Page 69 of Take the Fall
Hard. Long. Not careful. My ribs ached where his chest pressed mine and I didn’t care, I pulled him in harder, one handfisted in his shirt and the other at the back of his skull, and he made a sound against my mouth and his hands came up and grabbed me back like he’d been holding still for days waiting to be allowed to.
I kissed him until I had to breathe. Then I kept my forehead against his and breathed and didn’t let go.
“Hi,” he said, when I finally pulled back an inch. A little wrecked. He was almost smiling. “I had a whole speech.”
“I don’t want the speech.”
“It was a good speech. I worked on it.”
“Ryan.”
“There was a callback in it. To the night you carried me up these stairs.” He was doing the thing, the grin coming up to cover the wet in his eyes. “Really tight structure. You’d have wept.”
“I’m not joking right now.” My voice came out rougher than I meant it. I still had a fist in his shirt. I couldn’t make myself open it. “I have not been able to find you for six days. You don’t get to walk this off with a bit. Sit down. Sit down and talk to me like a person.”
The grin went. Something honest came up under it.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
I sat down and pulled him down with me, close, my arm along the back of the couch and around him, because I’d just spent six days with my arms empty and I wasn’t ready to test whether he’d stay if I stopped holding on. He let me. He turned into my side. I felt some of the brace go out of him.
“It’s done,” I said. “That’s the first thing. The case. This morning. It’s over.”
He went still against me.
“Tell me.”
“We took them. Voss, Marsh, the 52 end, the records.” I watched him take in the size of it. Then the other half, becausehe’d want it straight. “Not Whitfield, though. Nothing would stick to him. He walks. Same as your father.” I felt him absorb that without surprise, the way you take news you’d already braced for. “But your name’s coming out of all of it, Ryan. The IA file. The leak. The whole thing they hung on you. It’s coming apart. You’re going to be clean.”
He was quiet. I’d expected something. Relief, or the joke, or the breath people let out when a thing they’ve carried for months sets down. I got silence, and then a small sound that was almost a laugh.
“I know,” he said.
“You” I pulled back to see his face. “You know.”
“I was there.” The grin came back, but soft this time, real underneath. “This morning. I saw you walk Voss in.”
The shape by the far wall. The thing I’d told myself I’d invented.
“That was you?”
“Murphy let me come in the back. Strict orders, stand at the wall, touch nothing, say nothing, be gone before booking. He said, and I’m quoting, ‘You’ve earned a look and nothing else, Carlson, don’t make me regret it.’” His voice cracked on the next part and he let it. “I watched you bring him in, Luke. The guy who took my whole life and set fire to it. I watched you put your hand on his arm and walk him past my old desk like he was nothing. Like he was just a Tuesday.”
“You were there.” I couldn’t get past it. “I looked right at you. I thought I’d lost my mind.”
“You looked right through me. Very rude.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, fast, like he could get away with it. “He looked smaller. Did you notice that? Voss? I built him up as invincible in my head all this time, this thing that beat me, and you walked him in and he was just a tired man in a bad suit who’d run out of moves.”
“He cried at the desk,” I said.
Ryan’s head came up. “He did not.”
“No, he didn’t. But I hoped he would so you would feel better about it.”
Ryan laughed. It tore a little on the way out, half a sob in it, but it was a laugh.
“Thanks,” he said fiercely. “Anyways, I hope he sees the light, although I don’t think he ever will.”
He let his head drop onto my shoulder, and for a moment we just sat in it, the lamp and the warm flat and the thing finally finished, and I let myself believe, for that moment, that this was the whole of the conversation. That he’d come home because it was over and there was nothing else.
