Chapter 22 #2
“You didn’t ask,” Tristan points out.
“That’s worse.” My voice comes out rougher than I want it to.
“That’s worse, because they did it without being asked, which means they’ll keep doing it without being asked, and when this catches up to me properly—and it will, I know how this works, you can’t run a frame this clean and not have the resources to pursue it—I don’t want any of you in the frame with me. ”
The kitchen is quiet again.
Ryan stares at me for a considerable time. “That’s not your decision,” he says.
“It’s absolutely my decision.”
“You’re in our territory. You’re under pack—”
“I didn’t agree to that.”
“Lola—”
“I didn’t agree to it,” I repeat, my voice is level and I mean every word.
“I walked into your town and I took a job and I…” I stop.
I am not doing this. I am not going to sit in this kitchen and tell them what the last two weeks have been, because if I say it out loud it becomes something I’m leaving, and right now I need it to be something I’m protecting.
“You’ve been good to me. All of you. The town has been good to me.
I’m not going to be the reason any of that gets complicated. ”
“It’s already complicated,” Jack states.
“More complicated,” I reply. “Legally complicated. The kind of complicated that ends with jail.”
Archer has been quiet. He speaks now, low and direct: “Where would you go?”
I don’t answer. Because I don’t know. That’s the truth of it. I have not run the next step. For the first time in two weeks I don’t have the next move mapped. The next move requires leaving Sweetwater Valley and leaving Sweetwater Valley is…
It’s not what I want.
I know this clearly, sitting in this kitchen, with the mug going cold in my hands and four men who stood between me and law enforcement tonight without being asked. I know what I want with a simplicity that would be funny if it weren’t so badly timed.
I want to stay. I can’t stay.
Both things are true and they don’t resolve.
“I don’t know yet,” I say, which is the closest to honest I can get right now.
Ryan looks at me for a long time. “Tonight. The car moves tonight. Archer will take care of it. You sleep here. We make decisions in the morning.”
It’s not a request. It’s not quite a command. It’s the Ryan version, a plan offered, clearly, and the space to accept it or refuse it. Except that his eyes are saying please in the quiet way he says everything.
I accept it.
Because I’m tired and the emergency power is running low and the morning feels manageable in a way the next five minutes don’t.
“Okay,” I agree.
“Good,” he replies.
Archer moves the car. I give him the keys without ceremony and he takes them the same way. He goes, and I watch him leave, thinking about the pier moment, which I’m going to stop thinking about now.
Jack makes the rounds. I don’t know exactly what he does, I don’t ask.
The pack has its mechanisms, its protocols, the competence of people who have protected something long enough to know how.
By eleven o’clock the pack house goes quiet.
The carnival outside is doing its late wind-down, and the sirens are gone.
Tristan makes food. It’s late and I haven’t eaten in hours. I didn’t notice my hunger until he puts the plate in front of me, and the noticing arrives as my body simply responding to the food.
I eat.
He sits across from me while I do, not talking, just present. This is what I’m protecting. The warmth of this. The pack house, the domesticity of it. Tristan’s forearms on the table and his quiet attention.
“It’s good,” I say, about the food.
“I know,” he replies, without smugness. Just truth.
I eat the rest of it and he clears the plate. We exist in the kitchen quietly until Ryan comes back in and tells me the car is handled. Archer is running one final perimeter check.
“Get some sleep,” Ryan orders.
“I will.”
He looks at me. That look. The one I’ve catalogued a hundred times and understood for the first time tonight at the pier, before the sirens, when I looked at the river and thought what if this is it?
“Lola,” he says with a warning tone.
“I know, I’m going to sleep,” I reply.
He nods. He goes.
The pack house at midnight is the version I know best now.
The fire is low, the lights reduced. The sounds of four people in various states of rest. Jack asleep at the table again, I don’t know if this is a choice or a condition, I’ve stopped trying to determine the difference.
Tristan in the kitchen doing the last of the cleanup.
Archer is back. He doesn’t tell me where the car is. I don’t ask. He sits at the worktable but he’s not working, which is how I know he’s thinking. I watch him from the couch for a minute, the set of his shoulders, the line of his jaw in the low light. He feels me watching. Of course he does.
He looks up. We lock gazes across the room. I think about the pier and pack said in one word. The warmth of his mouth on mine. He gazes at me for an extended period. Then he looks back at the table.
I look at the fire.
I wait until two a.m.
Not because I need two hours to decide. The decision arrives somewhere around the moment Tristan turns the kitchen light off and the home settles into slumber.
I wait until two because I need them to be asleep.
Because the version of this where I say goodbye is a version I cannot do.
I absolutely cannot look at Ryan and say I’m going and have him say okay in the way that would mean he lets me.
I cannot hold Jack’s face in my hands the way he held mine.
Cannot stand at the kitchen counter with Tristan and pretend this is what I really want.
I cannot look at Archer at all.
So I wait until two.
I do it in order, which is either very organized or very sentimental, and I don’t examine which.
The blanket, which is my blanket, which I am leaving because taking it would be a thing I couldn’t come back from internally.
I fold it into the corner of the couch where it lives and I put my hand on it for a moment.
The stall apron, folded on the kitchen counter. My name isn’t on it. Nothing here has my name on it except the memory of two weeks, which doesn’t take up space.
Jack at the table, head on his arms, laptop open and gone to screensaver.
His face in sleep is peaceful and relaxed, so different to his vibrancy while awake.
I stand at the table edge and I look at him.
I don’t touch him because if I do, he’ll wake up, and Jack awake with his full attention is something I cannot navigate at two in the morning with my bag in my hand.
I cross to Archer’s worktable. He’s asleep in the chair, not comfortably.
Archer doesn’t do comfortable as a resting state, but he’s asleep, his head dropped slightly forward, the leather cord he was working with still in his hands.
In sleep the wariness is off his face and what’s underneath is younger than I expected. Less armored.
I stand at the worktable. I don’t touch him either.
Tristan’s door is closed. He went to bed at one, the gentle consideration of a man who understood that I needed the building quieter than his presence would allow. Through the door is nothing, silence, the deep sleep of someone whose conscience is clean and whose body does what he asks of it.
I put my hand against the door. Flat. Just contact.
I take it back.
The window chair is occupied by Ryan. I knew he would be. He settled there at eleven and hasn’t moved, and whether he’s asleep or watching I haven’t been able to determine from across the room.
I find out now. His eyes are open.
He’s been waiting.
I stand in the middle of the room with my bag and my jacket and the small tin trophy in my pocket. Ryan looks at me with the expression that gives me everything and nothing and that I have, in two weeks, failed to fully decode.
We look at each other. I don’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything.
The fire is coals. The house breathes around us. Outside, the carnival is dark and still, the last of the lights on overnight setting. Sweetwater Valley is exactly what the fortuneteller said, and I found it, and I’m leaving it at two in the morning because I love it and I can’t stay.
Both things. Both true.
Ryan’s jaw moves. He’s holding in something. Restraint. The same restraint I’ve watched him maintain for two weeks, the controlled choice to give me the space to be who I am. He holds it now. He doesn’t say don’t go. He doesn’t say anything.
He looks at me the way he’s been looking at me since the first night on the carnival ground. Like I’m a fact he’s accounting for, like I’m a calculation he’s already finished and the answer is already in hand and he’s been waiting for me to finish mine.
I breathe. I look at him one more time. Long enough to be honest about it. Long enough that when I carry it with me, I’ll have all of it.
Then I walk to the door.
My hand on the latch is cold.
I open it.
The night air is cool. I step through and close the door behind me with a care that is the quietest thing I’ve done in two weeks.
I walk away.