ALWAYS BURNING
NICO
The car let me out a block from my building a little before five, and I could not make myself go up.
Evie's lamp was burning in my window four floors up, which meant she had let herself in, and waiting up there meant the conversation, and I was not ready for the conversation. So instead of going in I turned and walked the three blocks down to the water.
There was a stretch of railing past the end of the park where the path ran right up against the East River, and on a clear night you could see the lights of the bridge stitched across the black water and the dark shoulder of the island beyond.
I had come here a hundred times to think a problem loose.
I had never come here at five in the morning with a contract folded in my coat that said a man could have my blood.
I put my hands on the cold rail and looked at the water and tried to feel like a person again.
“It looks like it's leaving,” a voice said, somewhere to my right. “It isn't. It's the same water the whole way through. The tide only borrows it and gives it back.”
I hadn't heard anyone come. There was a man a few feet down the railing, older, though I could not have told you by how much, in a long dark coat with his hands loose on the rail the way mine were.
He was not looking at me. He was looking at the same black water, and he had the stillness of someone who had stood at a great many railings and was in no hurry to leave this one.
“Sorry,” I said, which was a reflex and not an apology. “I didn't see you there.”
“Few people do, at this hour. It's the one kindness the city offers for free.” He smiled without turning his head, and there was an old, pale seam along the line of his jaw that the bridge light caught and lost. “I find I sleep less the older I get.
I've stopped fighting it. There are worse company than a river.”
I didn't say anything. I am not a man who talks to strangers in the dark, and I had every reason that night to be less so than usual.
“Long night,” he said. It wasn't a question.
“Something like that.”
“You have the look of a man who can't go home yet.” He said it gently.
I let out a breath that fogged and went. “That obvious.”
“Only to someone who's looking. Most people at this hour aren't.” He nodded slowly at the water. “May I guess, and you can tell me I'm a fool? Whatever it was tonight, you didn't do it for yourself. You don't have the face of a man who ruins himself for his own sake. You did it for someone.”
“My brother.” The word was out before I had decided to give it to him. “He got himself into trouble. I got him out. That's the family business, more or less. He breaks it, I pay for it.”
“Ah.” For the first time he turned and looked at me directly, and his eyes were a strange flat color in that light, patient and unsurprised. “Then you're one of those.”
“One of what?”
“The ones who were always going to be the one.” He said it without pity.
“Every family has a load-bearing wall. The trouble is that nobody ever asks the wall whether it would like to be the wall.
They simply lean, year after year, and call it love, and the wall holds because that is what walls do, and everyone agrees how strong it is right up until the day it isn't.”
I looked at the water so I wouldn't have to look at him. “That's a hell of a thing to say to a stranger.”
“It is. I apologize. Rivers make me sentimental, and the hour makes me honest, and the two together are a bad influence.” He didn't sound sorry.
“Can I tell you the part nobody tells you?
It's the love itself they use. Not your weakness.
Your love. It's the handle, the warm place a hand closes around when someone wants to move you, and the better you love, the better the grip. The people who feel things the way you clearly do are the ones the world sends the bill to, every time. It has a terrible sense of economy, the world. It never once charges the people who feel nothing.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because I've watched it happen for a very long time,” he said, “to better men than the ones who did it to them.”
The wind came up off the river, cold enough that I felt it go through my coat, and he stood in it as though it were a thing happening to someone else.
“I’m not looking for advice,” I said, and it came out harder than I meant it to.
“No,” he said. “Men in your state never are. They usually need it most.”
He turned back to the water, and for a while neither of us said anything.
“I’ll give it to you anyway. You can ignore it when I’m done.
Do not let what you gave up tonight become the only way you understand what he means to you.
Sacrifice is easy to measure. Love is not.
Grieve what you lost, rage about it if you need to, but do not build him a shrine out of your own ruin and call that devotion. ”
I didn't have anything to say to that. It had gone in somewhere under the part of me that argues.
“Some people,” he added, quieter now, almost to himself, “are lit at both ends.
You can find them in any room. They're the ones everything else warms itself at. They spend the whole of their lives giving off heat, and they go into the ground cold, every one of them, and not one of them ever understands why.” He paused.
“I knew someone like that once. A long time ago.
He used to stand at the rail the way you're standing now, as though he were apologizing to the water for the weight of him.”
“What happened to him?”
He was quiet for a moment. “He was loved by someone who confused saving him with keeping him. It came to a bad end. They usually do.” He pushed gently off the railing and straightened. “Forgive me. I've kept you, and you have a lamp burning in a window.”
I hadn't told him about the lamp.
“I didn't get your name.”
“Mark.” He smiled and it reached his eyes. “Go upstairs, Nico, and try not to make them pay for loving you.”
He walked off the way I'd come, toward the park, and I watched him go until the dark took him, and it took him sooner than it should have.
It was only on the stairs up to my apartment that I realized I had never told him my name either.
The radiators in my building gave up sometime around October and didn't bother again until spring, and I'd lived four winters in a coat indoors, but ten minutes of Evie on my couch and the place felt like somebody had left the oven cracked.
I had stopped commenting on it years ago.
I had learned not to tell my best friend she was strange to her face more than once or twice a decade.
She was in the wing chair with Drake asleep on her lap, which was its own kind of impossible, because Drake didn't do laps, and he didn't do anyone but me, and only me on a good day.
He had melted against her stomach like she was a heat source, and she had one hand resting on his back, and she looked up when I came in with an expression I knew.
It was the one she used on a chair I'd called dead right before she talked me into saving it.
“You didn't text, Nico.”
“I'm standing right here.”
She lifted Drake off her lap and set him down in the warm spot she left behind, and he didn't even wake up, the traitor. “Sit. Talk. And don't give me the short version. I always know when you're giving me the short version.”
I didn't sit. I went into the kitchen, because I needed my hands busy before my mouth would cooperate, and I filled the kettle and put it on and got down two mugs.
Hers was the chipped green one she'd claimed somewhere around year one.
Evie came and leaned in the doorway and let me get to it in my own time, which was the kind of patience that had kept us friends through worse than this.
Then I told her all of it, and she didn't say a word through most of it.
When I finished, she set her mug on the counter. “What's his name? The one who came to the shop.”
“Draco Reed.”
Her face and went still. “Say that again.”
“Draco Reed,” I said. “Why? You know him?”
“I know the name. Everybody in the right rooms knows the name, and the right rooms are not rooms you want to be in.” She kept her voice level, which was how I knew it wasn't. “He's old money, Nico. People don't say no to him and stay people. Do you understand what I'm telling you?”
“He owns half the city. Yeah, I got the impression.”
She crossed the kitchen and took both my hands in hers, and her hands were hot, the way they always were, hotter than hands have any business being. “Promise me you'll be careful.”
“Evie.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise. Where is this coming from?”
She let go, and turned, and took the kettle off the heat before it could scream. She poured both mugs, and by the time she handed me the green one I had half convinced myself I'd imagined the edge in her voice.
“There's the shop. If he's got me on a leash, I can't keep it open. I can't run a one-man shop from inside some rich man's house.”
“So don't run it alone.”
“It's always been alone. That's the whole point of it. It's the one thing that's just...”
“Mine. Yeah. I know.” She blew across her tea. “It can still be yours with two more sets of hands in it, you stubborn ass. That's not the same as giving it away.”
She was right, and I hated it a little. The shop was the one room in my life nobody else had a key to in the way that mattered, and the thought of somebody else's hands on the pieces, doing it wrong, dragging the cloth back instead of lifting it at the end of the stroke, sat in me like a stone.
But I made myself think about Tomas, who had been coming around since we opened, who had good hands and didn't fill silence either, which in my trade was worth more than talent.
“Tomas could open,” I said slowly. “He knows the till, he knows the regulars. He'd kill for the hours.”
“And I'll take the front when I'm not at the gallery. Books, customers, all the stuff you hate anyway.” She said it like it was already settled, because in her head it already was.
“Between us we keep the lights on and the door open and your name on the sign.
You go do whatever you have to do for Remy, and you come back to a shop that's still standing. That's the deal.”
“You'd do all that.”
“I'd do more than that. Also, if that man has a wine cellar, you steal me the oldest French thing in it. That's the actual price. Everything else is friendship.”
I laughed. It came out cracked and tired, but it was real, and it loosened the thing in my chest that had been clenched since the shop bell rang the night before.
“Your brother is such a pain in the ass,” she said. “Getting you into all of this. For what? A short amount of dopamine and a guy in Yonkers.”
“He's still my brother.”
She came around the counter and put her arms around me, and the heat of her went straight through my shirt the way it always did, and I thought, without wanting to, of a man at a railing telling me about people who give off heat their whole lives and die cold.
“Doesn't mean I have to like the man who made him that way,” Evie said into my shoulder. “And I don't, Nico. I want you to hear me say that I don't.”
“Noted,” I said into hers.
“Good.”
She held on a while longer than the hug strictly needed, and I let her, and for the first time since the night before I was warm, and I tried, the way the stranger had told me to, to let it cost me nothing.
It almost worked.