Chapter 17
seventeen
Logan drives me home after work and I spend Monday evening struggling to fit my things into Cassius’ space.
It’s hard to put my life in his drawers, his closets, his bathroom cabinets.
I wish he were here so I could ask his opinion on where to place things, but it’ll have to wait.
He should’ve been home by now. Adrian calls me Tuesday, early, to tell me Cassius has been delayed and not to expect him.
Because I’m up, I pick a book off the wooden shelf next to Cassius’s side of the bed and read until it’s time to get ready for work.
When I go downstairs, the ghosts crowd my kitchen. The Bolo-Hat man, who seems to have moved in when I did, is posted at the sink. The grocery-store creep is also here, with his collar forever blooming red, and so is a gaunt man who carries his own head in his hands.
“Morning,” Bolo-Hat says, brim tipping. “Don’t mind the crowd. This desert’s always been full of watchers.”
“Why are you suddenly talking?” I ask, because he usually doesn’t.
“Some days the veil’s thinner.” His gaze tracks the window, the light beyond it. “Name’s Gideon, because you’re answerin’. Wasn’t much here when I ran it. Railroad dirt and a string of shacks. By ’11 they’d blessed it proper and called it a city.”
He looks pleased at my silence, then goes on. “But when 1920 hit, the country went dry. This place? Fremont had its honest storefronts in the sun and its sins in the shade. Block 16 took care of both. You wanted a hand of cards, a girl, and a song, you found the right back door.”
“You were running liquor,” I say, before I can stop myself.
His mouth quirks. “The road that’d become Highway 91 was just a track scraped through cactus with Los Angeles one way and Salt Lake the other.
We ran the desert by stars. City men drank our gin from coffee cups and called it medicine.
” He taps his brim, eyes bright. “Then they started the big dam. Built a clean little company town downriver where a man couldn’t buy a beer for love or money. So the crews came here on payday.”
I picture the heat, dust, and hidden doors.
His words paint it for me until I can almost smell it.
Colored bulbs winking and laughter poured low so the law can pretend not to hear.
Men in rough denim with dam dirt ground into the seams spilling out of buses from the government’s shiny, dry company town downriver, pockets fat, throats thirsting.
They hide their pay in their boots and trade it for cards, for music, for women, for a coffee cup that steams like tea and smells like juniper and trouble.
Gideon fits there. Alkali dust rims his boots.
A silver watch winks at his wrist before it disappears under a cuff.
He doesn’t swagger. He occupies. He slides through the alley beside a bakery that pretends it only sells bread, knocks twice on a door that blooms a rectangle of lamplight, and sets oil-cloth bundles on a flour-dusted table.
The “tea” is clear as a church confession but bites.
Bathtub gin cut with citrus peel to hide the sting, rye that smells like the inside of a new wood barrel.
Men come in by starlight, leave by dawn, and somewhere between those hours a city decides what it wants to be when it grows up: not holy, not honest, but alive in a way no other city is.
“And when the country came to its senses?” he asks himself, and then answers. “’33. Someone finally said enough and let the cork out again. Didn’t matter much to us by then. Vices had already found their home.”
“You sound proud,” I say.
“I am.” His voice thins, turns careful. “I’ve seen men build empires out of nothing but stubbornness and sin.
Some last. Some rot from the inside out.
” He studies me, brim low. “Your husband comes from builders, but he comes from rot too. The devil’s got his father nailed so tight to the floor he can’t get loose to haunt nobody.
That’s why you don’t see him.” He tips his head.
“He almost ruined everything, but the line didn’t end there.
The ones after tried to make something different. Virulent with a selective conscience.”
“Is that Cassius?” I whisper.
“Yes, executioner,” he says. “With situational ethics.” He glances toward the hall like he can see where Cassius isn’t. The headless man shifts. The grocery creep stains the air a darker red. Gideon puts himself between them and me like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Why tell me all this?” I ask.
“Because you keep praying for answers. Might as well give you a few.” His brim dips again. “And because the early days matter. This city was born from thirst and secrecy. Your husband was born the same. You can love a place like that, a man like that, just don’t pretend they’re anything else.”
He starts to fade, edges thinning with the morning.
“Gideon,” I say, testing the name that rises as a memory I never owned. Then the room warms a few degrees, and he’s only a shadow on glass.
By the time Logan arrives to drive me to work I’m a basket case.
Only when Logan says, “Why don’t you just call him?
” on our way to work do I realize I’m partially to blame for how I feel.
But I don’t know the rules of this game.
Can he even get calls when he’s at work?
I only have one of his numbers. He should’ve explained more before he abandoned me.
When Logan parks in the garage, I don’t get out.
Instead, I take my phone out of my purse and hit Cassius’s contact.
My reflection doubles in the window. Wyatt’s face overlays mine, his throat a dark mouth that won’t ever close.
He fogs the glass when he leans in, voice a wet whisper only I hear: You chose this for me.
“You chose the knife. I chose myself,” I whisper back, and press call.
“Lindy girl,” Cassius says, a bit breathless. “Are you okay?”
“It’s been almost a week,” I say instead of answering him.
“I know.” I can’t pinpoint what’s happening on his end of the phone but noise swells behind him. “I told Adrian to inform you I couldn’t make it home.”
“Why didn’t you inform me?” I say. He stays silent for a long time.
“I’m sorry, darling. I wasn’t sure, I don’t…” Cassius's voice trails off.
“Adrian said you don’t want to spook me.”
“I don’t,” Cassius says immediately. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
“I don’t want to hear from your brothers, Cassius.
I need you to text me. I need you to call me.
I can’t go six days without hearing your voice other than when you pop in for a few seconds when I’m half asleep.
I need to know you’re okay. I need,” I pause thinking about the next words I’m going to say, swallow my pride, and decide to be honest. “I need you to care enough about me to want to call.”
“You and my brothers are the only things on this planet I do care about. If it were up to me, I’d never leave you. You consume my every thought. If I show you how much I actually care, you’ll disappear.”
I let those words sink in. I’m not sure he’s right.
Maybe being cherished that hard would be its own kind of oxygen.
The thought of his focus narrowing to only me in every room, with every breath, doesn’t scare me.
It settles low and warm, and some feral part of me wants both the lock and the key to this man to be inscribed with my name.
“Why don’t you do exactly what you want to, exactly what you feel, and if it is too much for me I’ll tell you to tone it down?
” I want to experience who this man is when he’s not holding himself on such a tight leash.
I’ll probably regret it, but I’d rather set myself up for the heartbreak than live another day like these past six.
“In that case, expect to be on your phone a lot more.”
“When will you be home?”
“I’ll be there before one,” Cassius pauses before adding, “Can I pick you up for lunch?”
“Yes. I’ll tell my boss I’m taking a late lunch. I only have an hour.”
“It’s an hour I can spend with you and you told me to do what I want.”
“I’ll see you at lunch,” I say. I’m already a few minutes behind, not that anyone here will care.
“See you soon, Lindy darling. I miss you.”
“I miss you too,” I say before hitting the end button on our call.
“Feel better?” Logan asks, grinning from ear to ear from the driver’s seat.
“Much better,” I say. I wait for Logan to get out and grab all my stuff from the front seat. I took a lot of work back and forth with Cassius being gone. I needed to keep busy so I wouldn’t jump off the balcony. Logan opens my door for me and I start the countdown to lunch.
At one o’clock on the dot, my phone vibrates on my desk. Victoria looks up from the manuscript she’s been working on and giggles, literally giggles, when she sees Cassius’s name on the screen.
“Hello,” I say, rolling my eyes at her.
“Hello, darling,” Cassius answers. “I’m downstairs whenever you’re ready.”
“I’ll pack up and be right down.” I stand and grab my purse.
“Can’t wait,” Cassisus says and ends our call.
“I take it you’re not eating with me today?” Victoria teases as I back toward the door.
“I’m sorry.” I step further back into the room. “My brain is mush today. I should’ve told you sooner that I’d be leaving for lunch.”
“No worries, girl,” Victoria says. “Go get your man.” Again, she’s giggling at me and I can’t help but laugh with her.
“I’ll see you in an hour.” I pass Logan without saying anything, but he falls in behind me.
I push through the exit and lock eyes with Cassius.
He’s a beautiful navy-blue suit, leaning against a black car.
I force myself to slow my pace, but when he opens his arms to me I throw calm, cool, and collected out the window and rush into his embrace.
He kisses the top of my head and squeezes me tight.
“I missed you terribly.”
“You have a funny way of showing it.”