Chapter 2 #2
"Nobody has to say it. I've watched you do this before.
You get bored, you find the shiniest, least available thing in the room, and you chase it because chasing feels better than staying still.
" He softens, just slightly, the gruffness dropping out of his voice.
"I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it because I've watched you do it since you were twenty years old and I don't want to watch you do it to somebody who doesn't deserve to get caught in the blast radius. "
I want to argue. I want to tell him he's wrong, that this is different, that I don't know what this is but it isn't the usual restless nonsense he's talking about.
I don't say any of that, because I'm not sure yet that it's true, and Knox has never once in ten years been wrong about me when it counted.
"We're fixing a roof," I say again, and finish my coffee, and go back out to the garage, and try very hard not to think about a lit window and a shadow with a paintbrush and a preacher's daughter who has a whole secret self nobody's ever let her have.
I fail. Completely. All day.
"You know I only give you this speech because I care," Knox calls after me, halfway through the door.
"I know."
"Doesn't mean I'm wrong."
"I know that too."
He lets me go with that, which is more mercy than I probably deserve, and I spend the rest of the morning under a bike I don't actually need to fix, mostly so I have somewhere to put my hands and something loud enough to drown out my own thoughts.
It doesn't work particularly well. Nothing's worked particularly well since Thursday, if I'm honest with myself, which I try not to be too often, on principle.
By Thursday I've reorganized the entire spare parts shelf twice, alphabetized nothing that needed alphabetizing, and generally made myself a nuisance to everybody within shouting distance, all in the name of not thinking about Ruth Calloway.
"You're worse than useless today," Diesel informs me, watching me stack the same three boxes for the second time.
"I'm being productive."
"You're being unhinged. There's a difference."
He's not wrong. I give up on the boxes and go sit on the porch steps instead, watching the road, and I don't even fully register what I'm doing until Diesel drops down next to me with two beers and hands me one without a word.
"You're watching for her truck," he says. It's not a question.
"She doesn't have a truck."
"You know what I mean."
I do know what he means. I take the beer instead of answering, and Diesel, mercifully, lets the silence sit there instead of filling it with more commentary, and we watch the empty road together until the sun goes down, and she doesn't come, because there's no reason she would, because it's Thursday and the roof's not scheduled until Saturday and I have absolutely no business sitting on this porch step waiting for a woman I've known less than a week.
I stay out there anyway, long after Diesel's gone in, long after the beer's gone warm in my hand, watching an empty road like it might change its mind.
Friday, she does come, though not for me — she shows up with a second load of shingles her father apparently paid for out of the church's discretionary fund, an olive branch of sorts, or maybe just a man covering his bases in case anyone asks how invested the congregation actually is in this particular charity project.
"Compliments of Reverend Calloway," she says, handing me the receipt like it's a diplomatic document.
"That's generous of him."
"He's a generous man. When he's not being—" She stops herself.
"Being what?"
"Nothing. Never mind."
"There's that word again."
She rolls her eyes, but there's a smile underneath it, and she stays longer than the shingle drop-off strictly requires, sitting on the tailgate of her father's borrowed truck while I finish patching the last stretch of roofline.
"Can I ask you something now?" she says, once I've climbed down and washed the worst of the grime off my hands at the outdoor spigot. "Turnabout's fair."
"Shoot."
"The name. Saint. Where did it actually come from? I've heard three different versions from three different people and none of them matched."
I consider deflecting. It's my default setting, the joke ready before the question's even finished, but something about the way she asks it — direct, unhurried, genuinely curious rather than hungry for gossip — makes me want to just tell her the truth for once.
"Diesel gave it to me," I say. "First month I was here. Ten years ago. He thought it was funny — worst rap sheet in the club, and they hang the holiest name on him they could find."
"That's not very nice."
"It wasn't meant to be nice. It was meant to be funny. And it was, honestly. I laughed harder than anybody."
"Did it bother you?"
Nobody's asked me that either. I turn the question over before I answer it, because for once I actually want to get it right.
"Not at the time," I say slowly. "At the time it felt like armor. Like — if it's a joke, nobody can use it against me. Nobody can disappoint me with it, because I never believed it in the first place."
"And now?"
I look at her, sitting on the tailgate in the last of the afternoon light, dust on her sandals, a smear of something — paint, maybe, from earlier, she must not have noticed — along the inside of her wrist, and something in my chest does that slow roll again, the one I still don't have a name for.
"Now I'm not so sure," I say honestly. "Ask me again sometime. I might have a different answer."
She doesn't push further, which I appreciate more than I say, and we sit there in comfortable, unhurried silence until the light starts going orange, and eventually she hops down off the tailgate and brushes off her skirt.
"I should get back," she says. "Before my father starts wondering."
"Wondering what?"
"Where I've been for two hours delivering a shingle receipt."
"Tell him you got a very thorough tour of the premises."
"That would raise more questions than it answers, Gabriel."
"Most true things do."
She laughs at that, shakes her head, climbs into the truck, and I stand there in the gravel lot watching her taillights disappear down the drive, and I think, not for the first time that week, that I am in serious, unauthorized trouble.
Hawk clocks me on my way back inside, leaning against the garage doorframe with the specific smirk of a man who's about to enjoy himself at somebody else's expense.
"Saw you out on Church Road again last night," he says.
"I like that road."
"You've said that. To Knox. Word travels."
"Small town, small roads. You said it yourself."
"I said it to Knox, not you, which means you've now heard it secondhand from a man who heard it secondhand from me, which means the whole clubhouse probably knows before you've even admitted it to yourself." Hawk shakes his head, grinning. "You've got it bad, Saint."
"I do not have anything."
"Sure. That's why you rode past a church at midnight to look at a light in a window."
"I like architecture."
"At midnight."
"Historic architecture. Very moody at night."
Hawk laughs so hard he has to lean against the doorframe for support, and I flip him off and go back to the bike, and the whole rest of the afternoon I can hear him telling the story to anyone who'll listen, embellishing it a little more with each retelling, until by dinner it's somehow become a tale involving a serenade and a ladder, neither of which happened, and I don't bother correcting it, because correcting it would mean admitting how close to true the rest of it actually is.
Diesel finds me still standing there a full minute after the truck's gone.
"You're doing the thing again," he says.
"Shut up, Diesel."
"I'm just saying. Four days. You've never stared at a road this hard in ten years, and I've watched you stare at a lot of roads."
He's got a point. I don't tell him that. I go back inside and pretend to care about the carburetor for another hour, and it doesn't work any better than it did on Monday.
Later that night, lying awake with the window cracked to let in the cool air, I catch myself smiling at the ceiling for no reason I can immediately name, and then I do name it, and it's her — the tailgate, the paint smear on her wrist, the way she said ask me again sometime about a question I hadn't even fully answered yet, like she was already planning on there being a next time.
I fall asleep smiling like an idiot, which hasn't happened to me in longer than I care to admit, and if I dream that night, I don't remember what about, only that I wake up still smiling, and Diesel takes one look at me over breakfast and says, "Yep.
It's bad," and doesn't elaborate further, because at this point, neither of us needs him to.