23. Dallas
DALLAS
The back porch was the only place in the clubhouse where nobody expected anything from you.
I’d figured that out somewhere around day three of lockdown.
You could sit out here with a drink or without one, stare out at the desert doing absolutely nothing, and not a single person would come looking.
Maybe because the view wasn’t much. Sand and scrub brush and a sky that went on forever in every direction.
Maybe because it was easier to pretend you were okay inside where the lights were on and the guys were moving around.
Out here, nobody was pretending.
I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and turned my bottle of water between my palms. The back door hadn’t opened in a while. Gauge was cooking. Deac was brooding. Rat was upstairs with Char, doing whatever Gauge had sent him up there to do.
I heard the door creak behind me.
I figured it was Mace.
But the footsteps were lighter than Mace’s, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I found Char standing in the doorway with her hair braided down her back and a dress on that told me she was done hiding in her room.
She didn’t see me at first. Her eyes were already trained somewhere out on the horizon, doing that math she was always doing. Running numbers on something she hadn’t told any of us yet.
“You lost?” I asked.
She startled. Grabbed the doorframe. “God. Do you people take a class in that?”
“In what?”
“Appearing out of nowhere.”
I held up my water bottle. “I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes.”
She looked at me, then out at the desert, then back at me. “Huh.” She let the door fall shut behind her and stepped out onto the porch. She didn’t sit — just stood there with her arms crossed, like she hadn’t fully committed to staying yet.
That was fine. I wasn’t going anywhere.
She looked out at the desert for a long moment before she finally looked at me.
I watched her jaw work the way it did when she was chewing on something she didn’t want to say out loud.
I’d clocked that habit somewhere around week two of knowing her.
She’d do it behind the bar when a customer annoyed her.
She did it whenever Deac said something that landed wrong.
She was doing it right now, staring at a point somewhere around my collarbone instead of my face.
“You don’t have to say anything right this second,” I said.
She finally looked up at me. “I know that.”
“Just saying.”
“Dallas.” Her voice had that warning edge to it.
“Char.” I kept mine easy.
She let out a short laugh that didn’t have much humor in it. “I hate when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Be so damn calm about everything.” She leaned back against the porch railing and crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t you ever just want to lose it?”
I considered that for a second. “Sure.”
“But you don’t.”
“Somebody’s gotta be the one who doesn’t.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Really looked, the way she rarely let herself. “Is that exhausting?”
I hadn’t expected that question. I turned it over once before I answered. “Sometimes.”
She nodded like she understood exactly what I meant. Maybe she did. Maybe that’s what she’d been doing her whole life too — being the one who didn’t fall apart, because the alternative was too expensive.
“Bait’s death wasn’t your fault,” she said quietly.
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
I glanced down at her. She wasn’t asking to be kind. She was asking because she actually wanted to know the answer.
“I know it up here,” I said, tapping two fingers against my temple. “The rest of me is still catching up.”
She looked away first. Her chin dipped, and I watched her throat move as she swallowed. “I keep thinking if I’d never started digging. If I’d just kept my head down and minded the bar and let them own the place.” She shook her head. “He’d still be here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Don’t I?”
“No,” I said. “You don’t. Because whoever she is, she was coming regardless. You didn’t cause this, Char. You just happened to be standing in the middle of it when it blew.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Neither did I. Down the hall, someone coughed. A floorboard groaned somewhere above us. The clubhouse breathed around us the way it always did — like a living thing that knew too much and kept its mouth shut about all of it.
“I’m not gonna stop,” she said finally.
“I know.”
“You’re not gonna try to talk me out of it?”
I shook my head. “Would it work?”
The corner of her mouth moved. Almost a smile. “No.”
“Then what would be the point?”
She looked at me then, and for a second something shifted in her expression. Something that wasn’t annoyance or grief or the armored version of herself she wore around the rest of us. Just her, tired and honest, standing on the porch with her hair braided down her back.
“You’re different than I thought you were,” she said. “When I first saw you.”
“What did you think I was?”
She tilted her head. “Trouble.”
“I am trouble.”
“Yeah,” she said, pushing off the railing. “But not the kind I thought.”
She moved back through the door, and I let her go. I sat there on that porch for another minute after she’d gone, listening to the sound of the door settle behind her.
Not the kind I thought.
I’d take it.