Page 48 of Take the Fall
I felt good. Not a complicated good. The simple kind, the kind that ambushes you when you’ve been running on something harder for weeks. Off the clock. Nothing waiting. Jordan beside me wrecking a plate of wings like it was the best thing that had happened to him all week.
It was enough.
Then he went quiet. Turned his glass on the coaster. Once, then again, setting it back in the same wet ring.
I knew that one. I’d watched a hundred people do it across a hundred tables. The wind-up before someone hands you the thing they came to say.
I let him get there.
He put the glass down and turned on the stool to face me. His jaw had a set to it I hadn’t seen on him before.
“Okay. I’m going to say a thing.” He stopped. “And it’s going to come out wrong. I practiced it in the car on the way over and it came out wrong there too, so. Manage your expectations.”
“Reid.”
“Just let me, or I’ll lose it.” He flattened both palms on the bar. Pulled a breath like a man about to go under. The flush started up the side of his neck, the one he hated. “I like you more than just a colleague or a friend.”
I put my pint down.
“And I know how it sounds,” he said, fast, before I could get a word in. “A rookie, mooning over the detective. I know. I’ve heard it in my own head, in your voice, and it’s mortifying. I do that to myself most nights, you’ll be glad to hear.”
“You don’t have to sell it.”
“I’m not selling. I’m confessing. There’s a difference, I looked it up.” He pressed on before he could lose the thread. “It’s just. You’re such a good person. A good heart.” He was talking to the bar now, not to me, the words getting out ahead of him. “And then you kept doing things like that. You know the night cleaner’s name. I don’t think one other person in that building knows the night cleaner’s name. You fixed my collar before Chen’s inspection and made it annoying on purpose so I wouldn’t have to thank you. You laughed at my parking-enforcement joke. It was a terrible joke. You laughed because I’d had a rotten morning and you’d noticed.”
He ran out of air. Looked, for a second, like he wanted the floor to open under his stool.
“I had a list,” he said. “In my head. I just said the list out loud. In a bar. Great.”
I sat there with my mouth open and nothing coming out of it, which for me is roughly a medical event.
Luke had told me. Weeks back. Dry, not looking up from his screen.The kid’s got a thing for you.I’d waved it off. Said he was reading shadows, that Reid looked at everyone like that, that he was a puppy with a badge. Luke had let it drop the way he drops things, which is to say he’d been right and hadn’t bothered to make me say so.
He’d been right.
“Jordan,” I said. Then nothing. I deal in words for a living. I had none of them lined up. “Okay. Hang on. First of all.”
Smooth. Very smooth.
And then Luke was just there. Behind my eyes, no asking. Not a thought I reached for. He arrived on his own.
Luke at the next desk with his sleeves shoved up. His forearms. The back of his neck where the hair went soft, the part of him I kept catching myself watching and pretending I wasn’t. His hands flat on the wood when he read a thing twice. The way the room never quite started until he was in it.
His mouth around my name. Once. In a dark kitchen, low, like it got out before he could stop it. I’d been carrying the sound of it ever since.
That was the whole of it. No speech. No list. Luke had never once sat in front of me and said a sentence like the one Jordan just said.
And it was more than this. More than anything anyone had ever declared at me across a table. Whatever ran between me and Luke didn’t need the words. It was in the coat on the chair. The keys he took out of my shaking hand. The glass of water he set down beside the whiskey and never mentioned. A hundred small things with no words on them, and I’d take any one of them over the finest speech anybody ever made me.
My chest pulled tight.
Oh.
There it was. The thing I’d kept just off to the side of my own eye for weeks, square in front of me now, with his name on it. And what I wanted, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time, was to be wherever he was. Him at the stove. Him reaching past me for a mug. That was the whole of the want, and it was enormous.
I’d called it other things for weeks. Kept clear of it on purpose. Because some part of me had known that if I ever looked at it straight, it would look exactly like this.
It did.
