Chapter 15 And Now We Wait #2
“All right,” he said. “Thank you. That’s what I came in to say.
Thank you. You are doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself without getting my hands dirty.
Every day you drag him a little lower, and every day he looks a little longer at the one person in that room who isn’t hurting him.
I was ready to be patient. And then you went and fell apart all on your own, weeks ahead of schedule.
” The smile widened. “He was always coming back to me, Carlson. That was never in question. But I did think I’d have to carry him out of the wreck myself.
I didn’t expect you to walk him to my door. ”
“He used to be different, you know,” he went on, when I didn’t move.
“Before the photographs. Easy. Light. You never met that man. You got the folded-up version, the one who flinches at his own mail, and you’ve been holding the folds shut ever since and calling it love.
It’s exhausting. I know it’s exhausting, because I did it first. The only difference between you and me is that I was honest enough to stop. ”
“You didn’t stop,” I said. “You left. There’s a difference, and he finally knows what it is.”
The smile stayed where it was. His eyes went flat.
“He’s had a long time to get over me,” Wright said, softer now, “and look how that’s going. When it’s finished, I’ll send you flowers.”
I had two fistfuls of his collar before I knew I’d moved. I put him into the tile between the sinks hard enough that the mirror rattled, and I held him there.
He didn’t fight the grip at all. That’s the part I keep coming back to.
He hung in my hands, relaxed, and smiled through all of it.
Then he brought both forearms up inside my arms and broke the hold, one clean move, trained, and stepped out of reach and pulled his shirt straight, in no hurry at all.
“Feel better,” he said. “Good. Then I’ll give you something too, since we’re finally being honest in here.
” He set his collar with two fingers and took one step back, comfortable again, or acting it.
“When this is done and they’ve swept you out of the building, he’ll come back to me.
He’ll cry about it first. And I’ll be patient with him, and I’ll be kind, and I’ll take him back anyway, because that’s what I do.
That’s what being loved by me is. So, enjoy whatever he gave you, Carlson.
Everything he does in the dark, I taught him.
There isn’t one part of him you’ve touched that I didn’t have first, and he knows it every time you put your hands on him. ”
My fist got there before any thought did. It caught him across the mouth and his head went sideways and his hip hit the counter, and he grabbed at it and stayed bent over the sink for a second, and the sound of it was still coming off the tile when I understood what I’d done.
He straightened up slowly. Blood sat at the corner of his mouth. He touched it and looked at his fingers, and then he laughed, one short breath of a laugh with nothing behind it, and the laugh went out like something switched off at the wall.
“You just assaulted a superior officer,” he said.
Quiet. Level. “In a division building. There’s a camera in that corridor with me walking in after you, and I will swear to every second of what happened next.
” He didn’t wipe the blood away. He wanted it where it was.
“I’m going to Murphy today, and it goes in writing, and by the time it’s done, a hearing about his temper will be the last anyone in this Service hears of Ryan Carlson.
That’s what happens to men who can’t hold themselves together. ”
I looked down at my hand. Two knuckles had split, and the burn was arriving late, always a beat behind.
He wanted me thinking about that corridor camera, so I thought about it.
It showed a sergeant following a junior detective into an empty men’s room and walking out with a split lip.
No sound. Whatever he swore happened in between was a story only his mouth could tell, and the tape put him a step behind me the whole way in.
Worth knowing. Worth keeping to myself. Let him carry it to Murphy believing it only cut one way.
He was too sure of his own evidence to look at the rest of the frame.
Then I looked at him.
“Go,” I said. My hand had started to throb, and I let it.
“Go to Murphy. Put it in writing. Sign your name under it, nice and legible. And while you’re down there, understand something, because I’m only going to say it once.
Luke isn’t a thing you left in storage. He isn’t coming back to you.
He was never coming back to you. He’s mine, he’s been mine all the time you’ve been standing in that bullpen.
So file your complaint. Send your flowers. And go to hell.”
He studied me, reading my face, looking for the lie in it.
I gave him the man I’d been playing all day, furious and finished and stupid with it.
Whatever he saw, it satisfied him. He walked to the door, and the corridor light came in white when he opened it, and I watched the pleasant expression come back up over his face between one stride and the next, complete, for whoever was out there.
Then the door eased shut and I had the room to myself again.
I ran the cold water over my knuckles until the split stopped weeping and the burn came down to something I could live with.
I did not smile in the mirror, because someone could still walk in, but I wanted to.
The punch hadn’t been in any plan, mine or Murphy’s.
I would have liked to call it performance.
It was the one honest thing I’d done all day, and Wright had walked out of here owning it.
I gave it a few minutes. Splashed my face, fixed my collar, combed my hair back down with wet fingers.
If I went back out too fast, people would wonder what else had happened in there.
Slow and worn, with my right hand in my pocket, I was exactly what the floor already believed I was.
When I walked back out the overheads were half down at the far end and the floor had mostly emptied and Wright’s desk was bare, his jacket gone.
Nobody looked at me. It had taken us one full day to teach forty people not to look at us, and it had worked, and I sat down at my desk feeling the kind of tired that had nothing to do with sleep.
Luke waited ten minutes. Then he came around to my side with a folder there was no reason for me to see, set it at my elbow, and leaned down over my shoulder to point at nothing, the way he used to before any of this, back when a hand on my desk was just a hand on my desk.
He smelled like stale coffee and the end of a long shift.
His eyes found the split knuckles before I could get the hand off the desk, and stopped there, and his mouth went tight, and I watched him decide not to say the thing he wanted to say with forty feet of empty bullpen around us.
“Did he take it,” he said instead, barely above a breath?
“He took it,” I said. “All of it.”
His throat moved once. Then he tapped the folder like we’d settled something about filing, said, “And now, we wait.”