Chapter 6 #2
She kissed like somebody who'd been standing outside in the cold for eighteen years and had finally been told to come in. Both hands in my collar. Up on her toes. Making a small furious sound like she was annoyed at how long it had taken.
I got her up onto the counter because it was there.
"Health code," she said, into my neck.
"What?"
"This is a food preparation surface."
"It's been closed since 2011."
"It's grandfathered," she said, and laughed, and I got her jacket off her shoulders and down her arms, and she quit laughing partway through and her breath went uneven, and the neon in the window buzzed on again like it had decided to attend.
There's a version of this I could tell you fast.
I'm not going to, because it wasn't fast. It was a woman who had never once in her adult life been looked at while she was being touched, learning in real time that she could keep her eyes open.
That's what it was. Every time she shut them out of eighteen years of habit I'd stop, and she'd open them, furious, and say don't stop, and I'd say then look at me, and she would, and her hands would go tighter in my shirt.
"This is a terrible idea," she said, at one point, with her legs around my hips and formica under her.
"Catastrophic."
"There's a ketchup here—"
"I have removed the ketchup."
"When?"
"Early," I said. "I planned ahead," and she laughed and then stopped laughing entirely because I'd found the place at the side of her throat that made her stop.
She said my name once, low, like it surprised her.
Nobody's ever said it like that. Guys in a room say it like an order. Emmett says it like a diagnosis. She said it like it was a good thing to have found.
Afterward we sat on the floor with our backs against the counter, sharing the world's worst thermos coffee out of one cup, her legs across mine and my jacket around her shoulders, and the jukebox playing Roy Orbison to an empty room because neither of us was willing to get up and stop it.
"I want to say something," she said, "and I want you to let me get through it."
"Go."
"I don't know what I am to you."
"Sunday—"
"Let me get through it." She held up a finger.
"I've spent my whole life being the thing that happens to people.
I'm the weather. I ruin barbecues. And I have exactly one skill for relationships, which is ending them early, and I am going to use it on you at some point in the next two weeks, probably badly, probably at a bad time, and I want it on the record right now, while I like you, that when I do that it will not be about you. "
I thought about that.
"Noted," I said.
"You're supposed to argue."
"Would it work?"
"No."
"Then it'd just be noise, and you'd have to sit through it, and we'd both know what it was.
" I passed the cup back. "Here's what I'll do instead.
When you do it, I'm going to say one sentence, and the sentence is going to be I think you're doing the thing you told me about in the diner.
And then I'm going to shut up and go home, because you're a grown woman and I'm not going to stand in a doorway arguing you into a relationship. "
Sunday stared at me.
"That's the most alarming thing anybody's ever said to me."
"Why?"
"Because it might work," she said. "Do you understand how much easier it would be if you begged? If you begged I'd have something to push against. I'm superb at pushing against things."
"I know."
"You know?"
"Sunday, I've watched you argue a man out of sixty-eight dollars, a records clerk out of an afternoon, and Marlowe Quinn out of the last word, and Marlowe Quinn has never lost the last word in her life."
She was quiet a second.
"So that's a no on arguing."
"That's a no on arguing. I'm not going to talk you out of a plan you've had since you were twelve. That'd be rude." I took the cup back. "But I'll tell you what I've got, since we're doing this."
"Do it."
"I'm the guy they send when the talking's done," I said.
"That's my whole use. And what I want — and I've never said this out loud, so if you laugh I'm walking into the desert — is to be some use to somebody at a point before that.
Once. Just once, I'd like to be the one who's around for the part where nothing's broken yet. "
Sunday didn't laugh.
"That's not a small want," she said.
"No."
"Rafferty, that's the biggest want I've ever heard."
"Yeah, well." I drank the terrible coffee. "Bishop says I don't communicate."
And she laughed so hard she spilled it down my shirt, and it was two-fifty in the morning at Mile 68 on a road that had killed thirty-one people, and I would not have traded that floor for anything.
"Rafferty."
"Mm."
"I want to tell you the actual thing. Not the diner version. The real one."
"Okay."
She turned the cup around in her hands.
"When I was nineteen my uncle Ted died on a bathroom floor exactly the way I saw it when I was twelve, except the shirt was wrong.
And I stood in a funeral home parking lot and worked out a rule about shirts.
" She was very steady. "That's what I did with it.
My uncle was dead and I revised my methodology.
That's the person I am and I want you to have that before you decide anything. "
"Sunday—"
"I'm not finished. Because here's the part that's actually wrong with me, and it's not the seeing.
" She looked up. "It's that some part of me was pleased.
Nineteen years old, standing in that lot, and underneath everything there was a little voice going: you were right.
I have never said that out loud to another living person. "
I thought about it for a while.
"You want me to tell you that's monstrous."
"I want you to tell me the truth."
"The truth is I've felt that," I said. "Not about a death.
About being right that a man was going to swing on me.
Same voice. Same little pleased thing underneath, and afterward you hate it, and it doesn't make you a monster, it makes you somebody who's had to be right about bad things to survive.
" I shifted. "You want to know what's actually wrong with you, Sunday?
Nothing that isn't wrong with a person who got handed a job at twelve and did it alone. "
She put her head on my shoulder and didn't say anything for a while.
At three-ten, the jukebox stopped mid-song.
The lights went with it, all at once, counter and neon and range hood, and the diner went black.
And out on the road, close, closer than it had ever been, an engine started idling.
Sunday's hand found my wrist in the dark.
"That's it," she said. "That's the sound my callers hear."
"Yeah."
"Rafferty, it's not on the road."
"What?"
"Listen to it," she whispered. "It's in the lot."