Page 16 of Take the Fall
I pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. He’d be sick by morning and ashamed by noon and he’d keep some of this and lose the rest, and somewhere between now and then I’d have to decide how much of it I let him know I’d been awake for. Asleep, the smile was gone for good. Just a tired man’s face, younger than the flat ever let him look, the frown the only thing he hadn’tbeen able to set down.Ryan, with the selling finally switched off, down to the plain frightened bone of him. I made myself quit looking. I stood up.
His door I left open a hand’s width, in case he was sick. Then I went back to the wreck of the kitchen, because I needed my hands on something that wasn’t him.
I ran the sink hot. Washed the week of plates, the standing fork, the lids gone tacky. Bagged the spoiled cartons and knotted it and stood it by the door. Wiped the table where his blood had dried to brown. None of it touched the print his mouth had left on mine, the heat and the rasp and the one low sound, and I didn’t expect it to, and I worked anyway.
He’d told me to hate him to keep me safe. He’d sworn he didn’t know what he felt and kissed me like a man who knew to the letter. He’d handed me his father and the door and the ground winning, a whole country I’d never been given the border crossing for, and done it certain I wasn’t real enough to keep any of it. I had more questions drying on my hands than I’d carried in, and not one answer worth the name, and a case in my pocket I couldn’t speak of, and the taste of him I hadn’t earned and couldn’t give back.
And the one under all of them, the one I had no business turning at two in the morning with my arms in the dishwater. Whether the whiskey had reached for the nearest warm thing in a cold flat, or whether the whiskey had only got the latch off a thing he kept bolted dead sober. I wanted to know which more than I’d wanted anything in a long time. I wasn’t going to get it off a sleeping man, and I wasn’t going to ask the waking one, because the asking would tell him I’d kept it.
So I’d carry the question up the stairs at six and through the morning and across every careful foot of the desk we shared. Carrying things quiet was the one thing I’d always done well, the job and the years before it had seen to that. Tonight it was nocomfort at all. It was just the cost of the thing, and I paid it, and I knew I’d pay it again come daylight.
I dried the last plate and stood it in the rack. Hung the towel square on the rail. The flat had gone quiet around me, the flat-out quiet that comes when the worst of a night is finished and the place is only a place again.
I stood there with my hands dry and nothing left to do with them, and looked down the dark hall at his door, open a few inches on a sleeping man, and I stayed looking at it a long while before I reached over and killed the light.
Chapter 7: Not Right Now
Ryan
I woke with my pulse in my teeth.
For a second that was all there was. The headache behind the eyes, a slow split down the middle of my skull. Then the light found the gap in the curtains and laid a blade across the ceiling, and I shut my eyes against it, and that was a mistake, because the dark behind my lids had pictures in it.
The kitchen table. The bottle gone. His hands turning mine over under the lamp.
My mouth on his.
I lay very still, like still would un-happen it.
The cut on my finger had a clean wrap. I didn’t remember that part going on. I remembered the rest. Rolling up off the bed into him. A hand on his jaw. Kissing him like the room was going down. The look on his face when I did it. Then nothing, the good clean nothing the drink gives you right before it hands you the bill.
A cupboard shut, soft, down the hall. Water in the tap. The clink of a spoon against a mug.
He was up. Twelve feet and a thin wall away, making coffee, and at some point I was going to have to walk out there and be a person in front of him.
There was a version of this where I didn’t. Where I gave it an hour, let him leave for the station, never put my face near it. There was a version where I came out loose and easy.God, what a state. I don’t remember a thing past the second drink.He’d let me have it. We’d file the whole night under weather and never speak of it again.
I’d done that my whole life. Smiled, shrugged, walked off light, never once caught holding anything heavier than a grin.
My head pounded. Under it, a week old and still going, my father’s voice on the phone, low and patient. Under that, the folder with my name on it, getting rebuilt across the city in a room I’d never see.
No door anywhere that didn’t have someone behind it I couldn’t beat.
I got up. The room tipped, then held. I pulled on yesterday’s shirt and didn’t bother with better. Then I went out to face him, because the only thing worse than facing him was another hour in a bed full of what I’d done.
The apartment smelled of coffee.
He’d cleaned the kitchen. Some time after I went down he’d done the dishes and wiped the table and bagged a week of takeout, and there was nothing left of the worst of it. Just a kitchen. And him in it.
Hawley stood by the counter with a mug. Dressed for work. He looked up when I came in and his face did nothing at all, which from him is its own kind of bracing.
I stopped in the mouth of the hall. “Morning.”
“There’s coffee.”
“Oh yeah.” My voice came out wrecked.
He poured one and set it on the counter between us. Made it the way I take it. I crossed and picked it up and held it and didn’t drink, because my stomach hadn’t decided yet whether it was going to be a stomach.
