Page 20 of Take the Fall
It was the reasonable thing. The decent thing. He was handing me the exact room I’d come out to ask for.
My heart dropped through the floor.
“And in the meantime,” I said. “We what. Share a sink and a wall and pretend nothing happened last night.”
“We do what we’ve been doing.”
“What we’ve been doing is killing me.”
“I know.” He said it plainly, no softer for being true. “We’re partners, and we live in four rooms, and one of us is in trouble he can’t talk about. So we keep the coffee going, and we get you through the week, and we don’t make a wreck we have to work next to.” He held my eyes. “I can do that if you can. It’s not what I’d pick. It’s what’s in front of us.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It won’t be simple. I didn’t say simple. I said it’s what’s in front of us, and we’re going to have to live in it either way.”
I’d braced all morning to be the one holding the line. To be the one sayingnot now, not like this.And here he was saying it for me, gentle, and all I wanted was to take it back. Take his hand back. Tell him I was sick of waiting, that the ground was never going to stop moving and I was tired of standing on it by myself.
“Don’t,” I started. “I.”
“Don’t what.”
The line was right there.Don’t wait. I don’t want to wait.It sat behind my teeth and I couldn’t get it past them, because every reason I’d just listed to keep him clear of all this was still true, and saying it would only drag him in.
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re right. Sensible.”
“Sensible.” Something dry under it. There and gone.
His phone went off in his jacket.
He pulled it out, looked, and the whole register of him changed. The man at the counter folded away and the cop came up in his place.
“Hawley.” A beat. His eyes cut to the middle distance. “When. Right, I’m up.” Another beat. “Twenty minutes.”
He hung up. Already moving. Mug to the sink, jacket squared on his shoulders.
“Work,” he said. “I have to go.”
“Then go.”
He stopped at the door. Looked back, not all the way around.
“Eat the rest of that toast,” he said. “And Murphy still wants you in his office. End of the week. Whatever else is on fire, you walk in there on your feet. Don’t let any of this cost you that.”
Then the door, and the latch finding home, and the bad stair on the landing giving under his weight. Gone.
I sat alone in the kitchen with two mugs and a headache and the print of his hand still on the back of mine.
His coffee sat where he’d left it, half gone. I don’t know why I picked it up. I just did. Turned it in my hands. The rim was still faintly warm on one side, the side he’d drunk from, and I put my thumb there without deciding to, on the curve of china his mouth had touched a minute ago, and held it there like a man who’d lost the run of himself entirely.
I didn’t have a name for any of it. Thirty-one years able to file anyone in under a second, and I sat in my own kitchen with another man’s coffee cup against my thumb and couldn’t have told you the first thing about what I felt, or wanted, or why my chest had caved when he said the smart and gentle thing instead of the other one.
He’d touched my hand. He didn’t know either. He wanted to wait.
All three true. None of them lying down together.
I set the cup down. Careful, like it might go off.
I washed both mugs and stood them in the rack. It was the one thing in the room I could do start to finish without getting it wrong, and I needed one of those this morning.
