Page 88 of The Maverick
"I know that, too."
I looked at him. He looked back. The tension between us had a different quality now than it had had in the night—not the good tension, not the one that resolved into touch. This one had edges.
"I still love you," I said. "That part didn't change."
"Good," he said. "Because that part didn't change for me either."
But he didn't reach for me.
And I didn't reach for him.
And the morning sat between us, warm and complicated, full of things that had been said and things that were going to need more time than we'd had yet to settle into the shape they were going to take.
I got up.
I found my clothes.
The cream cardigan was still on the floor where he'd pushed it off my shoulders the night before, and I picked it up and held it for a moment and thought about the woman who'd walked in through that door in it twelve hours ago, who'd stood in the lobby with her grandmother's earrings and her thrift-store boots and thought:this is what I've got and it's enough.
It was still enough.
It just had to be enough on my own terms.
24
TOMMY
She left.
Not in anger. That would have been easier to handle. She left the way she'd left the donut shop—gathering herself with the economy of a woman who had a shift to get to and could not afford to fall apart in front of a man she was going to think about all day, anyway.
She kissed me at the door. Soft. She saidI'll see you tonightand I saidyeah, sweetheart, you willand she saidI have to think,and I saidI know you do, take it,and the door clicked shut and the suite went quiet around me in a way it hadn't been quiet since I'd checked in.
I stood in the middle of the room for a minute.
The cream cardigan had been picked up off the floor. The candles had been blown out. The bedsheets were rumpled into the shape of two people having spent a long, complicated night together.
I'd been toldI love youby a woman for the first time in my adult life, and she'd said it in the middle of telling me she didn't know how to be in the same world I was in.
That was a lot of weather to come through one window at the same time.
To my credit—and I would take credit where I could find it, this morning—I did not go after her.
I did not put on yesterday's clothes and chase her down the carpeted hallway and tell her that she was wrong, that the world I lived in could be made smaller, that I'd give up the suite and the helicopter and the limo and the Four Branches bourbon and the whole Dominion Hall apparatus and meet her halfway. I didn't say any of those things, partly because some of them weren't true, and partly because Rebecca Lynn had asked me fortime, and time was the one thing a man could actually give a woman without it costing her anything she'd be embarrassed about later.
So, I went to the bathroom.
I turned the shower as hot as it would go and stood under it for a long time and let the water do what hot water did to operators after long nights—reset the nervous system, work the lactic acid out of the shoulders, give the brain something physical to argue with so it would stop arguing with itself.
It didn't help.
I shut it off. Toweled off. Stood in front of the marble counter with the towel around my waist and looked at the man in the mirror.
The man in the mirror needed to run.
That was the only program left. When the shower didn't reset me, the run did. I'd been running my way out of weather since I was twelve years old and had run a fence line until I couldn't feel anything anymore.
I dressed fast. T-shirt. Shorts. A pair of trail shoes I'd packed because operators always packed trail shoes. I slipped my room key and my phone to the inside pocket of the shorts. I left thewallet. The whole point of running was leaving the man who needed that in the room.
