Page 25 of Roulette

My grandmother’s photo sat on the nightstand, her smile unchanged, her eyes steady behind glass that had been wiped clean of a stranger’s fingerprint, and I held her gaze because it was easier than looking at the door.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

Footsteps in the hallway.

Not the careful, edge-of-the-floorboard tread Roulette had used going out. These were unhurried. Even, each one landing full-weight, a man who didn’t need to be quiet anymore. They stopped outside the door. The strip of amber light beneath it darkened as his boots crossed it.

“It’s done.” His voice came through the door, quiet and steady. “Open up.”

Two sentences. Four words total. The first contained everything I needed to know about what had happened. The second contained everything I needed to know about what happened next. The door would open, I’d step through it, and the world on the other side would be different from the one I’d left when I bolted myself into this room with a key from Roulette’s pocket and fear hot in my throat.

I didn’t move immediately. I found the key in my pocket, closed my fingers around the metal, and stood there with my back against the wall and my bare feet on the hardwood, giving myself one more second before I opened the door.

Sometimes it was to give you time to decide whether you were ready for what waited on the other side.

I turned the key.

The door swung open on Roulette standing in the hall, knuckles split, a shallow cut above his cheekbone already beading dark, and behind him the amber light and the wreckage of a kitchen chair and something on the floor I made myself not look at too closely. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I crossed the space between us and he caught me, one arm hard around my back, his chin dropping to the top of my head, and we stood like that in the doorway while men’s voices rose from the front of the house and someone opened the door to let more of them in.

It was a minute, maybe two, before I noticed his hand. The one not holding me. It hung at his side, and it wasn’t quite steady -- a fine tremor working through his fingers, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t paying attention, the kind of thing Roulette himself would never have acknowledged seeing in anyone else because that kind of noticing came with a price he didn’t like paying.

I’d never once seen his hands shake. Not checking a lock in the dark, not holding a gun at two in the morning, not doing anything that would have shaken mine straight out of my body. I took that hand in both of mine, turned it palm up, and pressed my thumb slow and steady along the lines of his knuckles the way he’d done for me more times than I could count.

“Hey,” I said, quiet, into his chest. “You’re all right.”

He didn’t answer right away. His breathing was still too fast, too shallow, the adrenaline working itself out of him the same way it worked out of me every time -- except I’d never watched it happen to him before, had never had the chance to be the steady one instead of the one being steadied.

“Wasn’t sure,” he said finally, low, almost too quiet to catch. “Wasn’t sure I could stop.”

I understood, then, what I was holding. Not just a man who’d protected me. A man who’d gone somewhere dark to do it and wasn’t entirely sure yet that he’d made it all the way back.

“You did,” I said. “You stopped. You’re here.” I kept my thumb moving over his knuckles, slow circles, the same patient rhythm he used on me when my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “I’ve got you.”

He let out a breath that sounded like it had been sitting in his chest for longer than the fight had lasted. His forehead dropped against the top of my head again, heavier this time, and for once he let me hold the weight of it instead of the other way around.

“Didn’t know you needed that too,” I said, after a while.

“Don’t. Usually.” His voice had steadied some, though his hand stayed in mine. “Don’t usually have anyone to need it from.”

I didn’t say anything else. I just kept holding his hand until the tremor in it finally stilled, and understood, standing there in a doorway with a stranger’s blood on the floor behind him, that this was the first time I’d gotten to be the strong one for him instead of the other way around, and it wouldn’t be the last.

* * *

Two nights later, Roulette told me to be at the clubhouse by seven. Not the porch, not the kitchen where the women gathered after supper -- the clubhouse. He said it the way he said everything, final, and didn’t explain further, which was how I knew it mattered.

I’d never been called to Church. I knew what it was only the way anyone on the compound knew -- a closed door at the back of the clubhouse, a long table behind it, business the old ladies weren’t part of and didn’t ask about. So when Roulette met me on the porch and walked me across the gravel toward the clubhouse, past the main room where I usually ended up, straight toward that back door instead, my stomach dropped somewhere around my knees.

“You’re allowed to tell me what’s happening,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

He knocked once, opened the door, and stood back to let me go first.

The room was smaller than I’d pictured, cinderblock walls and a scarred table long enough to seat every patched man in the chapter. They were all there -- Hornet, Gunner, and a dozen others I knew only by face. Fox sat at the head, arms crossed, his gray beard catching the single overhead light. Every man in the room came to his feet when I walked in. I hadn’t expected that.

“Sit if you want,” Fox said. “Or stand. Won’t take long.”

I didn’t sit. Roulette came to stand beside me, close enough his arm brushed mine, and for the first time since I’d known him he looked less than perfectly certain -- not nervous, Roulette didn’t do nervous, but present in a way that cost him something.