Chapter 14 #2
I don’t argue with her. I take a shortbread from the plate and stand.
My gaze sweeps past the wall of green journals, the orange cat, the rose lamp, and the woman behind the desk who found Daniel Marsh from a small office in a small town using contacts and favors and thirty-nine years of knowing how people work.
“Thank you,” I say sincerely.
“Come back if you need me,” she replies, already opening a different file. “And send that lawyer of yours my way if they want the full notes. Professional courtesy.”
“I will.”
I stepped outside into the cobblestone morning.
I put the shortbread in my mouth and I take out my phone. I call my friend Scarlet. She’s a lawyer, one I’ve known since grade school.
* * *
After working Tristan’s booth all afternoon and into the evening, I return to the pack house for dinner again.
Tonight Ryan passed behind me to get to the window and his hand—just his fingers, briefly—rested on the back of the couch near my shoulder. Not on my shoulder. Near. The heat of it reached me through my clothes and I felt my whole back go very still.
He said something to Jack across the room, unremarkable, something about the morning setup schedule, and his hand was gone again. I stared at the tea in my hands and breathed through it.
I am becoming very good at breathing through things.
By nine o’clock I’ve drifted sideways on the couch.
I notice this in the objective way of someone assessing a situation from a position of scientific detachment.
I have drifted sideways, toward the middle cushion, because the cushion there is better.
The one I was on has a slight unevenness, and the middle one doesn’t, and this is the only reason.
The middle cushion puts me closer to Jack.
Jack has not moved. He is in exactly the position he was two hours ago, except he’s traded his phone for a catalogue of something, game equipment by the look of it, and he’s reading it with the focus he applies to things he actually cares about.
His arm is on the back of the couch and has been there long enough that when I drifted, his arm is now behind me without either of us having done anything.
The warmth of him reaches my back through my clothes. I keep my eyes on the television and drink my tea.
“You’ve been here since six,” he says, not looking up from the catalogue.
“I know.”
“That’s three hours.”
“I can do math.”
“Just noting.” He turns a page. “Tristan’s going to make a late dinner.”
“I’ll go before—”
“It’s already made. He started an hour ago.” He says it with the neutrality of someone who knows that the word already does the work they need it to do. “Easier to stay.”
I look at the tea. “Easier,” I say.
“Mm.” He turns another page. “No pressure.”
The thing about Jack is that no pressure in his mouth is actually no pressure. It’s not the manipulation of no pressure that means I have calculated this will make you stay. It’s genuine and I can hear the difference.
I stay for dinner.
Dinner at the pack house is… different.
It’s not formal. It’s not a display of false welcome.
It’s just five people around a table eating very good food like they’ve done so for years.
Tristan made something with pasta and something slow-cooked and the bread from his café backup batch.
It’s the kind of food that requires your full sensory attention and rewards it.
We’re all talking, or not talking, in the easy rhythm of people who’ve eaten together many times.
They make space for me without making it an issue. My glass gets refilled. The serving dish gets passed without me asking. Archer is at one end and Ryan at the other. Tristan is opposite me and Jack is to my left. I’m surrounded by the pack and I don’t actually mind.
I eat more than I’ve eaten in a single sitting since before the whole Amber incident.
I’ve been eating to function all week—Tristan’s interruptions aside—and tonight I eat because the food is good and the table is warm and the light is low and the argument I’ve been making to myself has gone quiet for the duration of the meal.
I don’t examine the quiet.
I eat the pasta.
After dinner I’m on the couch again.
I looked at the door at nine-thirty and I thought about the walk back to Doris Harrow’s and the pine-scented room and the ceiling I’ve been staring at, and I sat back down.
Convenience. The late summer night air is cold and I don’t have a jacket light enough for comfort and it’s warm here and that is the entire reasoning.
Ryan is back in the window chair.
Archer has finished the structural repair and is now sitting, which is unusual, he tends to stay in motion in the evenings.
He’s at the far end of the couch with something in his hands.
I think it’s a length of leather cord, some maintenance thing I don’t have context for, and he’s working it with the patience he applies to physical tasks.
Jack is at the table now, doing something on his laptop.
Tristan sits beside me, close enough that his warmth is constant and present, and he has his own cup of tea. He’s reading something and the lamp is on. The rest of the room is dim and the fire in the corner is crackling with flames.
This is a lot of warmth.
The layered scent of the building has deepened over the evening with all of them in it, which I’m thinking about from a position of detachment, which is not convincing anyone, least of all me.
I close my eyes for a moment.
Just a moment.
Sometime later, I become aware of the following things, in this order: The fire has gone to low coals. The lamp is off. The room is quiet, no one is moving with purpose. I am horizontal on the couch. There is a blanket on me that was not on me before.
My head is at one end. There is a warm solid something at my feet, not weight, just presence, and when I orient my brain I realize it’s Archer, sitting at his end of the couch.
My feet are near his thigh, not touching, but near, and he hasn’t moved to create more distance. He has decided not to disturb me.
Tristan is gone from beside me.
Ryan is still in the chair. I can see the shape of him in the low light, turned toward the room rather than the window now, and I can’t tell if his eyes are open.
Jack is at the table with his head on his arms and his laptop still open.
I have been here since six o’clock and it is now? The clock on the wall reads 2 a.m., which means I have been asleep on this couch for hours without deciding to be.
I should leave.
I lie still. I try to locate the urgency of leaving—the practical arguments, the strategic reasons, the this is temporary and I know what I’m doing—and what I find instead is the fire going low, and Archer solid and still at the far end, and the rhythm of Jack’s breathing across the room.
I still should leave.
The couch is warm.
I close my eyes.
I don’t leave.
In the morning, when the light comes gray through the large windows and Tristan is already in the kitchen and the smell of coffee moves through the building like a slow tide, I open my eyes and I am still there.
Still here.
The blanket is tucked, someone tucked it, at some point, around my shoulders. I don’t know when. I don’t know who. It has been a very long time since I was tucked in.
I lie in the morning light and look at the beams of the ceiling and I think: this is fine. This is information. This changes nothing. I fell asleep on a couch. People fall asleep on couches all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.
I breathe in the coffee and the old wood and the cedar and underneath it all the warm-layered scent of this collection of people, this pack that isn’t mine, and my body says home before I can stop it.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
When I open them Ryan is in the chair and his eyes are open. He is looking at me across the room in the morning light with an expression I still can’t decode. I hold it for a moment and then I sit up, pushing the blanket off.
“Coffee,” I say, to the room, to no one in particular.
“Kitchen,” Ryan replies.
I go to the kitchen.
I don’t say anything about the blanket.
Neither does he.