Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
Eli
Rhett comes back from her shop a different man, and I know before he says a word that it’s my turn now.
He doesn’t tell me how it went. He doesn’t have to. He walks into the bunkroom quiet, for once in his life, no bit, no report, and sits on the edge of his bunk with his elbows on his knees, and he just breathes for a minute. Then he looks up at me, and there’s no joke anywhere in his face.
“I told her the truth,” he says. “All of it. She didn’t say yes.” A beat. “Didn’t say no, either. Wall cracked. That’s the best I had in me.”
“That’s more than the rest of us have managed.”
“Yeah, well.” He drags a hand down his face. “Your turn, prime. I mean it. She needs to hear it three times, in three voices, or she’ll talk herself clean out of all of us. You included. You especially, probably, seeing as you’re the one who never says a damn thing.”
He’s not wrong. That’s the hell of it. I lie awake most of the night knowing exactly how not-wrong he is.
The trouble with being me is I’ve spent my whole life at the edge of the room, reading it, and I got so good at that I stopped noticing the edge was a place I chose to stand.
I built a whole life on needed over wanted, and it held, right up until a woman dropped a tray of scones on Cal’s boots and I felt a thing I had no useful place to set down.
I’ve been watching her since before I had any right to. Through the front window some mornings, talking to her bread, wearing the same braced look I see in the mirror. You always know your own kind.
Six years here and some nights it still feels like I’m house-sitting a life that belongs to someone else.
Cal was born in this town. Rhett’s people are in the churchyard three generations deep.
I showed up, earned my spot the one way I’ve got, and never asked for more, because a guest who starts acting like family is a guest who gets reminded he isn’t.
And I made it worse, dressing my own fear up in the prime’s clothes.
A prime holds the line. Keeps the pack off a scared woman.
Makes sure she gets a clear shot at choosing.
All of it true, all of it good, and I’ve hidden behind every word of it, because “I’m respecting her choice” goes down easier than “I’m terrified to reach for her and find out I’m the one she can do without. ”
Restraint and hiding aren’t the same thing. But they wear the same face, and I’ve been letting mine pull a double shift.
The heat changed the frame on me. You can’t hold a woman through the worst days of her life, feel her hand the whole shaking weight of herself over to you in the dark, and then go back to standing at the edge like none of it happened.
She asked me to sit down. Now I have to decide whether I believe her over a story I’ve told myself since I was old enough to pack a bag.
Rhett was right in the bay days ago. Waiting doesn’t respect her choice.
It just lets her fear sign for her. And all week she’s been doing the exact thing I do, making herself useful to the whole town so nobody looks close, building a wall out of festival binders and a bright friendly voice.
I know that move. I invented it. I’ve been calling my silence patience while she talks herself into leaving.
She’s got the city on her. Cal smelled it first. I’ve caught it since, every time she hands me a coffee with that closed-off politeness, a woman with one foot already aimed at the door. The careful, respectful plan I built is going to stand right here and let her walk out through it.
Not tonight.
And I keep coming back to the minute in the heat when she surfaced out of the fog and reached for me by name. I still haven’t set it down. Trusting it means reaching back, and reaching back is the one thing I never learned to survive.
What scares me isn’t the walk over. It’s that I’ve never once done this without a reason in my hands.
Every time I’ve ever gone to her, I brought something.
Soup. A fixed oven. A note in block capitals telling her to eat.
A job to do, a thing to carry, a use. Cover.
Because if I show up useful and she doesn’t want me, well, I was only dropping off soup, no harm done, no reach, nobody has to know I wanted to stay.
That’s the whole trick of my life, laid bare.
I love people with my hands, so I never have to risk loving them out loud.
Tonight I’m going over there with nothing in my hands.
No soup. No repair. No excuse to be on that step but the true one. I’m going to stand in front of her and say it plain, the thing I’ve never said out loud to a single soul, with no soup to duck behind if she says no. Just me. Just the want, held out empty-handed.
It’s the most exposed I’ve ever let myself be. I’m forty feet from her door. I’m going anyway.
I get up. Cal’s awake in the next bunk, of course he is, and he doesn’t say a word, just finds my eye in the dark and nods once, the whole of his big heart in it, handing me the thing he wants for himself. Go.
Rhett’s turned toward the wall, but he’s listening, I can tell, and when I pass his bunk he says it low, not rolling over. “Empty hands, prime. She’s had enough of everybody’s excuses. Even the useful ones.”
“When did the pair of you get wise?”
“Learned it off you,” Cal says. “You just never once took your own advice.”
I pull on my boots. I don’t pick anything up to bring. That’s the point, and it’s the hardest part, walking out with nothing to offer but the man himself, who has spent years quietly sure that’s the one thing nobody keeps.
The shop’s dark when I get there. The light’s on upstairs, though. She’s awake. Course she is. Two of us can’t sleep tonight, then.
I let myself look at the warm square of that window a moment.
Ordinary. A woman up too late in a town she came here to disappear into, same as me.
I’ve stood outside a hundred lit windows in my life and told myself the warmth in them was for other people, that my job was to guard it from the dark, not to walk into it.
I’m so tired of the dark. I’m so tired of being the man who keeps everyone else’s house and never once steps inside one of his own.
I stand on her step with nothing in my hands for the first time in my life, heart going hard enough to hear, and I do the thing I have never once let myself do.
I lift one of those empty hands, and I knock.