Chapter 8 I Took the Fall for You #2
Adam remained silent for a while. He didn’t perform sitting with it, no slow nod, no closed eyes. He just went quiet, and it went on long enough that the espresso machine ran twice.
“You’re right,” he said, finally. “Everything you just said. I’ve had years to find a version of it where I come out better, and there isn’t one.
” He turned the cup once and left it. “I was scared, Luke. Of the threats, of the brass and the future, but mostly of what that building was going to call me once it was said out loud. You were braver about it than I ever was. I told myself that leaving was protecting you. I’m gone, the threats stop to matter, you get your career back.
I believed it while I packed. I might have believed it for a year after.
” He shook his head. “It wasn’t protection.
It was me saving myself, dressed up as a favor.
I can’t fix it from here. I just needed to sit across from you once and say I know what I did. I’m sorry.”
I looked at him for a while. He held it, open-faced, and I’d arrested men with faces like that, and I’d buried friends with faces like that, and no course tells them apart. I was tired, and it was old, and I had a life across town that was worth more than any of it.
“Forget it,” I said. “It’s a long time ago. We’re colleagues now, and there’s no reason we can’t be decent at it.”
“Colleagues.” He nodded once, like a man signing something. “I’ll hold to it. No hard feelings, Luke.” He stood and took his coat off the chair.
He didn’t ask me to forgive him, and he didn’t ask me to believe him, and he didn’t ask me to carry one word of it home to Ryan. I sat a moment at our old table with my coffee gone cold, and then I followed him out, because we were both walking back through the same lights.
We came out onto Broadview together. The evening had gone gray, traffic thick going north.
He kept the conversation going, easy, about the course schedule and a supervisor we’d both known, and he kept it going the whole block, never once letting the quiet come back, and I was only half in it, because most of me was still back at that table.
At the corner the light changed and I stepped down to cross, not looking, still half at the table.
His hand closed on my arm and hauled me back hard. “Watch it.” I came off my feet and into him, chest to chest, his other hand already at the back of my head, and before I had my balance his mouth was on mine.
For a second I didn’t move. One second, and everything came up in it, four years of a relationship I had grieved and buried. Then Ryan. Ryan’s face, clear as day.
I got both hands on his chest and shoved, hard, harder than I needed to. He went back two steps and caught himself on the light pole.
“Never again.” My voice came out low and dark. “Do you hear me? Never.”
“Luke.” His palms came up. “There was a car. It came through fast and you weren’t looking. I wasn’t going to stand there and let it clip you.”
I looked at the street. Traffic going north the way it had been all along, nothing turning, nothing close, the crossing empty. Maybe something had come and gone while my back was to it. Maybe.
He was still talking when I walked. I crossed against the light with the traffic honking at me, and I didn’t hear that either.
I took the long way home. Down Broadview to the park, the whole slope of it going dark, and up along the streets I used to walk in the worst year, when walking was the only thing that worked. I felt like I’d been hit. I walked fast, and the walking didn’t help.
I kept going back to the car. I never saw a car.
I made myself run it again, slow, from stepping off the curb, and there was his hand on my arm and there was his mouth and there was the empty crossing after, and nowhere in it was a car.
I couldn’t swear one hadn’t come through while I was turned away, dusk and thick traffic and me not looking.
That was the thing. I couldn’t swear either way, and I had the cold feeling he’d known I wouldn’t be able to.
There was a car if he said there was a car. Prove otherwise.
And for one block it came too close to things I’d spent a month refusing to think about.
A thing that happened with no way to say for certain it did, and him on the far side of it, sorry and reasonable.
I heard Ryan at the counter, flags nobody could explain, and I made myself set the whole thought down, because a kiss I hadn’t wanted was not the list of things Ryan had accused him of, and I knew the difference. I told myself I knew the difference.