Page 71 of Take the Fall
“So no. He won’t change.” There was no doubt in it anywhere, and that was somehow the saddest part. “He has never once changed. He’ll spend the rest of his life certain I’ll come crawling back, because in his whole life nobody has ever walked away from him and meant it. He’ll die waiting.” A small breath. “I don’t need his name, Luke. I don’t need his money. I’ve got a job. I had a job. I’ll have it again in a few weeks when the paperwork clears, thanks to you.” His jaw worked. “The only part that costs me is my mother. She’s going to hear a version of this from him first, and it’ll be the wrong version, and she’ll be hurt. But I’ll go to her. Not at the house. Somewhere he isn’t. And I’ll make her understand it.”
He stopped. He’d been building to something and I could feel it and I made myself stay quiet and let him get there.
“I had to burn it down to start over,” he said. “Clean. With nothing of his in it. So that whatever I build next is mine, and he can’t put a hand through the wall of it and rearrange the furniture.” His eyes came up to mine, and the certainty cracked just enough to let the fear show under it, the real thing, the thing he’d been carrying. “And I wanted you in what I build next. That’s the part I couldn’t say on the sidewalk. I pushed you away because I had to make myself safe to keep before I asked you to keep me. I didn’t do it to leave you. I did it so there’d be something left worth staying with.”
I couldn’t speak for a second.
“You should have told me,” I managed. “Any of it. I’d have stood next to you.”
“I know you would. That’s exactly why I couldn’t let you.” He turned my hand over in his, looked at it instead of me. “You’d have come into that office with me. You’d have put yourself between me and him. And he’d have seen, the second he looked at us, exactly what you are to me, and then he’d have had it, the one lever I couldn’t let him have.” He looked up. “He still doesn’t know. About us. He sat there and told me he’d had a cop beaten and he had no idea he was describing the man I’m in love with. I had to sit there and hold my face while he said it. So no. I wasn’t letting you in that room. Not that one.”
I’d been watching his mouth while he talked, the way you watch the person you’ve missed, and I saw it now, the thing I’d taken for the cold when he walked in. A faint split healing at the corner of his lip.
“He hit you.” Not a question.
His hand went up to it like he’d forgotten it was there. “Once. At the end. When he understood the paper was real and there was nothing left he could say that would land.”
He said it like it was nothing. It was not nothing. A useless fury turned over in me, but too late to be any good to him.
“I’ll kill him,” I said, and meant it for exactly as long as it took to say.
“You’ll do no such thing. He’s not worth your pension.” His thumb moved over my knuckles. “It’s over, Luke. That’s the whole point of all of it. It’s over.”
The cold thing in my chest had turned into something else entirely while he talked. I pulled him back in against me, careful of nothing now, both arms, my mouth in his hair.
“You impossible man,” I said into it. “You went and did the most dangerous thing in the whole case and you did it where I couldn’t watch your back.”
“You did the rest of it where I couldn’t watch yours. We’re even.” His voice was muffled in my shoulder. Then, lighter, the deflection coming back up now that the worst of it was out: “There is one practical consequence.”
“What?”
He pulled back. The grin was rebuilding, shaky, brave. “I turned down a genuinely obscene amount of money. Generational money. The kind that buys islands.” He spread his hands. “So it turns out I’m going to need a roommate. Cabbagetown. Third floor, no elevator, one bad stair. Rent’s reasonable. The current tenant’s very handsome but emotionally constipated.”
“Is he?”
“Famously. Hopeless. Took him a kitchen floor and a shower and a beating to say three words.” He was close now, his hand on my jaw, the joke and the fear and the love all running together in his face the way they only ever did with him. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in the room?”
I kissed him.
I kissed him the way I’d wanted to for six days and hadn’t been able to, slow this time, no audience, no danger left in the room, just the lamp and the warmth and the fact of him here and staying. He went soft against me and then not soft, his hand sliding up into my hair, and I felt the whole thing change pitch the way it does, the want coming up under the relief.
“That’s a yes,” I said against his mouth.
“I love you,” he said, dropping it plain, the way he does now, the way he taught me to. “Roommate. Partner. Whatever the word is. I love you. I’m not doing the rest of my life anywhere you aren’t.”
“Then stop talking,” I said.
He laughed, low, and let me pull him up off the couch.
I got him down the hall with my mouth on his and my hands already working his shirt, and the old careful man in me, the one who measures everything, was nowhere in the room. I’d spent six days thinking I’d lost this. I wasn’t going to be careful with getting it back.
In the bedroom he tried to take over, his hands going to my belt, and I caught his wrists.
“No,” I said. “Let me. You did the dangerous thing alone. Let me have this part.”
Something in his face went still and open at that, the way it had in the shower the night he said it first. He let his hands drop and let me have him.
I undressed him slow. The shirt off his shoulders, my mouth following my hands down the warm line of his chest, his stomach, the soft skin below his navel where his breath was already going short. When I got his belt loose and dragged his jeans and underwear down and off, he lifted his hips to help, and then he was bare under the lamp, and I had to stop a second and just look at him.
