Page 34 of Tempted By the Safety

Spencer gets his hand back. “Thanks. We should go.”

Dean puts an arm around my shoulders as we walk and turns toward Spencer. I know what’s coming a full sentence before it arrives, because I’ve heard this overture at every holiday since I was fifteen. “So listen. Listen. This is crazy timing, actually,because I’ve got a thing. A real thing. There’s a guy I know does resale, sneakers, deadstock, and he’s got a line on inventory, and it’s a hundred percent turnaround inside of six weeks, but the window’s tight, and it’s honestly not even a big number to somebody in your—”

“No,” Spencer says.

Dean keeps going for another half second on momentum. “It’s like four, maybe five, and I’d have it back to you before—”

“No.” He hasn’t raised his voice at all. What he’s done is move, a half step closer to me than he was, so that Dean’s arm around my shoulders now has company. “You’ve got a court date on the ninth. Ten thousand dollars of mine is sitting with the city until you show up to it. That’s the only business we’ve got.”

“Sure. Sure, no, absolutely, I hear you.” Dean laughs. “Just, you know. Opportunity knocks.”

“Ninth of next month,” Spencer says. “Nine a.m.”

Then he turns his head and looks at me. “Do you want to stay with them, or do you want to go home?”

I don’t answer right away, because I’m too busy noticing that in twelve hours of this day he is the first person to ask me what I want.

“Home,” I say. “But can we give them a ride first?”

“Of course.”

We drop Mom first, and then Dean, who lives in a building with a buzzer panel and a stairwell that smells like cat litter, and he hugs me for a long time in the street and tells me he loves me.

Then it’s just me and Spencer in the car, and the sun’s low off the storefront glass, and I’m so tired my hands don’t feel like mine.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “About all of it. My family’s a lot, I know that. I usually keep it in a box, and today the box just came apart, so. Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing for other people.”

“It’s efficient. I do it in bulk.”

He changes lanes. “Your mother’s a lot like mine was.”

I turn my head. He’s watching the road, one hand loose at the top of the wheel.

“Was?”

“Yeah. She passed away from cancer when I was eleven.”

“Spencer, I’m so sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.

“Thanks. It was a long time ago.”

That’s all he gives me, and I don’t reach for the rest. I know what it means when somebody stops at just a few words.

At a light he says, “Everybody calls you when there’s a problem. Your mother calls you, your brother calls you. Who do you call?”

The question goes under my ribs.

“Uber, mostly,” I say. “Occasionally a dentist.”

He doesn’t take it but he also doesn’t let me have it, exactly, because he keeps looking at me for another two seconds after the light turns green. And then he drives and doesn’t ask again.

I make it maybe six miles before I fall asleep with my head against the window and come up out of it when the tires change sound, and the gate’s swinging shut behind us in the side mirror. There’s a weight across my chest that turns out to be his jacket, tucked up under my chin.

I sit in a parked car and don’t want to get out. One afternoon of somebody else taking care of things, and now that I know what it feels like, I have no idea how I go back to not knowing.

But look at it from his side. He watched me get fired and hired me, put me in a guest suite, bought me clothes, canceled an afternoon of meetings to go pay my family’s bail. Those aren’t things you do for somebody you want. They’re what you do for a problem you’ve decided to solve, and once it’s solved you’re done.