I set my bottle down and watch for a moment.
Two people who both know damn well something’s happening between them, but keep circling it anyway. Getting close enough to feel the heat before backing off again, the second it starts feeling too real.
Every interaction comes wrapped in just enough plausible deniability to keep anybody from calling it out. Every little moment is balanced carefully on the edge of ‘friendly’ so nobody has to admit what’s actually sitting underneath it.
I know what that looks like from the outside, because I have recently been inside it, and the view from both positions is nearly identical.
Two years.
Two years of it.
The orbit.
The almosts.
The exhaustion of wanting something with a certainty so complete it’s lodged somewhere beneath the ribcage, and still finding a hundred good reasons every single day to keep the appropriate distance.
And then a kitchen table at two in the morning. Her father’s lamp. Her hand across the table, and the way she’d looked at me, stripped back to nothing but Millie, tired, real, fully present, made two years of patient, disciplined distance feel suddenly, almost comically wasteful.
The feel of her fingers threaded through mine stays lodged under my skin.
The mine documents waited.
The paperwork waited.
All of it did, because some things move on their own clock, and no man gets to argue with that.
I find myself watching Ghost reach past his laptop and move his beer a half-inch to the left, making space for Sage’s bag on the table without commenting on the fact that he’s doing it.
Sage notices. She doesn’t say so. She repositions the bag neatly into the cleared space.
There it is.
“You look very philosophical for a man holding a warm beer.” Dad’s voice arrives from my left, unhurried and familiar as gravel underfoot, and I look up to find him settling into the seat across from me with a solemn gravity. Dad moves like that, deliberate, unhurried, occupying whatever space he enters without feeling the need to announce it.
Deek materializes two seconds later and drops into the chair beside him with enough energy for three people, a fresh beer already in his hand, his eyes bright with the alertness of someone who has recently eaten something good—Sage’s jerky, no doubt.
“Those were an excellent call,” Deek informs me, nodding toward the paper bag in Ghost’s corner. “Sage gets the good ones from that place on Fremont. Ghost’s gonna have to actually acknowledge her at some point. Can’t eat a woman’s jerky every week and stay mysterious. There are rules.”
“There are no rules,” Dad says.
“There are social rules, Dad.”
“There are social conventions that Ghost has been comfortably ignoring since before you were born.”
“And yet he keeps eating the jerky.”
Dad makes a sound that is somewhere between acknowledgment and amusement.
There are mornings, more of them recently, when I catch myself watching Dad and feeling the resonance of a thing you recognize but haven’t had the right words for until the right moment provides them. He and Jonas have that quality in common, the kind of men who build things slowly and mean them to last. Dad said it to me once while we sat across fromeach other in the kitchen, completely unaware he was handing me something I’d end up carrying for years.
Two men who built slowly and meant it to last.
“Dad,” I say, and he looks at me, steady, waiting. “You ever regret anything about how the club stuff got started? The years of it?”
Dad drags in a slow breath and sets his beer down on the table. He doesn’t rush to answer or throw out some easy line to make the conversation smoother. He sits with the question for a minute instead, really thinking about it before he says a damn thing. “Some specific choices,” he says at last. “The timing of some things. Not the foundations.” He looks at me in that level way he has, the one that moves past performance and lands straight on the thing you’re actually asking. “Why?”
“Thinking about timing,” I say.
