Page 62 of Handful

I shut up.

“How you holding up?” he said. Not the club. Me. The quiet question, the one nobody else had asked straight out because everybody was waiting to see if I’d blow it.

“I’m—” I started the automatic answer and didn’t bother finishing it. “Club’s had me flat out. Venom Virtues all day, paperwork half the night. I’m not complaining — it’s what’s keeping my cut on my back. The days I can fill. It’s the nights. I put the lights out and she’s just there. Every time I close my eyes.”

He nodded, like that was a real answer. “Bea says the nights are where it lives. You’re doing the work. I see it.” He started the engine. “Repay the slot by being worth the position. Not by apologizing for something you have no business apologizing for.”

Then he rode out.

❧

I almost didn’t go to Sunday dinner. I hadn’t been in a couple of weeks — missing it for the same reason I’d been missing formation. I didn’t much feel like it; the last time I was there, Austen was with me. But I couldn’t skip another week without it getting noticed.

The clubhouse on a Sunday is the best it gets — loud, full, kids everywhere, Lilac’s cooking, Betty folding napkins into shapes nobody asked for. First thing I did, before I’d even sat down, was clock the two empty chairs.

Austen’s, two down on the long side, where she’d sat the first night I brought her — the night they moved family dinner to a Sunday so she could come. And Lindsay’s, down the far end. Danny’s mom. She used to come every week; she comes less now. Nobody pushes her. You don’t push a thing like that.

I sat down across from Glitch and Wren.

It was the first I’d seen of Wren since she’d come down and walked the floor at the start of the refit. That had been an experience.

I caught myself wondering if she even knew Glitch had told the whole table. Glitch caught me looking. He didn’t say anything — just a small nod, the kind that says I know what’s in your head, and it’s fine.

Her phone buzzed face-up by her plate. She glanced down, and something crossed her face. A small, private smile, there and gone.

Colt glanced at it too. “The hell’s that?” He sounded the letters off her screen, slow, frowning, the way you read a word in another language. “S-T-F-U-A-T-T-D-L-A-G-G. What’s that stand for?”

He was grinning when he asked it. Setting up to rib Glitch, I figured — catch the two quietest people in the club passing notes like a couple of teenagers.

“Shut the fuck up and take the dick like a good girl,” Wren practically whispered after glancing around to check where the kids were.

For a second nobody at the table moved. You could watch the same thought land on every one of them, one face at a time — little Wren. Shy little Wren had just said that. Betty set her fork down. Lilac’s napkin went to her face to hide her laughter. Indira shut her eyes.

And then every man at the table started laughing.

Glitch never so much as colored. He looked at Colt with something close to sympathy, kissed the top of Wren’s head, and went back to his plate. “You went looking,” he said. “That’s on you.”

I was laughing harder than anybody, and it took me a second to place why. The whiteboard. Weeks back I’d stood in Glitch’s ops room squinting at a wall of his shorthand — strings of letters I’d been unable to decipher. It was this — him and Wren hiding in plain sight the whole time.

“Enough,” Dutch said from the head of the table, and the laugh died to a simmer, and then he ruined it by adding, “Some of us are eating,” in a voice that wasn’t quite straight, and it flared back up.

He let it run a second, then caught my eye down the length of the table — me, still grinning, the loudest one left. He gave me a look. Not unkind. Just the look. I shut it down.

I looked at Austen’s empty chair. I’d had it. What Glitch had — the woman under my arm who wanted to be nowhere else. I’d thrown it away on a dance floor without a second thought.

Not for good, though. I’d told her she was my last and I’d meant it, and I wasn’t a man who’d lost her — I was a man with work to finish before he went and got her back. That chair would have her in it again. I’d see to it.

Chapter 18

❧

— Austen —

“The good news,” I said, sliding the sales report across the bar to Fewin, “is you sold eleven bottles of Veuve on Saturday.”

“That’s good, right?” Fewin looked pleased with himself. He’s a big man — beard, scarred knuckles, a face that ends conversations — and he builds a cocktail like he’s holding a baby bird.

“It could be,” I said, “if you hadn’t sold all eleven to one table.” I tapped the line. “A bachelor party. Eighteen men in matching shirts who’ll never set foot in here again, because the next time most of them have eighteen friends in one room it’ll be a funeral.”