Page 43 of Broken Ride

I want him with the lights on and the ledger open. Nobody warns you about that part either.

He's easy to love. That's the clinical finding they leave out of every text. The drowning ones are easy to love, because they hold on so well.

Later, while he winds down, I finally run the differential I've been refusing to run since the first night I smelled the night air on him and called it the pens.

If I stay, I'm choosing a man who is killing himself on an installment plan. Slowly, politely, with excellent manners and a clean shirt, but the trend line only runs one direction, and loving the patient has never once changed the chemistry.

Love is not a treatment. I know the science on that cold.

If I walk, I do the thing I have always done. Pack the truck, change the circuit, leave before the hurt clears the horizon. Running from a man who hurt me on purpose taught me to leave early and travel light, and here I am with my hand already drifting toward the keys over a man who has never done anything but stand between me and the dark.

Walking away from Garrett was survival. Walking away from Wade would just be practice, the same muscle trained so well it doesn't ask permission anymore.

Stay and watch him drown. Leave and prove I never learned to do anything else.

There's no clean line through it, and I distrust clean lines anyway. Nothing that matters has ever presented with simple symptoms.

He turns in early, road-tired, and I stay up with a contamination chart I'm not reading. Sometime past midnight I surface out of a half sleep with the lamp still on and reach for him, and his side of the bed is cold.

The bathroom is dark. His boots are gone from the door. His hat is gone from the dresser, and the bottle beside where his hat was sits untouched, seal intact, faithful as a paid witness.

The gravel is sharp through my socks and the night has gone high-country chilly, the day's heat gone with the light, and his truck is right where it's been parked since supper, and he's in it. Stretched across the back seat with his hat over his face and one arm hanging toward the floorboard, breathing slow and deep and even.

It takes me a long time to look down from the window. The bottle on the floorboard is a pint, flat-sided, made to ride under a seat. It's tipped on its side beneath his slack fingers, and the label is turned up toward me like it has nothing left to hide. It's empty.

I don't wake him. I stand in the cold with my arms crossed against it, watching the man I love sleep in a truck fifteen feet from a bed with his name on it, and the last open question in my workup closes itself without a sound.

The truck is where the drinking lives. Some half-drowned piece of him still refuses to bring it into the room with me, and I understand that tomorrow morning, for the first time since I met him, I'm not going to let him have that first hour alone.

12

WADE

Daylight comes through the windshield like a bill collector, and my skull answers the door before I do. I know where I am before I open my eyes. A man learns the shape of his own back seat same as he learns his own saddle, and I've woken up folded across this one enough times to recognize the particular ache it deals out.

What I don't recognize, arriving with the headache, is cold air moving through the cab and the smell of coffee nobody in this truck made. I'm not alone.

Laney is sitting in the open passenger door with her boots on the running board and two paper cups steaming in the cold. She's watching me with the morning sun behind her, and between us, down on the floorboard where I left it, the dead pint lies on its side with its label turned up like it's proud of the work.

I wait for it. The sermon. The tears. The door slamming hard enough to finish what the headache started. I've got answers loaded for all three, worn smooth from years of handling.

She holds out a cup.

"It's from the motel office pot," she says. "I'd apologize for it, but you're in no position to be particular."

I sit up slow, fast being off the menu, and take the coffee because my hands need the job. She shakes two ibuprofen out of her kit and sets them in my palm without ceremony.

"Horse dose?"

"Don't tempt me."

The coffee is terrible and the pills are human-sized and she still hasn't looked at the pint. I can't get ahead of that. She knows it's there. I watched her not look at it, which is a different thing entirely from not seeing it, and the difference is the whole morning.

"Say it," I tell her.

"Drink your coffee."

I've spent a lifetime braced for sermons. Preachers preach them. Old hands preach them. Colt's got a short one he trots out when the occasion calls. Sermons I can ride out same as storms, head down, waiting for the sky to empty itself.