6. Luka #2
"Somewhere you're safer not knowing."
"That's not an answer, that's a locked door with a man standing in front of it."
"Then it's a locked door." I held her eyes so she'd know it wasn't a game. "I'm not going to lie to you. I decided that already, tonight, before I knocked. So when I won't answer, that's me not lying. It's the most honest thing I've got."
She was quiet for a second, and I felt it land, the strange backwards comfort of a man who'd rather refuse than deceive.
"Okay," she said slowly. "That's either the most romantic or the most unhinged thing anyone's ever said to me, and I'm too tired to tell which.
Fine. You don't get a name. Neither do I, apparently.
So I'm calling you something. House rules. "
"Don't."
"Too late, it's happening. You said it yourself, I don't leave, the lights stay low, the man in the corner has secrets." She tipped her head, considering me, and a ghost of the old brightness came back into her face. "Warden. You're the Warden. It's got a nice ominous landlord energy."
"Whatever helps," I said, and felt the corner of my mouth twitch, and caught it before it got out.
"He almost smiled. The Warden almost smiled. I'm keeping that."
And then something in her shifted, a different way.
The talking stopped. Her hand went to her pocket, and this time it didn't stop, and I knew before I saw the glow on her face what she was reaching for.
Not a weapon. Not a call for help. Something worse, for me.
The phone came out and her thumbs moved across it fast and sure, hunched over the screen with her shoulders rounding inward, hiding it, and I watched the light change on her face from the cold blue of the lock screen to something softer, and I understood, a half second too late to stop my own heart from going through the floor, exactly who she was writing to.
In my pocket, against my hip, my own phone buzzed once.
I felt it through the fabric. One short pulse, the weight of it suddenly enormous, a brick sewn into the lining.
I did not move. I made myself not move. I sat there on the floor of a safehouse with three men's worth of trouble behind me and the only girl I had ever wanted to be honest with two feet away, and I let the message arrive and did not reach for it.
I knew what it said. I didn't have to look. I knew the cadence of her at midnight the way I knew my own pulse, six months of it, every night, the one hour of every day I'd let myself be a person instead of a function.
She'd written to Luke.
Rough night, Luke. Worst one yet. Some stuff happened and I can't really say what but I'm okay, I think. Mostly. You there?
Three dots would have been mercy. A single word.
Hey. Here. I'm here, little ghost, talk to me.
I had typed those words ten thousand times.
They were the easiest sentence in the world and they were sitting right there in my thumbs and all I had to do was take the phone out of my pocket and be the one person in her life who always answered.
And it would have been a lie. Not the words.
The words were true, I was here, I was closer than I had ever been, close enough to see the cold prickle her arms. But answering as Luke, in this room, with my mouth shut about who held the phone she was staring at, that was a lie with a roof and walls, a whole house of one, and I would not move into it.
Telling her the truth was impossible, not tonight, not with her shaking and bleeding and trusting the one thing in the dark that wasn't me.
So I did the only thing left, which was nothing, and nothing was the cruelest thing I had ever done to anyone.
I watched her wait.
I watched her watch the screen for the dots that didn't come.
She held it a long time. Longer than the message deserved, longer than was casual, her thumb brushing the glass once to keep it from going dark, as if the problem were the screen and not the silence.
The softness drained out of her face by degrees.
I saw the exact moment she decided not to send a second one, the small straightening of her spine, the breath she took and let go slow.
I had spent a hundred hours learning the shape of her hope through a keyboard and now I got to sit three feet away and watch it close like a hand.
"Everything okay?" I said, and despised the sound of my own voice for asking, for the cowardice of pretending I didn't know.
"Yeah." She turned the phone face down on her knee. Casual. Too casual. "Just checking the time."
It was the first lie either of us had told all night, and she told it to cover the fact that someone hadn't answered her, and I had to sit in the knowledge that the someone was me, and that I'd built her into a person who'd rather lie than admit she'd been left on read by the only friend she had.
"You should sleep," I said. "I'll take the chair. Nobody gets through that door."
"Bold of you to assume I sleep." But she was already losing the fight, the night and the cold and the running catching up all at once, her words slurring soft at the edges.
She lay back against the couch and pulled her knees up and tucked the dead-quiet phone against her chest like it might still ring.
"For the record, Warden, if I wake up in a chest freezer, I'm going to be so smug.
I called it. I'll haunt you. I'll be the most annoying ghost. Little ghost, big attitude.
I'll move your keys. I'll, um. I'll rearrange your scary little kit by color and you'll never find the, the . . ."
She fell asleep mid-sentence on the couch. I covered her and almost said the line only "Luke" would know, then shut my mouth so hard my jaw ached.