CHAPTER THREE #3
"Sure. But most people your age were noticing which girl to talk to, not which pregnant woman needed dairy-free food at a barbecue.
" Sasha looked at him a long moment, the particular assessing look she'd given him across a hundred fire debriefs and just as many ordinary Saturdays, the look of someone who'd watched a green recruit become the quiet backbone of an entire crew and had never quite worked out how to properly thank him for it without him finding some way to shrug it off.
"You know what I thought, the first time I watched you do that?
I thought, this bloke's either going to burn himself out inside five years being everyone's safety net, or he's going to be the best thing that ever happened to this crew.
Turns out it was both, a bit. You're still here.
Still doing it. Just took its toll along the way that nobody bothered to notice, because you never let it show. "
"I'm not burnt out, Sash."
"No," she agreed, watching him across the rim of her cup, "you're not.
Not anymore, from what I can see this weekend.
Something's changed in you lately. Can't quite put my finger on what.
" Her eyes drifted, deliberately, toward the front row of chairs, toward the single gap facing the fire, and back to him, and she said nothing further about it, letting the observation sit there unclaimed the way Jax's had, another member of the crew quietly cataloguing the same slow unfolding thing.
She moved off eventually to find Wes, leaving Renz standing there with his coffee going lukewarm, turning over the memory she'd handed him — twenty-two years old, an esky of dairy-free food nobody had asked for, the particular loneliness of being the useful one before he'd even had time to work out whether that was a role he'd chosen or one that had simply been waiting for him, shaped exactly to his hands, the day he arrived.
The afternoon went on the way it always went — food and noise and somebody's kid asleep on somebody's shoulder, the long slow unwinding of forty people setting a year's worth of danger down on a green headland above the sea.
? ? ?
Dom found him not long after Sasha had moved off, the baby finally asleep against his shoulder after a determined half hour of resisting it, and settled onto the bench beside Renz with the particular careful stillness of a father trying not to wake a child he'd fought hard to get to sleep.
"You know she's going to want a coffee too, one day," Dom said, nodding at the baby, keeping his voice low. "Reckon you'll remember her order the way you remember everyone else's?"
"Flat white, extra shot, no sugar. Same as her old man." Renz said it without missing a beat, and Dom laughed, quiet, careful not to jostle the sleeping bundle against him.
"Mate, she's eleven months old."
"I'm planning ahead." Renz refilled Dom's own cup without being asked, the automatic reflex, and Dom accepted it with the easy gratitude of a man who'd stopped questioning why Renz did what he did years ago and simply enjoyed the benefits of it.
"How's fatherhood treating you? Properly, I mean.
Not the version you give people at the pub. "
Dom considered the question longer than Renz expected, looking down at his daughter's sleeping face.
"Terrifying. Wonderful. Mostly terrifying, if I'm honest — you spend your whole life thinking you're reasonably competent at things, and then you're handed this tiny person who needs you to be competent at something you've never done before, and there's no manual, and you just have to work it out as you go and hope you're not getting it catastrophically wrong.
" He looked up, something thoughtful in his face.
"You'd be good at it, you know. Fatherhood.
You already do half the job for this whole crew — remembering things, noticing things, making sure nobody falls through a gap.
Kids just need that on a smaller scale."
"Bit different, having your own."
"Sure. But the instinct's the same instinct.
You've just never had anyone to point it at that was actually yours.
" Dom said it lightly, without any particular agenda, the offhand observation of a tired new father who hadn't quite worked out he was handing Renz a sentence that would sit with him a good deal longer than the moment warranted.
"Anyway. Reckon you'll get there eventually.
Man who remembers a baby's future coffee order eleven months early's not exactly running from the idea. "
He excused himself a few minutes later to hand the sleeping baby off to Pri, and Renz sat a while longer at the table with Dom's words turning over slowly in his chest, the particular unfamiliar shape of imagining a future that included more than tables and coffee orders and other people's children, a future that might, someday, include a chair with someone specifically his own in it, rather than one merely left open for someone he hadn't yet let himself properly claim.