly. “But you've been sanding the same spot for four minutes and you're harder than the board.”
Heat floods up my neck. I glance down. He's not wrong.
“I'm flattered,” he continues, hand to his heart again. “Truly. The craftsmanship, the intimacy of building something together, sawdust in the air. But I don't swing that way, and even if I did swing that way, you'd be a logistical nightmare—”
“I'll swing a mallet at you.”
“There he is.” He cackles, delighted, and knocks the last of the sawdust off the board. “There's the romance.”
He tips the board vertical and steps back, and we both look at it. A retired knife board with scars across the top and one perfect, smooth-rimmed opening at exactly the right height, and it's the single most deranged object I've ever helped create, and my chest is doing something terrifying.
“It's good,” Cole says, and for once there's no jab in it. He studies the board, then me. “You know what this is, right?”
“It's a board with a hole in it,” I say dryly.
“It's a door.” He spins the pencil between his long fingers.
“Twenty years, none of us could build you one.
She shows up for a monkey and you're out here doing carpentry.” He shrugs, sliding the pencil back into whatever dimension it lives in.
“Marek's going to be insufferable about it. He'll say the cards told him.”
“The cards probably did.”
“The cards absolutely did.” He hoists one end of the board. “Come on. Let's get it to your trailer before Logan sees it and dies of joy.”
We're maneuvering it through my door—it fits, barely—when my phone buzzes against my thigh.
On my way. 15 min. How's our patient?
Our patient.
Our.
“Oh no,” Cole says, reading my face. “You've got the look. Go. I'll set it up. I'll even angle it tastefully.”
“Do not angle it tastefully. Lean it against the wall and leave.”
“Lean it against the wall and leave, he says, after everything we've shared.” But he's already positioning it in the corner, out of the immediate sightline of the door, with more care than he gives his own knives.
I wash the sawdust off my hands and forearms at my sink, scrubbing like I'm prepping for surgery. In the little mirror, there's wood dust in my hair, and my eyes look different than they have in twenty years. Lighter. I don't have a word for it.
Cole watches me from the doorway.
“Rowe.”
“Yeah.”
“Be sure about her.” No grin now. His brown eyes are steady, and underneath all the flippancy, there's the boy who slept two bunks over from me in a dormitory that smelled of ash.
“Because you don't have practice at this.
Which means when it hits you, it's going to hit you like a truck with no brakes.”
“It already did.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then the grin comes back, and he thumps the doorframe twice on his way out.
“Then go meet your truck.”
I go.
Across the lot, past the mess area, past Jonah hauling coils of rope who takes one look at my face and starts smiling for reasons I refuse to investigate.
My boots crunch in the gravel, and the sun is high, and the wind is moving through the tents, and her car turns onto the access road trailing a plume of dust.
I'm in the parking lot before she's cut the engine.
She steps out with her kit over her shoulder, ponytail today, work clothes, and something in her expression I can't read at this distance—something careful, watchful, that wasn't there yesterday.
I don't care. She's here.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say, and my heart is racing like it’s a show night, and there is a board with a hole in it leaning against my trailer wall, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to survive any of this.