Chapter 5
JOELLE
He's sitting in his booth. Not eating. Not reading the paper. Just sitting there with his empty coffee mug and his big, rough hands flat on the table, like a man waiting for something to happen who has decided he isn't allowed to be the one who makes it happen.
"You should go," I say.
"Okay."
He doesn't move.
I wring out the rag and drape it over the faucet.
The diner is quiet. No fryer, no radio, no patrons.
I can only hear the refrigerator humming in the walk-in and the tick of the clock above the register that loses two minutes a day,.
Underneath both of those I can hear my own pulse, which is new, and which I do not appreciate.
"Two years," I say.
He looks up.
"Two years in that booth and you never said a word. Not one."
"I said my order."
"Black coffee, egg plate, side of toast. That's not a conversation."
His eyes drop to his hands, then back to me. His face has a kind of caught-out blankness, like a man who's been picking a lock quietly for two years and someone has turned the lights on.
I sigh. "You are the worst communicator I have ever met, and I spent three years with a man who proposed via text."
He doesn't say anything to that. I don't know why I told him.
"He texted 'marry me question mark,'" I say. "With the words. Not the punctuation. He spelled out 'question mark.'"
The corner of his mouth moves. It’s close to a smile, closer than anything I've seen on his face in two years of breakfast service.
"I heard you say please," he says.
I stop.
"On the phone." His voice is rougher than I expect, not rough like he's performing it, rough like he doesn't use it much and the gears are stiff. "I'd never heard you say it. Two years. You tell people what they want and you bring it and you don't ask for anything back. Not ever."
He's looking at the table. At his hands. At the bite mark on his right hand where Rosie got him, still pink.
"And I thought, she never asks. She gives everything away every morning and she's never once asked."
The counter rag drips into the sink. I hear it.
"I wanted to answer," he says. "I didn't know how to answer in anything except money."
His hand is on the counter. I don't know when they got there. Four inches from mine. I can see the knuckles, the calluses on his palm that I've been looking at from a coffeepot's distance for two years and have never once been allowed to want out loud.
He's looking at me now. It's the most he's said since I met him and it has cost him. I can see the price of it in his shoulders, in the set of his mouth, in the way the words came out against resistance, like he had to break them off of something to give them to me.
And that's the thing that moves me. Not the words. The cost of the words. The fact that this is the hardest thing he's done and he did it standing in an empty diner with his hand four inches from mine.
I come around the counter.
I leave it all there on the laminate, the check, the seven hundred mornings, the fact that this is the first complete sentence he's ever said to me that wasn't about eggs. I leave all of it on the counter and I come around to his side, where I have never once stood, and I stop in front of him.
He's tall. I know this. I've known it for two years.
But up close, standing, with the counter gone from between us, it's a different fact entirely, he takes up the air, and I have to tip my head.
He smells like pine resin and diesel and the coffee I poured him hours ago.
Underneath all of it there is something warmer, skin-close, that I have never in two years had close enough to find.
"This is stupid," I say.
"Probably."
"You don't even talk."
"No."
So I take his face in both my hands and I kiss him.
And everything I've spent two years not letting myself feel arrives at once, with no line at the door.
It is not a smooth kiss. It is not the kind that happens in a clean, well-lit diner between two people who've had a reasonable conversation and decided, sensibly, to explore a mutual attraction.
It is two years late and it shows. Our noses bump.
He goes still for half a second. A small sound catches in his throat, surprise, like he genuinely did not believe this was where the night was going, like he had spent the whole evening braced for me to send him home … And then his hands come up.
Careful. Those big careful hands, the ones I know the backs of, the calluses of and the cold-saw-oil smell of, and have never once been touched by.
They come up slow and they settle at my elbows and they hold on the way you hold what you've wanted long enough to have stopped expecting to get.
Not grabbing, just holding, as if he moved too fast it'll turn out not to be real.
And that undoes me more than anything his mouth is doing.
Because I feel it then, the whole of it, all the way down.
I have wanted this for two years. I have wanted it on seven hundred mornings and called it everything else, curiosity about a quiet man, professional attentiveness to a good tipper, wanted it so long and named it so carefully that I'd convinced even myself.
And now it's in my hands, literally, his jaw rough under my palms, his careful hands at my elbows and his breath going uneven against my mouth.
There is no name left for it but the true one.
I kiss him like I'm taking back two years I spent pretending.
He kisses me back like a man who'd given up on being kissed and is trying to memorize it in case it doesn't happen again.
I don't know how long. Long enough that the wanting stops being a thing pulled tight and starts being a thing held.
Long enough that when he finally eases back, half an inch, just to breathe, his forehead comes down against mine and stays there, and I feel his shoulders go.
The whole rigid set of him, two years of it, easing all at once, like a man setting down a load he's carried so long he forgot it was a load.
He breathes against me in the blinking dark.
I stand there with my hands still on his face.
I am in no hurry to be anywhere that isn't this.
"Was that …” he starts, low. The uncertainty in it coming from this big quiet man checking whether he's allowed to have what just happened, it goes through me sideways.
"Yes," I say, against his mouth. Soft. I mean it as an answer to every version of the question. "Yes."
He breathes out. I feel it more than hear it. And he doesn't say anything else, and I don't either, and for a while the only thing in the room is the two of us standing, not letting go.
Then the napkin dispenser slides off the edge of the table and hits the floor like a gunshot.
We both freeze.
Silence. The napkin dispenser rocks on the linoleum, settles. His hair is wrecked from my hands and his forehead is still against mine. He has the expression of a man caught doing a thing he cannot explain to a jury.
I start laughing, startled, breathless, too loud for an empty room. "Oh my God. Hank would die."
"Hank's not here," Colt says.
And there it is. The corner of his mouth goes all the way up, the rare full almost-smile, the one I have been trying to earn over the rim of a coffee cup since the spring before last, and it turns out it was worth the wait, because it changes his whole face. And I am the one who got it out of him.
The laughter doesn't kill the moment. It cracks it open.
Whatever was tight and urgent and a little frightening between us loosens into something warmer, and I find I'm not in a hurry anymore.
The wanting is still there. It has just stopped being a thing I have to do something about this second, and started being a thing I get to keep.
"Sit," I say.
He sits. I bend down and pick up the napkin dispenser and set it back on the table, dead center, the way I set everything, and then I slide into the booth across from him. His booth. I have wiped this table ten thousand times and never once sat down at it.
"I noticed you," I say. It comes out easier than I expect.
"Years ago. The first week, even. You came in soaked through from the rain and you didn't complain about anything and you tipped like the storm was your fault and you wanted to apologize for it.
I went home and told my sister there was a silent man who looked at the menu like it had personally let him down.
" I push the napkin dispenser an inch. "I've thought about you more than I'd say out loud in a lit room. "
He takes a while with that. He always does. I’m only now learning it isn't reluctance, it's that he won't say a thing he hasn't checked for load-bearing weakness first.
"You hum," he says finally. "When the rush ends. Right when the door stops and it's just the radio. Did you know you do it?"
He looks at his hands.
"You take the burnt corner of the hash browns.
You stand at the pass and eat it standing up because you think nobody's watching.
You tie your apron twice because the first time's never tight enough.
" He stops. "I know what you look like on seven hundred mornings.
I could've told you all of it. I never figured out how to do it without it sounding like a man keeping a list."
"It does sound a little like a man keeping a list."
"I know."
"I don't mind," I say. I actually don't. I find that the list is the most anyone has paid attention to me in years, and that he kept it without ever expecting to read it to me, just kept it because he couldn't help it, and that's the opposite of a man who proposes by text.
The lights blink. Red, then off, then red. Outside, the snow has started again, fat and slow under the streetlight, and somewhere a plow is working a street it'll have to work again by morning.
"I don't cook for myself," he says. He says it to the table, like the words cost him.
"I eat standing at the counter at the mill or I don't eat. This is …” he moves one hand, takes in the booth, the diner, the dark windows, me “…
this is the one warm room I'm in all day.
I figured if I said that out loud you'd feel sorry for me, and I'd rather you didn't."
I don't feel sorry for him. I feel something steadier than that, and warmer, and more dangerous to me than pity ever was.
"I never ask anybody for anything," I say, "because the last time I needed somebody, he answered with a text message.
So I decided I'd just … not need. It's easier to be the one pouring the coffee.
Nobody can leave you halfway through a shift.
" I look at him. "You scared me a little, honestly.
You're the first person in a long time I caught myself wanting to ask. "
"Ask," he says.
One word.
"Not tonight," I say, but I'm smiling. "Eat your eggs tomorrow and we'll see."
He stands when I stand. And we kiss again. Softer this time. No noses bump. We've found the trick of it already, the way you find it, and it is a slow, sure, unhurried kiss. We have all the time in the world because we may have finally decided to believe there'll be a tomorrow to do it again in.
Then I lock the diner. His truck is in the lot, snow gathering on the windshield, and before he does his own he scrapes mine off, the whole windshield, the mirrors, the little ridge of it along the wipers, because of course he does, because the man cannot say a kind thing but he will commit one with his bare hands in the cold and drive home with red knuckles rather than tell me to stay warm.
We drive away in opposite directions.
Driving home through the slow snow with the heater rattling, I let myself know the thing I've been circling all night.
What I want is not the answer he knows how to give.
I don't want his checks. I don't want him to fix my problems, balance my budget, source my turkeys.
I have spent my whole life being the only one who solves the problem and I do not need a second one of me.
I want the other thing. The one that cost him tonight in a different currency, the shoulders coming down, the seven hundred mornings he finally said out loud, the one word he handed me like it had been pried loose.
I want him to keep doing the hard thing instead of the easy one.
I want him to show up, not with his truck and his checkbook, with himself.
And tonight, in an empty diner, two years late, clumsy and rough-voiced and afraid of it, he finally did.