Page 19 of Take the Fall
“I remember kissing you,” I said.
His face didn’t move. The room went quiet enough to hear the fridge.
“Last night. When you were getting me to bed. I remember it, and I’m not calling it the whiskey, because it wasn’t, and you’d know I was lying.” My pulse climbed. “You were trying to put a drunk man down for the night, and that drunk man grabbed you. You didn’t sign on for that. It wasn’t fair, what I did.”
Something crossed his face. Dark. Fast. His jaw set, and he opened his mouth.
“I’m not a scumbag,” I said, before he could land it. “I know it looks like one’s résumé. The first time I kissed you I bolted out my own front door and stayed gone a day. Last night I did it drunk and went down before you could get a word in. If I were you I’d have me filed under the worst kind of man there is. The kind who reaches for whatever’s warm and bolts before the billcomes.” I held his eyes. “I’ve acted like that man. I haven’t been him. I need you to have that, even if it’s the only part you keep.”
A door slammed two floors down and feet went off down the stairwell.
He took a breath. When he spoke it came out lower.
“You want to know what I thought,” he said. “That first night. When you ran.”
“Hawley.”
“I read people for a living. Eight years of it. It’s the one thing nobody at that station argues.” He turned the mug, not looking at it. “And I stood in this kitchen after you’d gone and thought, I read it wrong. A month of him across a desk, and I got the one thing wrong that mattered.” He set the mug down. “So don’t tell me what I did or didn’t sign on for. You’re not the only one in the room who’s spent a week not sleeping.”
That shut me up. All the way up.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“No. You ran before you could.”
“I’d have stayed.” It was out before I could weigh it. “If I’d had the first idea there was a chance you. I wouldn’t have gone out that door.”
“You didn’t know. That’s the whole of it.” His thumb moved on the handle. “You ran, and I let you go. Going after you would’ve just proved you right to run. So I stood here and let you teach yourself the wrong thing for a week.”
“That’s very calm of you.”
“It wasn’t. At the time.” He said it to the counter. “Don’t mistake quiet for calm. You’ve been doing that with me since the day they put us across a desk from each other.”
We stood in it. Neither of us had anywhere to put our hands.
“My head’s a mess,” I said, when I couldn’t take the quiet. “I’m not playing for sympathy. It’s the fact. I don’t know why I kissed you. Twice now. I’ve turned it over till I’m sick and there’s noclean answer in there.” A breath. “I want one. I want to look at it instead of running. But I’m looking through all of this. The file. My father. And I don’t trust a single thing I feel right now to be the real shape of it.”
He was very quiet.
“And there’s the half I keep skipping,” I said. A short laugh that went nowhere. “I asked it sideways before and you let it slide. So straight, then. Was there ever anything on your side, or am I opening a vein over one drunk man’s mess in a kitchen?”
He set his mug down.
Then he reached across the counter and put his hand over mine.
He didn’t say a word. His hand just covered the back of mine, warm, sure, and he looked at me while he did it, and his eyes had stopped doing nothing. They were doing everything. Steady and dark and fixed on me like I was the only thing in the room worth the looking.
My heart came up off the floor of me and slammed.
I didn’t move. I was afraid if I moved he’d take it back, and I’d learn it had been a mercy, a hand laid on a man who needed one. So I sat with his hand over mine and my pulse going like I’d run the last block, and I let it be true for exactly as long as he let it.
His thumb moved once across my knuckles. Just once.
A long while passed. Longer than a hand needs to make a point.
Then he took it back.
“I don’t know either,” he said. Quiet. Level. “If you want the honest answer, that’s it. I don’t have this filed any cleaner than you do.” He picked the mug back up, like the hand had never happened, except we both knew it had. “And you’re right about the timing. You’ve got Internal Affairs on one side of you and your family on the other, and you can barely sit up straight.Maybe we leave it. Until the ground stops moving. Then we look, if there’s still something to look at.”
