Page 43 of Take the Fall
Face to face. He turned me into him and got both arms around me and held on. My face went into his shoulder. The cold of outside was still on his coat. I got two fists in the back of it and I held on and I sobbed into him like something coming apart in his hands.
He didn’t shush me. He didn’t tell me it was okay. It wasn’t, and he wasn’t a liar. He stood there in the middle of the kitchen and took all of it. One hand flat between my shoulders. One at the back of my head. His jaw against my temple. Still.
I cried until it stopped on its own. Until there wasn’t any more.
He felt it go. Of course he did. He felt everything in a room. When the worst of it passed he eased, just a little, the length of him going soft against me. No clock on it. No hurry.
“I’ve got you,” he said. Into my hair. Just that.
Then, quieter, the thing that went through me like current:
“Ryan.”
Not Carlson. Not once had he called me anything but Carlson. He said my name. The plain one underneath. Low and even and sure, no weight on it except all of it, and it landed in the middle of my chest like a hand laid flat.
I held on tighter. I couldn’t have said a word if my life hung on it.
He held on.
When I came back to myself we were still standing in the middle of the kitchen. The dumplings were stone cold in the bags and neither of us cared.
I straightened. I dragged the heels of my hands down my face, and it came away wet, and I left it be.
“Sorry,” I said. The reflex.
“Don’t.” Flat. Final. “Not for that. Not to me.”
I looked at him. His eyes were wet too. He didn’t hide it and he didn’t make anything of it.
I looked at him in the small light. My face was a wreck and my hands weren’t steady and I’d just cried in front of him until there was nothing left, and I wasn’t afraid.
That was the new thing. After all of it.
I wasn’t afraid.
Two floors down a door banged and somebody told the rain off like it could hear them, and the building laughed, and the kettle two doors over started its slow climb to a boil.
I allowed my mind to calm down in the warm kitchen and let him stand close.
Chapter 13: Names That Aren’t Names
Luke
Ryan’s jacket was still on the back of his chair.
He’d taken the other one, the darker coat, grabbed from the hook on the way out while Reid was already at the door. They’d gone at half nine. Murphy had assigned the call straight-faced, which was how Murphy assigned anything he privately found funny. Easy file. Short leash again. Even if he wanted to, Ryan had to be on his best behavior.
Ryan hadn’t argued. I’d been watching that all week. The partial duty had stopped scraping against him. He’d found his footing somewhere.
I knew when.
I sat down, looked at the jacket, and pulled the first file toward me.
Last night was sitting in the room. Not like a memory. Like something still drying. Ryan in my arms, his voice stripped down, nothing performed in it. He’d told me about reading every dinner table before he could ride a bike. About being looked atlike a draft of something that needed finishing. About the charm he’d built one room at a time in his father’s house. Not because he wanted to. Because it was the only part of him they couldn’t take off him.
It was the first room in my life I wasn’t performing in,he’d said. About a squad room. At twenty-three.And they took it.
Then, his hands going still:My father is Robert Branford. Branford Industries. The name’s on three towers downtown. You’ve walked past all of them.
