Page 2 of Take the Fall
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” I said.
He squinted. Half-sure. Pat slid his drink across before he could land on it. “On the house, Tommy. Go watch your game.” Said it light, but it moved the man, and he went, glancing back once, the recognition already coming apart in the drink and the bad light.
Pat didn’t look at me. Wiped the bar where the man had stood. “He’s three sheets. Won’t remember his own name tomorrow, never mind yours.” A beat. “Which I don’t know, for the record. And don’t want to.”
“Thanks.”
“Mm.”
I drank. My hand wasn’t quite steady on the glass. So much for nowhere. Even here, even three streets from anywhere I belonged, the face found its way to the surface and gave me up.
The voicemail icon came up and stayed. I didn’t need to play it.Ryan, it’s your uncle’s assistant. He’d like a word at your convenience.The convenience would not be mine. It never was.
I pushed the glass forward. Pat read it and poured.
The whiskey had got behind my eyes by now, into the place where the thinking happened. The thinking had gone slow and round and kept washing up in the same spot. I gave up steering it. It went to a kitchen floor and stayed there.
His hand at the back of my neck. That was the part I couldn’t get past. The kiss was in there too, all of it, but it was the hand my mind kept circling. The weight. The warmth. The way it stayed, fingers in my hair, when I’d have bet the last thing I owned that a man like Luke didn’t have that in him.
A month ago he’d looked at me across the Inspector’s office like something tracked in on a shoe. The Bear, the station called him. Six foot of silence who ate alone and spoke in single words and had run two partners out of the division before they handed him me. They’d locked us in a behavioral program and a shared apartment because we were each one mistake from being put out of the police for good. For the first weeks I’d counted the days until I could be quit of him.
Then somewhere I hadn’t been watching, he stopped being the thing I was counting down from. He bandaged me up after a fall took me off a roof. He took a punch meant for me and didn’t make a thing of it. Tonight he’d knelt in the broken glass and held me while I came apart and saidyou don’t have to pretend with me, like he’d seen straight through the version of myself I’d spent my whole life building.
I’d kissed people before. That was what I kept setting this next to, so it would come out the same size as the rest. Women. A long easy parade I’d charmed and walked away from. A couple of men too, years back, drunk, in the dark, nothing I’d let mean a thing by morning. I knew the shape of all of it. I knew which drawer it went in.
This one wouldn’t go in the drawer. I’d been working at it for hours and it kept sliding back out. He hadn’t pulled away. I had. And the part of me that had done the pulling was getting harder to hear over the part of me still down on that floor with his hand in my hair, not wanting to be anywhere else.
I tried to put it somewhere. I was good at that. A lifetime of putting things somewhere, smiling, moving on, never once getting caught holding anything heavier than a grin. I’d liked women easily my whole life. No complications. I knew what I was the way you know your own name. And here was a thing that wouldn’t file, wouldn’t fit, wouldn’t stop, and it scared me worse than the folder on the table back home, worse than the call I hadn’t answered.
So I told myself the easy version. I was benched and frightened and grabbing the nearest solid thing in the room. That was all. A man whose life is going out from under him reaches for whatever’s closest and calls it more than it is. Once the case cleared, this would settle into what it had always been. A partnership. A shared sink. A wall between two rooms.
I almost believed it. For a sentence at a time I managed it.
I shut my eyes against the corner TV. Opened them. The kitchen was still there, brighter than the room.
The phone rang again. I made myself look.
Inspector Murphy. My dear boss. The closest thing to a believer I had left. I watched his name ring through and didn’t pick up. Even if the mess wasn’t his fault, I felt betrayed somehow.
He wouldn’t leave a message. He treated voicemail like an insult, and a missed call from the Inspector said more than a message could have anyway. He’d want me in the chair across his desk by morning, telling me in that flat way of his that sometimes you give up ground to win the war. The trouble with morning was the walk back, and the door at the end of it, and the man behind the door I’d spent the whole evening trying to drink down to a size I could carry. I’d been at it for hours and the size hadn’t changed. The whiskey had only turned the volume down, the way you turn down a radio you can still hear through the wall.
The ringing stopped. The screen went dark. The dark screen said it louder than any banner.
Two days ago he’d slid the reassignment folder across his desk and asked, careful, whether there was anyone I wanted to phone. I’d told him no. He’d let that sit, then put a hand on my shoulder going out the door. Brief. The weight landing once and lifting. He didn’t do that. He’d done it for me. And I’d answered it tonight by watching his name light up and letting it die.
I should have called him back. I knew that the way you know a thing and don’t do it.
Pat set a basket of pretzels in front of me. “Eat something.”
I ate one. Salt and nothing. I ate a second because the first hadn’t tasted like anything and some animal part of me kept expecting the next one to. It didn’t. I left the rest.
The phone buzzed again. I let it go two rings while I worked out I was going to answer this one. Then I turned it over and understood why.
REID. Constable Jordan Reid, our dear rookie.
I picked up.
“Carlson.”
