Chapter 13
Hanna
Isend the text at four fifty-one in the morning and then I sit at my kitchen table in the dark for forty-five minutes and try to think of a single good decision I've ever made.
I can't think of one.
The list of bad decisions is, by contrast, robust. I can name them chronologically.
Age nine: attempting to iron a dress while it was on me.
Age fifteen: not looking at the coffin. Age eighteen: convincing Cal he could drive home from a party when neither of us could feel our feet.
Age nineteen: Ty Brennan, three months, a supply closet, a twin bed, a shirt I took with me to Portland and never once wore again because every time I looked at it I couldn't breathe.
Age nineteen through twenty-nine: Portland, Portland, Portland, a series of bad dates shaped exactly like whichever part of Ty the man in front of me wasn't.
Age twenty-nine: Copper Ridge. Home. A linen closet. A kitchen with a dying-bug porch light where I told the man of my life I couldn't promise him a date for telling my brother.
Age twenty-nine: a text at four fifty-one in the morning that read I'm not going to let you leave the bed.
I stare at my phone.
Okay, he sent back. Just Okay.
I know Ty Brennan's okays better than I know most people's full sentences. I've been cataloguing them since I was nine. Okay with a period is patience. Okay without is agreement. This Okay had a period. This Okay was a man holding a door open and not telling me how long he could hold it.
I drink two glasses of water in a row, then do what I've been refusing to do for weeks —weeks since a Saturday night in the station kitchen when I kissed him and he kissed me back and neither of us said it out loud, weeks of linen closets and kitchen conversations and the specific discipline of pretending in public — walk into my own bedroom, close the door, lie face down on the pillow, and think about Ty.
Not think about the conversation about Ty.
Think about Ty.
The way he looked at me in my kitchen two hours ago.
The way he said I'm not built for that and I knew, the way you know when a kettle has gone quiet, that he meant it.
The way he drove across town on a Thursday and sat at my table and asked for a thing he's earned the right to ask for, and I said I needed tonight, and what I've done with tonight is spent it refusing to let myself have the thing that brought him to my kitchen in the first place.
I pick up the phone. I don't text him.
I sleep for an hour. I dream about the academy — not the closet, the classroom, Ty across the aisle with his stupid college-ruled notebook writing notes on a lecture I can't hear.
The dream isn't a sex dream. It's worse.
It's a dream where he turns and mouths something at me and I can't hear what he says, and he's patient about it, the way he's been patient about everything.
I wake up at seven-ten and go to work.
The shift is nothing. Two calls — a slip-and-fall at the diner and a chest pain that turned out to be an extremely aggressive burrito.
Ty is at another station. We don't overlap.
Which means I spend the entire twenty-four hours not seeing him, and not seeing him is, as it turns out, worse than seeing him, because when I see him I at least have him to look at instead of looking at the parts of the station that are his.
His locker. The coffee machine he hates.
The spot on the couch where he sits when he's reading a book he's read four times.
Riley catches me staring at Ty's locker like it's an oracle.
"Come get lunch with me."
"I brought — "
"Come get lunch with me, Hanna." Her tone makes it a statement.
We get lunch. Riley orders for both of us because she's in a mood. She asks me three questions about Cal, two about my mother, and zero about Ty, which is how I know she knows. I eat a sandwich and don't taste it.
"You're quiet."
"Mm." She refills her water.
"You want advice?"
"No."
"Okay."
She eats her sandwich and doesn't give advice and sits with me. At the twenty-minute mark she gets up to refill her iced tea, and stops on the way back, and without looking at me says:
"It's worse in the dark. Whatever it is. It's always worse in the dark."
"That a firefighter thing or a life thing?"
"Yes." She sits back down.
I love Riley Prichard.
My shift ends at seven in the morning. I drive home, shower, make a cup of coffee I don't drink. Ty hasn't texted me since Okay. Twenty-six hours of Okay. He isn't going to text. He said what he was going to say. He's going to wait.
I text him at seven forty-three.
Me: Are you home.
He answers in under a minute.
Ty: Yeah.
Me: Can I come over?
The three dots. The three dots. The three dots.
Ty: Yes.
Ty's apartment is above the auto parts store on Third.
Blue-gray carpet. A couch he inherited from his father.
A bookshelf fuller than any thirty-three-year-old man's bookshelf should be.
Two plants on the windowsill — a basil and a tomato, both living, both apparently cared-for — and something about those plants is going to break me if I look at them too long, so I don't.
He opens the door in a t-shirt and sweats and no glasses, with the kind of tired that comes from not sleeping on principle. He steps back. I come in and close the door behind me, because closing the door is what I came here to do.
"I didn't sleep."
"I didn't either." I look at his kitchen through the open doorway — two mugs upside down on a dish towel, a loaf of bread on the counter, an apartment belonging to a man who feeds himself. "I'm not here to talk about Cal."
"Okay."
"I need you to know that."
"Okay."
"I'm going to think about Cal tomorrow. Tonight — " I stop, because I've said tonight and it's seven forty-seven in the morning, and I have to laugh at myself a little, which I do. "This morning. I'm not thinking about Cal this morning. I'm here to not think about Cal this morning."
"Hanna — "
"I'm not agreeing to anything. I'm not making any deals. I drove here and I parked and I came up the stairs, and I knocked, and that's the extent of the plan."
"Okay."
"Stop saying okay."
"Okay."
I cover my face with both hands and laugh into them — not a funny laugh, the laugh of a woman who's taken a left turn off every cliff available and finally landed somewhere soft.
He steps closer. Not all the way. Halfway.
"Look at me."
I look at him.
His eyes are the same eyes I've been avoiding for weeks and ten years and the rest of my life combined, and in the thin morning light of his hallway they're the specific gray-brown of wet bark.
Nothing defensive in them. And with the clarity that only comes from not sleeping, I understand: the thing I've been afraid of isn't Cal finding out.
The thing I've been afraid of is this.
Looking at Ty Brennan and having him look back without any of the walls I've spent my adulthood building.
"Can I — " I say, and I don't finish, because his mouth is on mine before I do, the way the match isn't on the paper until it is.
It isn't the kitchen hallway. It isn't the linen closet.
It's his bedroom, two rooms away, a bed made properly because he's a man who makes his bed.
His sheets are soft. He has a lamp on. He doesn't turn the lamp off, and that's the first thing I notice — that the lamp stays on, that I'm looking at him and he's looking at me, that there's nowhere to hide.
My academy-brain and my Portland-brain and the weeks in-Copper-Ridge-brain all reach for the joke, and the joke doesn't come, and instead I hear myself say, very quietly:
"You have to understand that I've thought about this for ten years."
"I know."
"Not — not like a perv. I mean — " Already reaching for the deflection.
"Hanna."
"Yes?"
"I know."
His hands know my ribs the way mine know his jaw.
I'm nineteen again and twenty-nine now, both things are true at the same time, which is something I didn't know could happen in a body.
He remembers. He's remembered — the small stupid things, the spot under my ear, the inside of my elbow, the line of my shoulder — and he's added new ones, because I'm not nineteen-year-old me and he isn't twenty-three-year-old him.
The softness at his waist I don't remember.
The small silver scar on his left hip is new.
My own new things are a mile-long list I don't have time to be self-conscious about because he's cataloguing them like they aren't new, like they're simply the current map of me.
"I don't want to deflect."
"Then don't." He says it into my collarbone.
"I don't know how to not."
"You're doing fine."
I'm not doing fine. I'm doing the opposite of fine.
I'm doing something I haven't done in my adult life, which is let a man look at me and have opinions about what he sees.
Ty has opinions. His opinions are visible and specifically favorable.
He doesn't say them the cluttered way men said things in my Portland bedrooms. He says them with his mouth on my collarbone, his hand on my hipbone, in the specific quiet way he says everything — flat and true and without rhetoric.
"You're — " he starts.
"Don't."
"Hanna."
"If you say something too nice I'll cry, and I don't cry during sex. I have rules."
"You have rules about this?"
"I have rules about everything, Ty, which you're aware of."
"Okay."
"Okay."
He doesn't say it.
He also doesn't stop looking at me.
I let him.
Somewhere between the lamp and the ceiling I stop tracking the jokes.
I stop tracking my face. I stop tracking whether my left knee is doing a stupid thing.
I stop tracking whether I'm being romantic or practical or desperate or the woman who hasn't let another human being see her without a mask since she was fifteen and her father's captain came to the door.
He says my name once.
Just once.
The way he said it across a booth in Peak Grounds, on a Wednesday morning, when I couldn't find the joke.
Hanna.
I say his.
I don't remember the last time I said his full name without ironic weight — the Ty with its armor attached. I say it now with the armor off. It comes out stupid. It comes out breathless. He hears it. He doesn't comment on it. His hand at my jaw makes the comment for him.
There's a moment. I can't describe it. I've been describing everything for twenty-nine years and this particular moment doesn't describe.
It's a moment where the distance I've built on purpose — the six blocks between my mother's house and the Watershed, the nine hundred miles between Copper Ridge and Portland, the ten years between twenty-three and thirty-three — collapses the way buildings collapse in trainings at the academy, all at once, from the inside.
I cry.
I cry, which is against all of my rules, and Ty doesn't say anything about it, only keeps his hand at the back of my head and says, one more time, Hanna, and I cry harder, because he doesn't ask me what's wrong.
Nothing is wrong. The thing that's happening isn't the thing being wrong — it's the thing being, for a second, exactly what I was afraid it would be, which was more than I could hold.
Afterword.
The lamp is still on. His ceiling has a small water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like a duck. The Le Carré is on his nightstand, face down and spine cracked. There's a bottle of water on the floor. He's lying on his back next to me with his hand on my stomach, and my face is wet.
"I'm sorry about that."
"Don't."
"It was a thing. I don't usually — "
"Hanna. Stop apologizing."
"Okay."
We breathe for a while.
"I didn't deflect once."
"No." He says it like a fact.
"I don't know if I'm allowed to be proud of that."
"You are."
"Is this — " I gesture vaguely at the ceiling duck. "Is this what I've been avoiding."
"Which this?"
"The not being funny. The looking at someone and having them look back."
"I think so."
"I could get used to it." A breath. Another. "That was a scary sentence."
"I know."
"I'm going to make a joke in about thirty seconds because I have to."
"Take your time."
Thirty seconds go by. I think about the basil plant and the tomato plant on his windowsill.
I think about the fact that Ty Brennan keeps a basil plant alive in a second-floor apartment in Montana.
I think about the fact that I'm in love with the kind of man who keeps a basil plant alive and drove across town at nine forty-five to tell me he couldn't keep doing this in the dark.
"Your basil is thriving."
"Yeah."
"That's a completely unreasonable basil, Ty. That basil is — "
"Hanna."
"Yeah?"
"I'm glad you came over."
"Me too."
"Was that the joke?"
"No. The joke is coming."
"Okay."
I wait.
I don't find the joke.
For the second time in a week, I fail to find one and I don't panic about it. I lie on my back in Ty Brennan's bed with my hand on my own stomach next to his hand on my stomach, and the lamp on, and the ceiling duck above me, and I let the absence of the joke be the thing in the room.
"I'll tell him," I say, very quietly.
"Okay."
"Not today."
"Okay."
"I don't know when."
"Okay."
"But I'll tell him."
"Okay."
"Ty?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't leave the bed."
"Okay."
He doesn't.
I fall asleep in his bed with the lamp on and the ceiling duck watching and the basil plant on the windowsill of a man who's been waiting for me his whole adult life, and I sleep for hours without moving.