Page 272 of What We Brave
Behind me, Reid shifts. His hand finds my hip, settles there. He's awake. Listening. Choosing not to speak, which might be the smartest thing Reid Garrison has done all day.
"I love you," I say to Blake. "You know that."
"Yeah." A pause. "I know."
The pause kills me. It's my fault it's there.
I hold onto him. Press my face against his shoulder. He smells like travel and dust and underneath it, faintly, sawdust. Always sawdust.
His breathing doesn't settle. I lie there listening to it — the slight catch, the controlled exhale, the way his body won't let go. Reid falls asleep behind me. His hand goes slack on my hip, his breathing deep and even.
Blake stays awake. I stay awake with him.
I don't know how long. An hour. Maybe more. The village goes completely silent outside, just wind and the creak of the roof.
I wait. Not because I think talking will fix anything. Because I don't want him to be alone in this.
Eventually — finally — his breathing changes. Slows. Deepens. His body softens beside me, the tension draining out of his shoulders in increments. He crashes the way he always does, like his body just overrides his brain and pulls the plug.
There you go. Rest.
I press my lips to his shoulder. Close my eyes.
He's right here. Three inches away. And he feels like he's on the other side of the world.
Tomorrow. I'll tell her tomorrow.
50
REID
Blake's been on that roof since seven this morning.
I know because I watched him climb the ladder with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pry bar in the other, and David said something in really broken Spanish to Carlos that made Carlos laugh, and Blake just started working. No preamble. No small talk. Just boots on the scaffolding and hands on the wood like he'd been doing it his whole life.
Which, honestly, he kind of has.
I'm sitting in the shade outside the community kitchen watching Mary try to make rice.Tryis doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. She's got the pot on too high and she's stirring it, which — even I know you don't stir rice. You just don't. It's the one rule.
"Mary. Hey. You're stirring."
"It sticks if I don't stir."
"It sticks because the heat's too high."
She gives me a look. The same look Laine gives me when I tell her something she already knows but doesn't want to hear.There it is.The genetic proof.
"Reid, I have been cooking rice for thirty years?—"
"And it's been sticking for thirty years."
She swats my arm with the wooden spoon. There's a grain of rice on my sleeve now. I leave it.
"Laine didn't learn to cook from you," I say. "Did she."
"Laine learned from every family we ever stayed with. Filipino women, Honduran grandmothers, a ninety-year-old woman in Haiti who made the best beans I've ever tasted." Mary smiles, but there's something wistful in it. "She learned from everyone except me."
"My mom couldn't cook either. She once made spaghetti with ketchup."
