CHAPTER 8
Omar
◆
So I was in the loft galley before the rest of them surfaced, humming something I couldn't have named, knuckling the propane range until the burner caught with that soft thump and bloomed up blue.
That's the thing about a propane flame. It's the truest blue there is, bluer than any sky I ever rode under, and it does exactly what you ask of it every single time.
You turn the knob, you get the fire, and that's the whole of it.
People are where the trouble starts; gas keeps its end of the deal.
I slid the percolator onto the back burner and let it start its tick-tick-tick, the little glass knob in the lid going dark, then amber, then dark again, like a heartbeat learning the room.
Cracked eggs into the cast iron one-handed, because showing off in an empty kitchen is still showing off and I'll take what audience I can get.
The bread Hollis had baked two days back was going stiff at the heel, so I sawed it thick and laid it in the bacon fat, and the whole narrow steel kitchen started to smell like a place a person could stay.
I caught her scent before I heard her on the loft stairs.
She came up slow, the way you move through a house that isn't yours, one hand on the rail, the steel pen already tucked through that low twist of dark auburn hair like she'd armored herself before facing the day.
And under the expensive shampoo and the cold-tarmac smell the whole hangar wore, under the fear that never quite left her, there was something new riding her skin this morning, the dark resinous smell of cleaned steel and split cedar that I knew already because it walked around this hangar in a man's boots.
Ah, I thought, and kept my face exactly where it was. So that happened.
"You're up," I said, cheerful as a man who hadn't just smelled Grant Holloway all over an attorney's collarbone. "Good. Sit. You're about to find out why I'm the most popular man in three counties, and it has nothing to do with my conversation."
"It's six in the morning."
"It's six in the morning during the apocalypse," I said. "Different rules. Eat."
She sat. That alone told me how rough the night had been, because the Sloane Mercer I'd met two days ago would've argued about the chair.
She wrapped both hands around the mug I set down, and her shoulders came down a quarter inch when the steam hit her face, and I pretended very hard not to notice, because she was the kind of person who'd bolt if you noticed her relaxing.
"Eggs are aggressive," I warned, sliding the plate in. "They've had a hard life. The toast is just bread that found religion. Don't thank the bread. It'll get a complex."
The corner of her mouth moved into the rumor of a smile. I'll take a rumor.
"You always talk like this," she said, laying it down flat as a finding rather than something she needed answered.
"Only when I'm awake. And when I'm asleep, according to a guy I shared a bunk with once, but he was unreliable and also on fire at the time, so.
" I poured my own coffee, burnt and black, the way the percolator made it after the second cycle.
"Eat, trouble. I can smell three things on you and I already fixed one of them with the eggs. "
Her hand stopped halfway to the fork. "What are the other two."
I let that one coast right past me, the way you let a turnoff slide by when you've already decided it leads somewhere you're not going this morning.
"Tarmac," I said instead, which was true and beside the point both at once, "and the fact that you didn't sleep.
The eggs fix neither, but they buy you the strength to be insufferable about it, so. "
She ate. She didn't want me to know how hungry she was, and she was bad at that, the way only people who'd taught themselves not to need things are bad at that.
I'd been bad at it once too. I knew the whole grammar of it, the careful slowness, the way you make the first bite look like a favor you're doing the cook.
I'd done it at a dozen kitchen tables that weren't mine, in a dozen houses that were always somebody else's, learning fast that the trick to being allowed to stay was to never, ever look like you needed to.
So I didn't comment. I just made sure her plate stayed full and didn't make it a thing.
Grant came up the stairs while she was on her second egg, and the whole register of the room changed.
What happened next is the part I'd turn over in my hands for weeks afterward, the one that actually mattered.
I clocked it the instant he hit the top step.
The way her spine went straight, the way his eyes found her and then deliberately didn't, the way his particular weather braided into the trace of him already settled on her collar until the air in my honest little kitchen wasn't honest at all anymore.
Two people who'd done something they hadn't finished deciding how to feel about, breathing the same eight feet of space.
And I waited for it. The thing I was supposed to feel. The hot drop in the gut, the hackle-raise, the mine that any wolf worth the name should've felt watching another man's scent ride a woman the wolf had already, quietly, started to think of as—
It never came. What rose instead was the wrong creature entirely, something warm and wide and absurdly close to relief, and it surfaced where the jealousy was supposed to be and just sat there looking pleased with itself.
Huh, I thought, and turned a piece of toast that didn't need turning, and let the strangeness of it settle in me like a stone I'd pick up later when I had hands free. That's not how that's supposed to go.
"Holloway," I said. "Eggs. Sit down before you count the exits, we both know there are two and one of them's the window."
Grant grunted, which from Grant is practically a sonnet, and took the far chair, and put his back to the wall, and thumbed that spent brass round in his pocket once, twice, the way he did when a room had more feeling in it than he'd budgeted for.
I slid him a plate. He nodded at it like it had earned the nod.
Across the table Sloane had gone very still and very busy with her coffee, a woman pretending the man who'd kissed her was a piece of furniture.
I should've been jealous. I kept checking, like prodding a tooth, like running a tongue over the chipped corner of my own front one.
Anything? Anything in there? And there just wasn't. There was only the dumb glad ache of watching two people I was already starting to be stupid about find some heat in a cold place.
I had a feeling shaped like a word I hadn't been handed yet.
"You two are loud," Cady announced, materializing at the top of the stairs in three sweaters and a blanket worn like a cape, pink hair flat on one side.
She dropped into the last chair and stole my toast off the rack with the confidence of a woman who'd done it a thousand times.
"The whole loft can hear you Not Talking. It's worse than talking. Omar, food."
"You took my food."
"More food. The hierarchy of need is clear.
" She bit the toast and looked between Sloane and Grant with the bright, slightly unnerving attention of someone who saw a layer of the world the rest of us couldn't, and her eyes did a little flicker — the look she got when a glamour shimmered or a thing she wasn't supposed to know floated too close to the surface. She opened her mouth.
"Cady," I said, light, a warning wrapped in a song.
She closed it. Filed something. Took more toast.
Grant ate fast and left faster, the way he did, muttering that he'd check the generator levels with Hollis, and the kitchen exhaled when the stairs took him.
Cady drifted off to her comms nest to coax the one sat phone into telling her whether the world still existed beyond the storm.
And then it was Sloane and me and the blue flame and the tick-tick-tick of the percolator settling, and the white roar of the storm against the steel, and a wreck of dishes I had no intention of doing yet.
"You didn't react," Sloane said.
I wiped down the range. "To?"
"You know to. " She set the mug down with the small precise click of a woman placing an exhibit into evidence.
"Holloway. Me. Whatever you decided you smelled.
You didn't react. Three days I've watched you read a room before anyone's spoken in it, and you read that one, and you did nothing.
" Her gray-green eyes came up, and they were a litigator's eyes, sharp under the exhaustion. "Why."
Because I don't know yet, trouble. Because the answer is bigger than my mouth and I haven't been told the name of it.
What I said was: "You want the joke version or the real one?"
"I want the version that isn't a wall."
That landed. That one actually landed, because she'd named the exact architecture of me, the trick I'd built before I had whiskers, the joke set in front of the true thing like a sandbag.
I leaned back against the cold steel of the counter and looked at this furious, scared, ferociously smart woman who'd clearly slept three hours and was still running rings around me, and I gave her something I didn't usually spend.
"I grew up on roads," I said.
She didn't move. She had that gift, the good interviewers have it, of going quiet in a way that makes the quiet a place you want to put things.
"Foster placements. Three counties, more houses than I kept count of, though I kept count of every road between them, because the roads were the only thing that didn't send me back.
" I turned the blue flame down a notch, watched it shrink and steady.
"You learn fast, in that life, what gets you kept.
And what gets you kept is being easy. Being sunshine.
Being the kid who's no trouble, who fixes his own plate, who never, ever needs anything, because the day you're a burden is the day the placement ends and you're back in the car with your bag in your lap, watching another house get smaller in the mirror. "
"Omar."