Chapter 4
Gabriel
I'm falling for Ruth Calloway, and it is, without question, the most dangerous thing I've ever done — and I've done some genuinely stupid things.
It's not her father I'm afraid of. Reverend Thomas Calloway could ban me from every pew in three counties and I'd survive it fine.
What scares me is simpler and worse: she makes me want to be good.
Not the joke kind, not the ironic road-name kind.
The real kind. The kind you can't fake your way into with a grin and a fast excuse.
And I don't believe I can be that. Not really. Not underneath.
"You've been weird for two weeks," Diesel says, tossing me a wrench I don't ask for and don't need. "Weird good or weird bad?"
"Weird nothing. I'm fine."
"You've missed poker night twice."
"I've had things going on."
"Preacher-shaped things?"
I don't answer that, which is its own kind of answer, and Diesel has the decency not to push further, though the look on his face says he's filing it away for later ammunition.
"You know," he adds, unable to help himself, "for a guy who claims nothing's going on, you sure spent forty minutes yesterday picking out a shirt."
"I did not spend forty minutes picking out a shirt."
"Hawk timed it."
"Hawk needs a hobby."
"Hawk's hobby is currently you," Diesel says, grinning, and ducks the rag I throw at his head.
Here's what happens when I get scared: I don't run, exactly.
I pick fights. Small ones, stupid ones, the kind that let off pressure without actually solving anything.
I get short with Hawk over nothing — an argument about whose turn it is to restock the garage fridge that has nothing to do with the fridge and everything to do with the fact that I spent the previous night sitting outside a lit window again, watching a shadow paint, and hating myself a little for how much I wanted to knock.
"This is about the fridge," I insist, jaw tight, three inches from Hawk's face over a genuinely empty shelf. "It's always your turn and it's never done."
"It's a fridge, Gabriel. Nobody's died over a fridge."
"That's not the point."
"Then what is the point? Because right now you look like a man about to throw a punch over string cheese."
I don't have a good answer for that, because he's right, and I stand there in the garage with my fists half-clenched over absolutely nothing, and Hawk just watches me, unimpressed, until I finally let the whole thing go with a mumbled apology that satisfies neither of us.
It's easier, some old and stubborn part of me insists, to be the troublemaker everyone already expects. Trouble doesn't disappoint anybody. Trouble was never supposed to be anything else.
That night I don't sleep well, which has become something of a theme lately.
I lie in the dark running through every version of Ruth Calloway I've collected so far — the clipboard, the sandals, the paper cranes, the mountain she's never climbed hanging in a closet nobody else has seen — and somewhere around two in the morning I give up entirely and go sit on the roof instead, the same spot from every sunrise I can remember since I first got here, except this time it's the middle of the night and there's no sunrise to wait for, just stars and the low hum of crickets and a restlessness I don't have a good name for yet.
Diesel finds me up there an hour later, apparently unable to sleep himself, and doesn't say anything at first, just sits down beside me with two beers he clearly grabbed on his way out, hands me one, and looks up at the same stretch of sky I've been staring at.
"You gonna tell me what's going on with you," he says, "or am I gonna have to keep guessing."
"I don't fully know myself."
"That's usually how the big ones start." He takes a long pull of his beer, thoughtful in a way Diesel rarely bothers being out loud. "You know I was engaged once. Before the club. Before any of this."
"I did not know that."
"Not many people do. Didn't work out. She wanted a version of me that showed up on time and didn't disappear for three days without calling, and I wasn't that guy back then.
" He shrugs, easy, like it costs him nothing to say, though I suspect it costs him plenty.
"Point is, I know what it looks like when a guy's found somebody worth actually trying to be different for. You've got that look."
"I don't have a look."
"You've got a look, Gabriel. Whole club's noticed. Even Hawk noticed, and Hawk barely notices when his own bike needs gas."
I don't say anything to that. I just drink my beer and watch the stars and let Diesel's words sit there in the dark, uncomfortable and true in equal measure, and eventually he claps me on the shoulder and heads back down, leaving me alone with the sky and the crickets and the specific, unfamiliar weight of being seen by somebody who isn't asking anything of me in return.
Knox catches me at the worst possible moment — mid-argument with Diesel over that same fridge, round two, because apparently I hadn't gotten it out of my system the first time — and doesn't say a word until Diesel's stormed off, and then he just stands there, arms crossed, watching me the way he watches everything, patient and unbothered and entirely unfooled.
"You want to tell me what that was actually about?" he says.
"The fridge—"
"Gabriel."
I stop. Let the silence sit there, because Knox has earned the right to a silence like that, ten years running.
"I don't know how to do this," I say finally, and it costs me something to say it, the way honesty always costs me something. "Whatever this is. With her. I don't know how to be the kind of man she deserves."
Knox is quiet for a long moment. When he finally speaks, his voice has none of its usual gruffness.
"You know why we called you Saint?" he says. "Started as a joke. Diesel thought it was funny — the worst rap sheet in the club, and we hang the holiest name on you we could find. Everybody laughed. I laughed too, if I'm honest."
"I remember."
"But I've been watching you for ten years, son, and somewhere along the way that joke stopped being true.
" He holds up a hand before I can argue.
"I've watched you give your last twenty dollars to a stranger at a gas station because the guy's card got declined and he had a kid in the back seat.
I've watched you take a beating meant for Hawk without so much as a second thought, because that's what brothers do and you never once questioned it.
I've watched you show up for this town — the shelter, the food drive, the kid whose bike you fixed for free last spring because you saw him crying about it on the side of the road — a hundred times when nobody was looking, when there was nothing in it for you and no one keeping score. "
I don't say anything. My throat's gone tight in a way I don't have a name for.
"The name stopped being a joke years ago," Knox says. "You're the only one who never noticed."
"That's a lot of credit for a guy who still can't walk into a church without breaking out in a cold sweat."
"You walked in this week," Knox points out. "Ruth mentioned it to Wren. Wren mentioned it to Briar, and I heard about it from Briar over dinner, which means the whole club's known for three days and you apparently didn't think it was worth mentioning that you attended actual church."
"It wasn't for a service. I just — looked at the building. From outside. For a while."
"Sounds like progress to me."
He claps me on the shoulder once, hard, the way he does, and walks off toward the garage without waiting for a response, because Knox has never needed one. He says his piece and leaves you alone with it.
I stand there in the gravel lot for a long time, feeling something crack open in my chest that's been sealed shut since I was seven years old and a woman counted the silverware and looked at me first.
That evening I find Ruth at the community garden, sitting on an overturned crate with a small canvas propped against her knees, painting the sunset in fast, loose strokes like she's trying to catch it before it gets away from her.
She doesn't hear me approach until I'm nearly on top of her, and she startles, nearly knocking the canvas over, and I catch it before it falls.
"You scared me half to death," she says, hand pressed to her chest.
"Sorry. You looked busy."
"Chasing the light. It never holds still long enough."
I sit down on the grass beside her, close enough that our shoulders almost touch, and watch her work for a while in silence.
She's got paint on her fingers, a smear of orange along her jaw where she's pushed her hair back without thinking, and she is, in this unguarded moment, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.
"You're staring," she says, without looking away from the canvas.
"I'm allowed to stare. You've got paint on your face."
"Where?"
"Everywhere. It's a whole situation."
She laughs, swipes at her jaw with the back of her wrist, manages to smear it worse instead of better, and I reach over without thinking and wipe it away properly with my thumb, and the air between us goes very quiet all of a sudden, charged in a way it hasn't been before, not quite like this.
"Can I tell you something?" I say, when I finally trust my own voice again. "Something I don't usually tell people."
She sets her brush down, gives me her full attention, the way she does, like whatever I'm about to say is the only thing that matters.
So I tell her. All of it. The group homes.
Mrs. Petraki and the silverware. The Hendersons and the watch that turned up in Denny's jacket two weeks too late for anyone to bother apologizing.
The particular loneliness of being fifteen and deciding that if the world was going to call you trouble no matter what you did, you might as well stop fighting it.
Knox, and the two a.m. bowl of chili, and the joke of a name that calcified into armor because armor doesn't have expectations attached to it.