Page 15 of Take the Fall
“Are you, though.” He squinted at me like the question had stakes. “Nobody’s here at two in the morning. Two in the morning is when the true things come out, because they think nobody’s awake to hold them to it.” The smile came back, smaller, the sell gone out of it. “You’re a very good hallucination. The others never bandage anything. Cheap of them.”
“I’m not a hallucination, Carlson.”
“That’s the kind of thing a hallucination says to keep its job.”
On any other night it would have been funny. Part of me wanted to hand him the laugh he was angling for. I kept it, because the laugh would tip him back into the man who performs, and the man who performs had finally, terribly, clocked out.
Then his face did the thing it never did in daylight. The tears came up and stood in his eyes without falling, and he looked at me through them like a man at a window watching a season he couldn’t get out into.
“I broke it,” he said. “The one decent thing. You.”
“You didn’t break anything.”
“I kissed you.” A confession to a priest he’d decided wasn’t real. “On the floor, in the glass. You were kind to me and I put my mouth on you and then I bolted out my own front door like the place was alight, and stayed gone a day. And you must have thought. God. You must have thought I was having a laugh at you. The pretty one slumming it, making a fool of the big quiet man and running before you could call it. It wasn’t that. That’swhat I can’t get out from under. I don’t know what it was. I’ve no drawer for it, I’ve no read on it, I’ve no read on you, and it is eating me where I live.”
I sat there and let him be wrong in front of me, because the true thing, that I’d lain awake on the far side of that wall every one of those five nights wanting exactly the thing he was apologizing for, was not a thing you hand a man this far gone. He’d drop it before morning, or worse, keep a corner of it and build the rest crooked.
“You read me wrong,” I said. It was as much as I’d let out the door.
“Maybe you should hate me.” He wasn’t hearing me now. He was down inside it. “It’d be cleaner. You’d keep your distance and distance is the only safe place to stand near me. They get to everyone in the end. My father gets to everyone. And you’re the one person who never wanted a thing off me, so you’re exactly the one he’d. You should hate me. Do us both the favor.” A wet sound aiming for a laugh and missing. “I’m a jinx. Everyone who trusts me ends up holding the bill. Ask Daniel. Ask the last poor soul who thought I was worth the trouble.”
There’s no page in any manual for a man you’d put your hand to the nape of telling you to hate him for your own safety. I was shaken and I wasn’t going to let it show. I couldn’t argue him level, because level was three drinks back up the road. I couldn’t hand him the one true thing that might have answered him, and I couldn’t tell him the work I came home wrecked from was his, was for him, the one card in my hand I had to keep face down. So I held all of it and gave him none of it, and learned more about the man behind the smile in twenty minutes at that table than six weeks of watching had taught me.
“Up,” I said. “You’re done. Bed.”
“I’m fine here.”
“You’ll wake folded into a chair with a neck you’ll feel Friday. Come on.”
He let me get an arm under him, which told me everything, and we went down the short hall slow with his weight half on me, his breath warm and sharp at my jaw, and I kept my eyes on the door and off the no-distance between us.
I sat him on the edge of the bed and crouched for his shoes.
“It won’t let me be,” he said, over me, to the dark. “The kiss. I close my eyes and it’s your hand on my neck, every time, and I get so angry I could put a fist through something. Why can’t I just know. Everyone else gets to know what they feel. I read strangers for rent and I can’t read the one thing in my own chest.” Both hands dragged down his face. “I hate that I don’t hate it. There. The truth nobody ordered. I don’t hate it and I can’t forgive myself for that.”
I stayed crouched with his shoe in my hand and made myself breathe slow. Drunk and sideways, he’d just handed me the thing I’d given up on getting from him sober. That he didn’t hate it. It should have landed clean and good. It only told me he was out in the same deep water I was, and worse equipped for it, and reaching for me was the kind of thing a man does when he can’t tell up from down anymore.
“Lie back,” I said, freeing the second shoe. “We’ll go looking for your head tomorrow.”
He didn’t lie back.
I came up to ease him down by the shoulder and he rose into me instead, his good hand catching my jaw, clumsy and sure at the same time, and he kissed me.
It was nothing like the floor. The floor had been falling. This was reaching, drunk and graceless and certain, his mouth open on mine and a low sound coming up out of his chest, and something in me that had been banked down for weeks took light all at once. The heat of him. Two days of stubble against mymouth. His fingers spread along my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my lips, and for one bad second the whole tired length of me leaned in and my hands started up off his shoulders to take a hold I hadn’t been given.
Ryan.Just the name, no rank on it, no surname, the one I’d been keeping behind my teeth for weeks, and it picked the worst possible second to come loose.
One second. I gave it one I had no right to.
Then I had his shoulders and I held him off, gentle, because there is no version of a man kissing someone this drunk that I could carry into the morning, and because wanting it that badly was the exact reason I couldn’t have it. Both hands flat, my pulse going like I’d taken the stairs three at a time. The wanting didn’t care that he was three sheets to the wind. It stood up in me and roared and reached, and the rest of me did the only decent thing on the table, which was none of it. I have never worked so hard in my life to keep my hands exactly where they already were.
He blinked at me, the heat already sliding into fog, his eyes losing their hold on mine.
“Luke,” he said. Soft. Surprised by it, like the name had got out on its own.
And then he went. The drink took him mid-breath, the way it does, his weight tipping into me, and I caught him against my chest and lowered him to the pillow and he was under before his head had landed. Gone. Mouth slack, the frown still set between his brows, the bandaged hand curled in against his own chest.
I stood over him, my heart still slamming.
