Chapter 29 Healing
Sam
It's a dead Tuesday, slow enough that I'm cutting limes I don't need cut, when Summer comes through the door a little after eleven. Three days since the show and she still walks in like the room owes her something, which it does. I reach for the bourbon before she's on the stool.
"There she is." I slide the glass across. "Still finding glitter in unspeakable places?"
"Found some in my ear this morning. Three days." She climbs onto the stool and wraps both hands around the bourbon. "I'm never getting it all out, am I."
"Never. It's in you now. Welcome to the life." I lean on the bar. "How's the comedown."
"Weird. Big. I keep waking up at four with my whole body still up on that stage like it didn't get the memo the show ended." She drinks. "Is that normal?"
"It's normal. You scared the hell out of your own body up there. Give it a week, it settles."
"You were at the back. The whole time."
"Where else would I be."
"You had a face on. Second number. I looked out and there you were, doing a face."
"I was working."
"You were not working. I know your working face. That was a different face."
"It was a hell of a number." I let that be as much as I'm giving her, and she lets it go, because she knows me.
"How's the cowboy."
She knows the question isn't really about Colt.
"He's doing the work, Sam. Not the version where a man says sorry and waits for a medal.
The real one. He shows up. He listens. He's climbing back out of whatever they buried him under.
" She turns the glass a slow quarter. "I'm letting him back in.
Slow, with my eyes open. But all the way, I think. "
"I've felt it since he came into town. I watched him the night you took that stage.
A man who's performing crowds you, makes sure you clock everything he does for you.
He didn't do any of it. He hung back at the wall and let the night be yours, didn't push, didn't make it about himself.
I read people for a living." I wipe a stretch of bar that's already clean.
"That's not a man running a play. You don't have to walk me up to it slow. I'm a grown man. I'll live."
She says my name. Not soft.
"Sam."
She looks into my eyes. Just the one word, hard enough that the rag stops moving in my hand.
"You pulled me out of the water when I'd forgotten I had a body, and you handed it back with no bill, no conditions, no story I had to perform to earn it.
You were the softest place I had when I didn't have one left.
I am not walking out of here and leaving you behind like you were a season I passed through on the way back to my life.
You're not a season. You're kindred. You're mine.
I want you with me always, however that has to look, and I need you to take that and not wave it off. "
And for once the smart mouth comes up empty. No line. No deflection. She's cracked the lid and she's watching me, waiting, and there's nothing clever to put between us.
"It's funny that you think I'd let you go that easily." I smirk. "You're the first person in three years I let all the way in. I'm not giving that up because Colt is back." I make myself hold her eyes back. "You're stuck with me. Kindred doesn't come with an exit."
One tear gets loose. She catches the rest.
"Kindred," she says.
"Kindred."
She reaches across the bar and takes my hand and holds it, and I let her, which is not something I do with most people. We sit in it a second.
Then, because one of us has to break it before we both go under: "And your cowboy better get used to me. If he's in your life, he's in mine. I've always wanted a little brother to make miserable."
She laughs, wet. "Stepbrother."
"Worse. Found brother. No legal way out of it for him." I squeeze her hand once and let go. "Now drink your bourbon before the ice gives up on it."
***
I pour us each a fresh round. Bourbon for Summer. Whiskey for me. We don't talk for a minute. We just sit there with the bar between us. The kind of sitting that happens between two people who have agreed on something difficult and need a moment to let the agreement settle.
The front door of the club opens. The bell does its small tinny thing.
Dominic.
He comes up to the bar like he has a reason for being here at the tail end of the night, after the show, with the chairs already starting to go up.
He doesn't. The room is mostly empty. There are four other people in the building including the two of us.
He slides onto the stool next to Summer and nods at me and orders a bourbon and asks me about a permit issue he has no business asking about.
Then he asks Summer how the manuscript is going.
He is, by every observable metric, performing the role of a man who has casually wandered in.
Dominic Vargas doesn't casually wander.
I pour the bourbon. Slide it across. He reaches for his wallet to pay because Dom always pays even when I tell him not to. He pulls the wallet out of his back pocket and a folded piece of construction paper flutters out with it and lands on the bar in front of Summer.
Crayon. Green and purple. A person, if you're being generous.
Summer picks it up.
Dom goes very still.
She unfolds it. In the bottom corner, in the wobbly hand of someone who has just figured out the letter D, four words: TO DOMMY. WITH LOVE.
She looks up at him.
She looks at me.
I have set down the glass I was polishing.
Dom is looking at the bar between us like the wood grain might save him. His jaw has gone tight. His ears have gone red. In the weeks I have known this man I have never seen the ears.
"Dom," Summer says.
"Don't."
"I am asking the question."
"I know you are asking the question, Summer.
I am asking you not to ask it tonight. I have had a long week.
Marisol talked to me for nine minutes today, the child made me a dinosaur and she signed it.
I have been carrying it around since Wednesday because I haven't yet found a structurally appropriate place to put it.
I don't want to talk about it. I want you to give it back to me.
I want both of you to pretend you didn't see anything. "
I say, very calmly, "Sixty-four crayons? The big box. With the sharpener."
Dom closes his eyes.
"Sixty-four."
"That is all I needed."
He doesn't say anything. The red has reached his hairline now. He has gone the color of a man whose feelings have ambushed him in a public venue and who is genuinely working out whether to leave the country.
Summer smooths the drawing on the bar. Hands it back to him.
He folds it. Slides it into the wallet. Slides the wallet into the back pocket. Pats his back pocket twice, drinks his bourbon and doesn't say another word for a long minute.
When he finally speaks, it is to the empty glass.
"Marisol told me not to get any ideas."
"Mm," Summer says.
"I got every idea."
"Yeah you did."
He looks up. The ears haven't come down yet.
He looks at Summer, and then at me, and then back at Summer, and what passes across his face isn't the face of Dominic Vargas, venture capitalist. It is the face of a man who has been holding a folded piece of construction paper against his back pocket for days and has just been seen doing it.
"Don't tell anyone," he says.
"No one," Summer says.
"I mean it, Sam. Don't tell anyone."
"No one, Dom."
He nods. Drinks. The ears begin, finally, to retreat.
I pick the glass back up and resume polishing it. Summer drinks her bourbon. Dom drinks his. Nobody says another word for ten minutes, and the silence is the most affectionate silence I have sat inside in years.
***
I'm closing up at midnight, the club dark around me, when my phone buzzes with an Instagram follow request.
Autumn Hayes.
I stare at it. Summer's best friend. The one who screamed from the front row.
Held Lucia on her lap through the second act and didn't put her down.
Came into Vibes trailing glitter and enough energy to power the block and then went quiet during the first number, watching it like she knew what it cost. I noticed her, and I haven't stopped noticing her.
I'm not ready. Not yet. I'm still learning to let go of the hurt, but I'm close.
I accept the follow request. For the first time in three years, the walk home doesn't feel like a retreat. It feels like a beginning.