Chapter 4 #3
"Supper's over. You ran it." Rory pushed a bowl into his hands.
The cook's bowl. Theo recognized it — the tester, the one that was Rory's, had been Rory's for nineteen years — and he looked at Rory holding it out to him in the gold light with four hundred satisfied people behind them, and understood that it was not a bowl of chowder, that it had not been a bowl of chowder the last time either, that Rory Nash said things with bowls he could not say with his mouth.
"That's yours," Theo said.
"I know whose it is." Rory didn't take it back.
So Theo ate, standing next to him at the edge of the festival, and it was — of course it was — perfect, because Rory had made it, hundred-quart batch and all, gentle after the cream, and Theo ate the whole thing looking at the fleet and did not trust his voice, and Rory stood next to him not looking at him, giving him that, again, the not-looking, the specific mercy of it, and the two of them watched the boats and said nothing and Theo thought, with the trapdoor wide open under him: I could do this.
I could actually do this. I could stay here and turn tables toward the water for the rest of my—
He stopped the thought before it could finish, the way you'd catch a glass going off a table.
Because he had a spreadsheet open under his life, and a tired man in Portland with a sixty-day clock, and a navy business card in his wallet, and a text he'd sent nine days ago that Wade Colson had never answered, which was fine, which was good, which meant the door was still shut, which meant Theo could keep having the four days and the forty quarts and the bowl a little longer before he had to remember why he'd come.
They cleaned up past midnight, the two of them and a dwindling crew of high schoolers who peeled off one by one until it was just the diner, and Theo and Rory carrying the last of it back in through the screen door, the landing dark now, the fleet blessed and quiet, the whole town gone home fed.
The adrenaline hadn't left. That was the thing about pulling off a big room — you came down for hours, you were wired long after, and Theo was wired now, wired and warm and undone by the whole day, and he and Rory ended up in the dark kitchen with the last two bus tubs and no more high schoolers to be a buffer, standing closer than they'd stood since the wrist over the chowder pot, and something had changed and they both knew it had changed and neither of them was moving away.
"You did a good thing today," Rory said. Low. In the dark. "For a guy who keeps telling me he's here to ruin my life."
"I said slightly ruin. And then leave." But it came out wrong, it came out with no armor on it, because Theo was too tired and too high on the day to get the smile up in time, and what was underneath the smile was right there in his voice, plain, I don't want to leave, I am terrified of how much I don't want to leave, and Rory heard it, Theo watched him hear it.
Rory took a step. Just one. Close enough now that Theo could smell the day on him, chowder and salt and the clean sweat of work, close enough that the harbor light through the window caught the scarred edge of his hand as it came up — came up toward Theo's face, slow, like a man reaching for something he'd already decided he wasn't allowed to have and was reaching for anyway—
Theo's phone went off in his pocket.
Loud. Bright. Obscene in the dark quiet.
And Theo — nine years of reflex, you always check, it's always the venue calling about a problem — pulled it out on instinct before he could think, and the screen lit both their faces up blue, and there, right there, big enough for a man standing eighteen inches away to read upside down if he'd wanted to, was the name.
WADE COLSON.
And below it, the top line of the message: Theo — apologies for the delay. Very interested in Merritt Harbor. When can we talk numbers?
Rory's hand stopped in the air.
Theo watched him read it. Watched the blue light of the exact thing Theo had been not-thinking-about all week land on Rory's face, and watched the reach die, and watched the man who'd handed him a dead uncle's binder and a cook's bowl and a step in the dark pull all of it, all of it, back behind the harbor-cold shutdown, in the space of one buzzing phone.
"Rory," Theo said. "That's not— I sent that before I—"
"Fleet's blessed," Rory said. Flat. Done. He picked up the bus tub. "Good work on the supper. Get some sleep."
The screen door didn't slap this time. He caught it. Which was somehow worse.
Theo didn't go after him. That was the reflex — go after them, fix it, get the smile up, find the sentence that puts the room back together — and for once in his life Theo stood absolutely still and let a man walk away without chasing, because there was no sentence.
He'd built his whole self out of the ability to make anything sound fine, and there was no version of I texted a developer about selling this place out from under you the same week you started handing me bowls of soup that came out fine.
The one skill he had, and it was useless precisely where he needed it most.
Theo stood alone in the dark kitchen with his phone still lit in his hand, Wade Colson's interest glowing up at him like the answer to every prayer he'd said before he got here, and understood that it had arrived, finally, at the precise moment it could do the most damage — the moment he'd stopped wanting it.