Chapter 5
Crow
Reaper found me in the garage two weeks later, elbow-deep in a bike that didn't strictly need the attention I was giving it, and watched me for a full minute before he said anything, which for Reaper counted as a diagnosis.
"You're stalling," he said.
"I'm working."
"You're re-torquing bolts you already torqued an hour ago. I watched you do it. That's not work, that's a man avoiding a phone call." He crossed his arms, leaning against the frame of the bay door. "How's the wedding planning going?"
"Fine."
"That's a very short answer for a man who usually gives me three-part strategic breakdowns unprompted."
I set the wrench down harder than I meant to. "It's going fine, Reaper. Venue's booked. Guest list's finalized. The prenup's airtight. Everything's exactly on schedule."
"And the part that's not on the schedule?"
I didn't answer that, which was, apparently, answer enough, because Reaper's expression did something I didn't like — a kind of knowing patience, the look of a man who'd already run this exact play himself once, with Esme, and recognized the terrain.
"You're catching feelings," he said.
"I'm not catching anything. This is a business arrangement."
"Sure it is." He pushed off the doorframe and came to lean against the bike, close enough that I couldn't pretend to keep working without it being obviously rude. "I said the same thing about Esme, you know. Right up until I very much wasn't saying it anymore."
"This is different."
"How."
I didn't have a good answer, and Reaper, infuriatingly, let the silence make his point for him.
"Just — be careful," he said finally, softer than his usual register.
"Not with the plan. The plan's solid, and I need it to stay solid, because that road matters.
I mean be careful with her. If this tips over into something real for one of you and not the other, somebody gets hurt, and I'd rather that not be either of you. "
"Nothing's tipping over."
"Uh-huh," Reaper said, in a tone I was starting to recognize as the universal sound of nobody believing a single word I said about this, and left me alone with the bike and the bolts I'd already torqued twice.
Diesel found me at the bar that night, which was worse, because Diesel didn't do subtle interrogation the way Reaper did. Diesel just asked the question directly and waited, arms crossed, with the patience of a large dog expecting a treat.
"So are you actually in love with her, or is this still the road thing."
"Jesus, Diesel."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the road thing," I said, with more force than the sentence required, which even I could hear made it sound like exactly the opposite.
"Uh-huh." Diesel signaled the bartender for two more beers, entirely unbothered by my tone. "You know, for a guy who runs numbers on everything, you're being real cagey about a pretty simple variable. Do you like her, or don't you. Yes or no. It's not calculus."
"Everything's calculus if you do it right."
"See, that's exactly the kind of thing a man says when the answer is yes and he doesn't want it to be.
" Diesel took a long pull of his beer, watching me with an expression far too perceptive for a man who'd once proposed to a barista with a ring pop.
"For what it's worth, I liked her fine at the market.
She held her own against Vitale better than most people do. "
"She's not — this isn't about whether I like her."
"Sure it is. That's the entire thing it's about.
" Diesel shrugged, easy, like he was discussing weather instead of dismantling my carefully maintained denial in four sentences flat.
"Look, I know you like to think you're the cold, calculating one.
Reaper's the gut, Saint's the diplomat, you're the guy who runs the spreadsheet.
But spreadsheets don't explain why you've spent three weeks 'fixing trellises' at a house that, according to Saint, has had zero actual structural problems since the initial storm damage got repaired in week one. "
"How does Saint know that?"
"Saint knows everything. It's unsettling.
That's not the point." Diesel clapped a hand on my shoulder, hard enough to rattle my beer.
"The point is, brother, you don't have to be the numbers guy every single minute of your life.
Sometimes the numbers guy gets to just like somebody, no math required. "
I didn't have a response for that, which Diesel seemed to take as a small personal victory, judging by the satisfied look on his face as he wandered off to go argue with Saint about something equally unhelpful.
It happened three days later, and it happened, appropriately enough, over something completely mundane.
We were at the villa going through seating arrangements — a task I'd have sworn on my life could not possibly generate tension of any kind, given that it consisted entirely of index cards and a hand-drawn table diagram — and the afternoon had started ordinarily enough.
She'd made coffee. I'd brought the guest list, printed and alphabetized, which had earned me a long look and the comment that apparently I really did alphabetize things for fun, and I hadn't bothered denying it because denying it would have required lying, and I'd stopped being able to lie to her comfortably somewhere around the third week.
"Okay," she'd said, spreading index cards across the stone table, one for every guest, "table one is family and close friends.
Table two is club, presumably, since I assume your people don't mix well with mine yet.
Table three is town notables, which mostly means people Marta will personally hold me accountable to if I seat them wrong. "
"That's a lot of tables for ninety people."
"Weddings are logistics wearing a nice dress, Roman. You of all people should appreciate that."
"I do appreciate it. I'm just observing that you've built an entire seating taxonomy with more categories than my club has committee structures, and my club has a lot of committee structures."
"Are you mocking my system?"
"I'm admiring your system. There's a difference."
"That's what you said about the trellis fixing, and I still don't fully believe you on that one either." She slid a card across the table toward me — Marta's name, block capitals, underlined twice for emphasis. "Where does she go?"
Isla was leaning over the table beside me, close enough that I could smell the lemon oil that seemed to live permanently in her hair, arguing with genuine passion about whether her cousin Renata and Marta should be seated at the same table.
"They'll either become best friends or start a small war," she said. "There's no middle option with those two."
"So separate them."
"That feels like cowardice."
"It's strategic risk management," I said. "There's a difference."
"You would call it that."
"I call it that because it's accurate."
She laughed, and reached past me for another index card, and her arm brushed mine, and neither of us moved away this time, the way we hadn't moved away from a dozen small accidental touches over the past two weeks, each one a little less accidental than the last, both of us pretending otherwise with a commitment that was, frankly, starting to strain credibility even between just the two of us.
"Roman," she said, not looking up from the table diagram, her voice gone quieter, more careful than the seating argument warranted.
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you something. Not for the performance."
"You keep prefacing questions that way. I'm starting to think you don't trust me to answer honestly unprompted."
"I trust you fine." She finally looked up, and whatever she'd been about to ask seemed to catch somewhere behind her eyes instead of making it out as words. "Never mind."
"Isla."
"It's nothing."
"It's clearly not nothing. You've got the same face you had right before you told Vitale his lemons were overpriced. That's not a nothing face."
That got a small, surprised laugh out of her, and something in her shoulders eased, just slightly. "Fine. I was going to ask — do you ever think about what happens after? Once the will's satisfied, the land's secured, and we're supposed to go back to being strangers who nod at each other in town."
The question landed somewhere I hadn't fully mapped yet, and I found myself, uncharacteristically, without an immediate answer.
"Sometimes," I said finally, because lying to her felt suddenly, viscerally wrong in a way it hadn't with anyone else in a long time.
"And?"
"And I don't like the math on it as much as I used to."
She went very still, index card forgotten in her hand, and the space between us — always small, always somehow smaller than the seating chart strictly required — collapsed further, until I was close enough to see the exact moment her breath changed.
"Roman."
"I know."
"We have a contract."
"I know that too."
"An exit clause. Clean terms. No complications." She was reciting it like a lifeline, like the words themselves could hold something back that had already, quite clearly, gotten loose. "We agreed."
"We did," I said, and didn't move away, and neither did she, and for one long, suspended moment the whole careful architecture of the arrangement — the numbers, the plan, the road, the exit date — went completely, dangerously silent in my head, replaced by nothing but the fact of how close she was and how much I did not want to be the one to close that distance first, because closing it first meant admitting something neither of us had built room for.
She closed it instead.
It wasn't a kiss, not quite — her hand came up to my jaw, hesitant, testing, and she got close enough that I could feel her breath against my mouth, and I held completely still, letting her decide, because some decisions aren't mine to make even when every part of me wanted to make it for both of us.