“Good,” he replies.
Archer moves the car. I give him the keys without ceremony and he takes them the same way. He goes, and I watch him leave, thinking about the pier moment, which I’m going to stop thinking about now.
Jack makes the rounds. I don’t know exactly what he does, I don’t ask. The pack has its mechanisms, its protocols, the competence of people who have protected something long enough to know how. By eleven o’clock the pack house goes quiet. The carnival outside is doing its late wind-down, and the sirens are gone.
Tristan makes food. It’s late and I haven’t eaten in hours. I didn’t notice my hunger until he puts the plate in front of me, and the noticing arrives as my body simply responding to the food.
I eat.
He sits across from me while I do, not talking, just present. This is what I’m protecting. The warmth ofthis. The pack house, the domesticity of it. Tristan’s forearms on the table and his quiet attention.
“It’s good,” I say, about the food.
“I know,” he replies, without smugness. Just truth.
I eat the rest of it and he clears the plate. We exist in the kitchen quietly until Ryan comes back in and tells me the car is handled. Archer is running one final perimeter check.
“Get some sleep,” Ryan orders.
“I will.”
He looks at me.Thatlook. The one I’ve catalogued a hundred times and understood for the first time tonightat the pier, before the sirens, when I looked at the river and thoughtwhat if this is it?
“Lola,” he says with a warning tone.
“I know, I’m going to sleep,” I reply.
He nods. He goes.
The pack house at midnight is the version I know best now. The fire is low, the lights reduced. The sounds of four people in various states of rest. Jack asleep at the table again, I don’t know if this is a choice or a condition, I’ve stopped trying to determine the difference. Tristan in the kitchen doing the last of the cleanup.
Archer is back. He doesn’t tell me where the car is. I don’t ask. He sits at the worktable but he’s not working, which is how I know he’s thinking. I watch him from the couch for a minute, the set of his shoulders, the line of his jaw in the low light. He feels me watching. Of course he does.
He looks up. We lock gazes across the room. I think about the pier andpacksaid in one word. The warmth of his mouth on mine. He gazes at me for an extended period. Then he looks back at the table.
I look at the fire.
I wait until two a.m.
Not because I need two hours to decide. The decision arrives somewhere around the moment Tristan turns the kitchen light off and the home settles into slumber.
I wait until two because I need them to be asleep.Because the version of this where I say goodbye is a version I cannot do. I absolutely cannot look at Ryan and sayI’m goingand have him sayokayin the way that would mean he lets me. I cannot hold Jack’s face in my hands the way he held mine. Cannot stand at the kitchen counter with Tristan and pretend this is what I really want.
I cannot look at Archer at all.
So I wait until two.
I do it in order, which is either very organized or very sentimental, and I don’t examine which. The blanket, which is my blanket, which I am leaving because taking it would be a thing I couldn’t come back from internally. I fold it into the corner of the couch where it lives and I put my hand on it for a moment.
The stall apron, folded on the kitchen counter. My name isn’t on it. Nothing here has my name on it except the memory of two weeks, which doesn’t take up space.
Jack at the table, head on his arms, laptop open and gone to screensaver. His face in sleep is peaceful and relaxed, so different to his vibrancy while awake. I stand at the table edge and I look at him. I don’t touch him because if I do, he’ll wake up, and Jack awake with his full attention is something I cannot navigate at two in the morning with my bag in my hand.
I cross to Archer’s worktable. He’s asleep in the chair, not comfortably. Archer doesn’t do comfortable as a resting state, but he’s asleep, his head dropped slightly forward, the leather cord he was working with still in hishands. In sleep the wariness is off his face and what’s underneath is younger than I expected. Less armored.
I stand at the worktable. I don’t touch him either.
Tristan’s door is closed. He went to bed at one, the gentle consideration of a man who understood that I needed the building quieter than his presence would allow. Through the door is nothing, silence, the deep sleep of someone whose conscience is clean and whose body does what he asks of it.
