Page 8 of Take the Fall
That got a real laugh out of me. The first in what felt like a week. It hurt my head. I didn’t care.
We sat with it a minute, the easy quiet of two men who’ve eaten together. He stacked the plates but didn’t get up to wash them, which I understood was a courtesy too, a way of not turning his back on me, of staying in the room. He turned his coffee mug a slow quarter-turn on the table, around and around, the way a man does with his hands when he’s deciding whether to say a thing.
He didn’t say it. Whatever it was. He let it go around with the mug and stay unsaid, and I was grateful, because I had a feeling I knew the shape of it and I wasn’t equipped this morning to hear a kid tell me what was plain on his face.
I finished the plate. Drank the second glass of water he’d refilled without my asking. The painkillers had taken the worst edge off, enough that I could see the day standing in front ofme. And the day had a shape I’d been avoiding the whole time I pretended to study his bookshelf.
I had to go back.
Not here. Here was kind and warm and not mine, and a man can’t live on another man’s good couch hiding from a third man’s silence. There was a desk waiting for me. An inbox. An institution deciding in rooms I wasn’t in whether I got to keep being the only thing I knew how to be. I could keep letting it get decided without me, the way I’d let everything get decided lately, or I could go and put myself back in front of it. I decided on the second one. It was the first thing I’d actually chosen in longer than I wanted to count, and it took something out of me. And there was a door with my keys on the counter behind it, set down by a hand whose warmth I could still feel if I let myself. Which I did not. Which I would not, this morning of all mornings.
I stood. The room held steady. Progress.
“I should let you have your day.”
“You don’t have to bolt.” He stood too, fast, like he might slow me down if I went for the door. “You can sit. There’s more coffee. There’s a whole second egg in the future if you want it.”
“I’ve imposed enough on the egg.” I found my jacket on the back of the chair where he’d hung it and got into it the right way this time. Both arms on the first try. I counted it a victory and a sign. “If I stay any longer you’ll find out I’m not actually that interesting, and then where will we be.”
He walked me the four steps to the door, because it was that kind of apartment and he was that kind of host. I sat on the little bench in his entryway, because the floor and I weren’t on speaking terms yet, and worked my shoes on. The left one took two tries. The bench undid me a little. Who puts a bench by their door, on a constable’s pay, except a man who’s decided his quiet life is worth the small kindnesses.
I got the second shoe on and sat a moment longer than the shoe required. Elbows on my knees. Looking at the clean floor of a home that worked.
That was the thing about the place. It worked. A man lived here, alone, and it held him, and I’d never once managed that in any of the rooms with my name on them. The one that had started to feel like anything was the apartment with my keys on the counter, and only because of who slept on the other side of the wall. Which was the exact reason I couldn’t walk into it this morning.
Out that door was the street. The streetcar that came in threes. The river to cross back over. The walk after it. And at the end of the walk, the door I’d walked out of and the man I’d walked out on, who’d be at work by now, who I’d have to face tonight in a kitchen the size of a confession. I’d run out of that apartment less than a day ago like the place was on fire. Now the whole morning had narrowed to the animal fact that I had to walk back into it. Sleep down the wall from him. Do it again the night after. Because that was the deal I’d signed and the law of the small life I had left.
And under all of it, the thing I wouldn’t look at straight. That I didn’t dread going back the way you dread a place. I dreaded it the way you dread a person. Dreaded the door because of who’d be behind it tonight, and the dread had a thread of something else braided through it that I refused, this hungover, in this kind man’s borrowed entryway, to name. I’d spent the night running from a feeling and woken up in a stranger’s home and the feeling had simply waited for me, patient, the way it had been waiting since a hand settled at the back of my neck and I forgot, for one second, every rule I’d ever made about myself.
Reid was still standing over me. Waiting. Not crowding. Just there.
“You good?” he said. No crush in it now. Just a young man watching an older one find the will to stand up.
“Define good,” I said, and stood, and reached for the door.
Chapter 4: I Don’t Walk Out
Luke
Last night he kissed me on the kitchen floor. I kissed him back. Then he ran. And I let him.
I’d told this one, weeks back, that I didn’t walk out on people. Said it to his face in a precinct bathroom and meant it like a vow. Then he put his mouth on mine and bolted, and I stayed down in the broken glass and listened to him go and didn’t follow. So either the thing I’d said about myself was a lie, or letting him run was the only way left to keep it true. I’d had all night to work out which. I still didn’t have it.
I got to the station before the shift change, the way I had every day for a month. Except this morning I’d had nowhere to leave from.
The apartment was empty when I came in last night. Empty again when I gave up on sleep and put my feet on the cold floor at five. I’d known it would be. A man can tell the size of the quiet in a place by the time he’s through the door. Ours had been the full size. The kind with nobody breathing behind the otherwall. His bed not slept in. His shoes gone from the mat. The mess on the floor I’d cleaned up myself the night before, on my knees with a dustpan, picking his blood out of the grout with the broken glass.
I’d gone to the gym after. Nothing else to do with my hands. Parliament Boxing, where I went most nights to put the day somewhere it couldn’t follow me home. Wrapped up and worked the heavy bag past the hour the owner usually killed the lights. He looked at my face once and left them on and went in the back. I hit the bag until my shoulders gave out. The thing in my chest hadn’t moved an inch.
You can’t punch your way clear of a quiet apartment. I knew that going in. I went anyway. The alternative was sitting in the rooms where it happened, listening for a man who wasn’t coming back to the other side of the wall.
So I came to work. There was nowhere else the day went.
The bullpen at quarter to seven was half-lit and nearly empty. Overnight crew packing it in. Morning crew not yet in to fill the chairs with noise. The fluorescents did their sick buzz. The vending machine hummed its one note. I crossed to my desk and the smell came up to meet me. Old coffee and paper and the floor cleaner that never quite covered either.
Our desks were pushed together. Somebody’s idea of partnership, two surfaces shoved face to face so the men behind them had to look at each other all day. Mine was clear. His was a disaster, the way it always was. A slope of folders and sticky notes and a paper cup gone green at the bottom. I hadn’t touched it. A month of partnership and I hadn’t moved one page of his mess. I didn’t move it now. The not-moving of it sat in my chest like something with edges.
I sat. Put my hands flat on the desk. Tried to find the start of a normal day in them.
