Chapter 12 Playing the Part #2
“He hasn’t. It was one kiss and a goodbye, and he’d tell you so himself, if you could stand to ask him.”
“Don’t tell me what he’d say.” It climbed and I let it climb. “You don’t get to be the one who knows him. Was he happy with you? Back then. Happier than he is with me. Say it, whatever it is.”
“I’ll tell you what you’re up against,” he said. “You’ve been decent about the asking, which is more than I expected. It might even do you some good to hear it plainly, the once.”
“Then say it.”
“I had Luke for four years, and I handed him back.” He said it like it had cost him nothing.
“Then I watched, from across the city, what he made of himself without me. He was worth having when I had him. He’s worth a great deal more now.
” Something moved in him as he said it, quick and hungry, and he caught it and took a breath and it was gone, and he’d settled back.
“I’ve thought about it more than I’ve thought about anything in years. I decided I’d have it back.”
“Luke,” I said, echoing it back at him, not asking. I’d seen the thing under the ease, and I put it with the rest.
“Him, and everything he turned into while I was gone. I don’t pull those two apart.” The easy smile came back. “And I’ll spare you the question you’re working up to. Yes. He kissed me back. Look at the picture as long as you like. It won’t change the second it caught.”
He wasn’t done. He said the next part slowly, to make sure I kept it.
“And here’s what I’m not asking you, Detective, because you and I both already know it.
I’m not asking whether he told you about that kiss.
He didn’t. I know the man better than you ever will.
He came home to you, and my name never once left his mouth.
He decided you couldn’t be trusted with it.
” He leaned back. “You’ll lie there on that tonight. I know I would.”
Wright was right that Luke had never told me, and he knew what that secret would do to me.
The anger came up under all of it, and I didn’t stop it.
“You don’t even love him.” Low and shaking. “That’s the part I can’t get past. You’d take him apart, and you don’t even want him. You never loved him.”
“No.” He said it like he was agreeing the coffee had gone cold. “I don’t think I’ve loved anything in my life, if that’s the word you’re reaching for. He was attentive. Caring. Good in bed, which was always a bonus. Whether that adds up to love, I couldn’t tell you, and I’ve never needed to.”
He listed Luke off the way you’d list a car you were thinking of buying back, and I sat there thinking of the way Luke read at night with one foot tucked up under him, how he wouldn’t hear his own name the first three times and then pretended he had.
Wright had had him for four years and never once met that man.
He’d had something that answered to the name.
“You want me wrecked over him,” he went on, watching me. “Jealous. Some version of you. I’m not, and that’s the thing you can’t beat. You love him and it’s killing you. I don’t, and I’ll have him anyway.”
I believed that more than anything else he said all morning, and it was the first thing that landed on me for real, because it was true.
“Then why.” My voice cracked. “Why come all the way back for a man you don’t even want.”
“Because of what he’s worth now. Because I can.” He turned the coffee cup a slow quarter. “And because you’re sitting across from me in pieces over it, and there’s nothing in the world I like better than that.”
I had my hand around the whiskey, and I made myself set it down without drinking, just to have somewhere to put it.
“And when you’re done with him.” I was leaning over the table and I didn’t pull back. “When he’s used up. You set him down and walk off, same as before.”
“He rebuilds himself. Better every time.” The smile again. “You ought to thank me, really. He’d never have been the man you fell for if I hadn’t broken him first.”
That one was true. It went in, and I let it show.
Then I was half out of the booth without deciding to be, and the owner’s head came up, and I made myself sit back down.
“You get away with all of it.” Lower now, and it cost me more than a shout would have. “Nobody ever lays a hand on you.”
“Nobody ever will.” No heat in it, which was worse. “Ask anyone at either house what became of Adam Wright. A better rank. A better chair. There’s never anything left to take hold of, Detective. You of everyone should know that by now.”
There it was, the thing I’d driven the whole way out here for.
He’d told me to my face that no one could ever touch him, and he believed it all the way down.
That was the flaw, the only one he had, and he’d just handed it to me.
I was raging at him and taking it down at the same time, steady behind the noise.
I wasn’t going to argue him out of a belief like that, and I wasn’t going to outlast it.
I’d give him something to reach for where I was already waiting, and let him carry himself into it.
I didn’t know how yet. I knew what he’d reach for.
Then I stopped fighting him. I let it all go quiet, until I was just a man sitting with his hands open on the table, empty.
“He’s already gone, isn’t he?” I said, low. “You know it. Since you came back he’s somewhere else with me. He goes still when your name comes up. He stopped reaching for me at night. I lie there and I feel him deciding, and there’s not one thing I can do about it.”
None of it was true. He’d reached for me every night that week.
I was the one who’d gone somewhere Luke couldn’t follow and never told him why, and here I sat handing Luke’s name to the man who wanted him, calling my own silence Luke’s.
I watched it reach Wright and I watched what it did.
The false sorrow came over his face again, and for a second the hunger came up under it before he pressed it down.
I’d told him the way was clear, and that it was now.
“You think he wants out,” he said. His voice stayed level. But he’d gone still, and he was watching me too closely, and under the calm I could see how badly he wanted it and how hard he was working to keep it off his face.
“I think he’s already gone.” The words came out of me flat, used up. “Adam. I think you had this won before you started.”
It was the only time I used his first name. I used it because coming from me, that far down, it was the most broken thing I could hand him, and he took it exactly that way, satisfied, a man handed the last thing he’d come for.
“Ryan.” He tried it out, the first name, like a kindness he was extending down to me. “Let him go. It’s finished already. You’re the last one in the building to know it. Do it clean and quick. That’s more than he’s doing for you.”
I let him say a few more like it, each one more certain than the one before, a man laying out a life he’d already decided was his to run.
I gave him the beaten nod, and I got up before he could.
He wanted to watch me go anyway, so I gave him that too, the slow walk, the sagged shoulders, everything emptied out of me.
Out on the street the light was flat and ordinary, and I stood in it for a second before I made my legs work.
By the time I reached the car, the last of him was off me, and what was under it was colder and cleaner than anything I’d shown him in that bar.
Because I had him now. Everything he was stood on one belief, that nothing could ever touch him, and he’d handed it to me across the table, proud of it. That was how I’d take him down. He’d never see it coming, because I’d just spent an hour teaching him I was already finished.
I got behind the wheel and pulled out toward home, toward the evening I’d set and the truth I owed Luke.