Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Njal
Morning comes in gray and slow, and she's still here, which is the first good thing about the day.
Sophie's asleep on her stomach with one arm flung across my chest and her hair a wreck across the pillow.
I lie there a while, letting myself look at her and doing the math I do every morning now without meaning to.
Heart rate, even. Head, clear. No bright wire running under my thoughts trying to convince me I could fix the whole world before breakfast.
The pills are in the kitchen where they live, and I'll take them with eggs in an hour, same as always, and the steadiness holds.
She stirs before I do anything about it.
Comes up out of sleep slowly, the way she did yesterday, and I watch the exact moment everything comes back to her—a flinch crossing her face, her body going tight against mine.
"Hey." I get my hand into her hair before the memory can take her all the way under. "You're here. I'm here. The dog's snoring. Start there."
"Start there," she repeats, and breathes.
Then she rolls into me and kisses me, slow and deliberate, her leg sliding over mine, and I know what she's doing before she's fully decided to do it.
She's running.
Not from me. Into me. Using the heat of it to put a wall between herself and the parking lot, between herself and Patricia's lowered eyes.
I let her, because a woman who got eggs thrown at her yesterday gets to decide how she greets the morning.
I kiss her back. I let her climb on top of the day and ride it down to something she can stand.
But I clock it.
I don't make a speech out of it and I don't pull away, but I see it for what it is, and somewhere underneath the good of her mouth on mine, I make myself a small private promise to keep an eye on how often the reaching-for-me becomes her reaching for anything but the truth.
Not today, though. Today she can have it.
Today, she can have whatever gets her out of bed.
We end up at the original Beans and Babes by ten, because Meghan texted before either of us was decent, asking if Sophie was coming in. She wants to walk her through this location so Sophie's got something to work from when she designs the new one.
Sophie looked at the message a long time before she said yes.
"You don't have to," I tell her in the truck. "Nobody'd blame you for staying home for a week."
"I'd blame me." Her jaw sets, the way it does when she's scared and going anyway. "If I hide, they win twice. They took the school. They're not taking the one place that still wants me there."
So we go.
And here's what I didn't expect—Meghan doesn't treat her like glass.
She puts a notebook and a fan deck of paint chips in Sophie's hands and walks her slowly around the shop, the open one, the one that already works.
Meghan gives me the trash and the heavy lifting, because I'm a prospect everywhere I go apparently, and she runs the place like a woman who's raised kids and a coffee empire and isn't about to be slowed down by either.
"I want the new place to feel like this one the second somebody walks in," Meghan tells Sophie, the two of them standing in the middle of the floor and looking back at the worn brick and the warm light and the mismatched chairs nobody would ever call a mistake on purpose.
"Same vibe. Same warmth. But I don't want it to be a photocopy, you hear me?
People want to feel like they found someplace, not like they walked into a chain.
So you study this room. You tell me what makes it feel like somebody's kitchen instead of a storefront, and then you go build me that feeling somewhere else. Can you do that?"
"I can do that," Sophie says, and I watch her shoulders come down an inch at a time over the course of the morning.
She's good at this. Better than good.
She walks the shop with the notebook, sketching the way the shelves step down toward the register, holding chips up against the brick, talking through warm whites and a deep green for the accent wall at the new place, where the seating should go so it reads like a living room and not a waiting room.
Meghan mostly lets her run, throwing in a yes or a not that one here and there, and somewhere in the middle of it, Sophie forgets that her hometown thinks she's a monster.
There's grunt work in it for me, and I'm glad of the grunt work. I haul the trash, break down the boxes out back, fix the wobble in the table by the window that Tor's been meaning to get to for a month.
I keep my head down and my hands busy, and I stay near enough to her that if the door opens wrong, I'm between it and her before she's even looked up.
Dasha drifts in around noon and takes over the register, bumps Sophie with her hip, and says something that makes Sophie laugh for real, the first real one since yesterday.
I break down another box and let myself feel something close to all right.
Around one, an older woman comes in I half recognize—somebody's aunt, somebody from the edges of the club's world—and orders a cortado.
Dasha's slammed with a rush, so Sophie steps in behind the counter to help.
She hands the cortado over, and the woman holds her eyes a moment and says, "You're the teacher."
I'm across the room and moving before I've decided to, drying my hands on my jeans.
But the woman's face isn't hard. "My granddaughter had you.
Pre-K, before you moved up to the second grade.
Emma. Redheaded, never shut up." She wraps both hands around the cup.
"Emma cried for a week when she found out she wasn't getting you again.
You're the one who taught her to write her name.
" She nods once, like she's settling something.
"Whatever they're saying out there, I know what my granddaughter came home telling me for a year.
Don't let them take that from you, sugar. "
Sophie doesn't say anything for a second. I watch her swallow hard and find her voice.
"Thank you," she manages. "That—thank you. You don't know what that's worth right now."
"I've got an idea." The woman pats the counter and takes her cortado to a corner table, and Sophie stands there a second, blinking after her.
I catch her eye across the room, and she gives me a look that's half a laugh and half about to cry, and I give her a nod back.
Not everyone is going to think she's a monster.
Meghan catches my eye from the pass and tips her head at Sophie, just slightly, a question.
She holding up?
I tip mine back.
She's holding up.
The women in this family run a whole conversation off the angle of a chin, and I've learned to speak it by watching my mother and sister my entire life.
It's the back end of the shift, both of us on a break in the little office with the door cracked, when she tells me.
She's got her hands wrapped around a cooling cup she's not drinking.
She's looking at it instead of me, and I know the look. It's the look of somebody walking up to a hard thing sideways.
"Can I tell you something stupid?" she says.
"You can tell me something. We'll see if it's stupid."
"Rent's due soon." Her thumb runs the rim of the cup.
"And I've got most of it, from my last school check.
But there's no check after this one, Njal.
They put me on leave without pay, and leave's going to turn into me being fired, we both know it's going to.
I've been sitting here all morning doing the math in my head, and the math doesn't work past about the middle of next month. "
She says it fast, like she's been holding it.
"I've never not made rent in my life." Her voice tightens.
"I had a job at nineteen, and a job all through college, and a job every summer.
I have never once had to wonder if I'd make it, and now I'm wondering, and on top of everything else it's the part that's got me ready to throw up.
Stupid, right? The town thinks I'm a monster, and I'm worried about a rent check. "
"It's not stupid." I keep my voice even. "It's the most sane thing you've said in two days. The big stuff's too big to hold. So your head grabs what it can count. Rent's a number. Numbers feel like something you can do something about." I lean forward. "And you can. Because I've got it."
She blinks. "You've got what?"
"Rent. This month, next month, however many months it takes until this is over, and you're working again." I say it plain, like the fact it is. "Say the word, and it's handled. You don't think about it again."
"Njal." She sets the cup down. "That's—no. That's crazy. You can't pay my rent."
"Why not?"
"Because—" She gestures between us, at the air, at all the undefined space we've never put a name to. "Because we're not even—Njal, we're not dating. We've known each other for a few weeks. You don't pay rent for a woman you're not even dating, that's not—people don't do that."
I look at her for a second.
And I realize she doesn't know.
All this time, all the mine I've said into her skin, and the actual words have never once been laid out in the daylight where she could hold them.
"Sophie." I lean my forearms on my knees so we're level. "We're not dating, you're right. Dating's not what this is."
Her face does something uncertain. "Then what?—"
"I claimed you." I watch her take the word and not know what to do with it.
"That's not a thing I say lightly. In my world, it means you're mine.
Mine to stand in front of. Mine to take care of.
Mine to put my whole family behind when a town turns on you, which—in case you missed it yesterday—already happened.
My father called you ours before he ever laid eyes on you. That's what being claimed means."
She's staring at me.
"You—" She stops. Starts again. "You claimed me. Like a—like a parking spot. A library book."
"Like a woman I'm not letting go of." The corner of my mouth pulls. "But sure. Like a library book, if it helps."