Chapter 6 Last Call #2
There’s no page in any manual for a man you’d put your hand to the nape of telling you to hate him for your own safety.
I was shaken and I wasn’t going to let it show.
I couldn’t argue him level, because level was three drinks back up the road.
I couldn’t hand him the one true thing that might have answered him, and I couldn’t tell him the work I came home wrecked from was his, was for him, the one card in my hand I had to keep face down.
So I held all of it and gave him none of it, and learned more about the man behind the smile in twenty minutes at that table than six weeks of watching had taught me.
“Up,” I said. “You’re done. Bed.”
“I’m fine here.”
“You’ll wake folded into a chair with a neck you’ll feel Friday. Come on.”
He let me get an arm under him, which told me everything, and we went down the short hall slow with his weight half on me, his breath warm and sharp at my jaw, and I kept my eyes on the door and off the no-distance between us.
I sat him on the edge of the bed and crouched for his shoes.
“It won’t let me be,” he said, over me, to the dark.
“The kiss. I close my eyes and it’s your hand on my neck, every time, and I get so angry I could put a fist through something.
Why can’t I just know. Everyone else gets to know what they feel.
I read strangers for rent and I can’t read the one thing in my own chest.” Both hands dragged down his face.
“I hate that I don’t hate it. There. The truth nobody ordered.
I don’t hate it and I can’t forgive myself for that. ”
I stayed crouched with his shoe in my hand and made myself breathe slow.
Drunk and sideways, he’d just handed me the thing I’d given up on getting from him sober.
That he didn’t hate it. It should have landed clean and good.
It only told me he was out in the same deep water I was, and worse equipped for it, and reaching for me was the kind of thing a man does when he can’t tell up from down anymore.
“Lie back,” I said, freeing the second shoe. “We’ll go looking for your head tomorrow.”
He didn’t lie back.
I came up to ease him down by the shoulder and he rose into me instead, his good hand catching my jaw, clumsy and sure at the same time, and he kissed me.
It was nothing like the floor. The floor had been falling.
This was reaching, drunk and graceless and certain, his mouth open on mine and a low sound coming up out of his chest, and something in me that had been banked down for weeks took light all at once.
The heat of him. Two days of stubble against my mouth.
His fingers spread along my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my lips, and for one bad second the whole tired length of me leaned in and my hands started up off his shoulders to take a hold I hadn’t been given.
Ryan. Just the name, no rank on it, no surname, the one I’d been keeping behind my teeth for weeks, and it picked the worst possible second to come loose.
One second. I gave it one I had no right to.
Then I had his shoulders and I held him off, gentle, because there is no version of a man kissing someone this drunk that I could carry into the morning, and because wanting it that badly was the exact reason I couldn’t have it.
Both hands flat, my pulse going like I’d taken the stairs three at a time.
The wanting didn’t care that he was three sheets to the wind.
It stood up in me and roared and reached, and the rest of me did the only decent thing on the table, which was none of it.
I have never worked so hard in my life to keep my hands exactly where they already were.
He blinked at me, the heat already sliding into fog, his eyes losing their hold on mine.
“Luke,” he said. Soft. Surprised by it, like the name had got out on its own.
And then he went. The drink took him mid-breath, the way it does, his weight tipping into me, and I caught him against my chest and lowered him to the pillow and he was under before his head had landed.
Gone. Mouth slack, the frown still set between his brows, the bandaged hand curled in against his own chest.
I stood over him, my heart still slamming.
I pulled the blanket up to his shoulders.
He’d be sick by morning and ashamed by noon and he’d keep some of this and lose the rest, and somewhere between now and then I’d have to decide how much of it I let him know I’d been awake for.
Asleep, the smile was gone for good. Just a tired man’s face, younger than the flat ever let him look, the frown the only thing he hadn’t been able to set down.
Ryan, with the selling finally switched off, down to the plain frightened bone of him. I made myself quit looking. I stood up.
His door I left open a hand’s width, in case he was sick. Then I went back to the wreck of the kitchen, because I needed my hands on something that wasn’t him.
I ran the sink hot. Washed the week of plates, the standing fork, the lids gone tacky.
Bagged the spoiled cartons and knotted it and stood it by the door.
Wiped the table where his blood had dried to brown.
None of it touched the print his mouth had left on mine, the heat and the rasp and the one low sound, and I didn’t expect it to, and I worked anyway.
He’d told me to hate him to keep me safe.
He’d sworn he didn’t know what he felt and kissed me like a man who knew to the letter.
He’d handed me his father and the door and the ground winning, a whole country I’d never been given the border crossing for, and done it certain I wasn’t real enough to keep any of it.
I had more questions drying on my hands than I’d carried in, and not one answer worth the name, and a case in my pocket I couldn’t speak of, and the taste of him I hadn’t earned and couldn’t give back.
And the one under all of them, the one I had no business turning at two in the morning with my arms in the dishwater.
Whether the whiskey had reached for the nearest warm thing in a cold flat, or whether the whiskey had only got the latch off a thing he kept bolted dead sober.
I wanted to know which more than I’d wanted anything in a long time.
I wasn’t going to get it off a sleeping man, and I wasn’t going to ask the waking one, because the asking would tell him I’d kept it.
So I’d carry the question up the stairs at six and through the morning and across every careful foot of the desk we shared.
Carrying things quiet was the one thing I’d always done well, the job and the years before it had seen to that.
Tonight it was no comfort at all. It was just the cost of the thing, and I paid it, and I knew I’d pay it again come daylight.
I dried the last plate and stood it in the rack. Hung the towel square on the rail. The flat had gone quiet around me, the flat-out quiet that comes when the worst of a night is finished and the place is only a place again.
I stood there with my hands dry and nothing left to do with them, and looked down the dark hall at his door, open a few inches on a sleeping man, and I stayed looking at it a long while before I reached over and killed the light.