Page 36 of Trust my Heart

I believed that more than anything else he said all morning, and it was the first thing that landed on me for real, because it was true.

“Then why.” My voice cracked. “Why come all the way back for a man you don’t even want.”

“Because of what he’s worth now. Because I can.” He turned the coffee cup a slow quarter. “And because you’re sitting across from me in pieces over it, and there’s nothing in the world I like better than that.”

I had my hand around the whiskey, and I made myself set it down without drinking, just to have somewhere to put it.

“And when you’re done with him.” I was leaning over the table and I didn’t pull back. “When he’s used up. You set him down and walk off, same as before.”

“He rebuilds himself. Better every time.” The smile again. “You ought to thank me, really. He’d never have been the man you fell for if I hadn’t broken him first.”

That one was true. It went in, and I let it show.

Then I was half out of the booth without deciding to be, and the owner’s head came up, and I made myself sit back down.

“You get away with all of it.” Lower now, and it cost me more than a shout would have. “Nobody ever lays a hand on you.”

“Nobody ever will.” No heat in it, which was worse. “Ask anyone at either house what became of Adam Wright. A better rank. A better chair. There’s never anything left to take hold of, Detective. You of everyone should know that by now.”

There it was, the thing I’d driven the whole way out here for. He’d told me to my face that no one could ever touch him, and he believed it all the way down. That was the flaw, the only one he had, and he’d just handed it to me. I was raging at him and taking it down at the same time, steady behind the noise. I wasn’t going to argue him out of a belief like that, and I wasn’t going to outlast it. I’d give him something to reach for where I was already waiting, and let him carry himself into it. I didn’t know how yet. I knew what he’d reach for.

Then I stopped fighting him. I let it all go quiet, until I was just a man sitting with his hands open on the table, empty.

“He’s already gone, isn’t he?” I said, low. “You know it. Since you came back he’s somewhere else with me. He goes still when your name comes up. He stopped reaching for me at night. I lie there and I feel him deciding, and there’s not one thing I can do about it.”

None of it was true. He’d reached for me every night that week. I was the one who’d gone somewhere Luke couldn’t follow and never told him why, and here I sat handing Luke’s name to the man who wanted him, calling my own silence Luke’s. I watched it reach Wright and I watched what it did. The false sorrow came over his face again, and for a second the hunger came up under it before he pressed it down. I’d told him the way was clear, and that it was now.

“You think he wants out,” he said. His voice stayed level. But he’d gone still, and he was watching me too closely, and under the calm I could see how badly he wanted it and how hard he was working to keep it off his face.

“I think he’s already gone.” The words came out of me flat, used up. “Adam. I think you had this won before you started.”

It was the only time I used his first name. I used it because coming from me, that far down, it was the most broken thing I could hand him, and he took it exactly that way, satisfied, a man handed the last thing he’d come for.

“Ryan.” He tried it out, the first name, like a kindness he was extending down to me. “Let him go. It’s finished already. You’re the last one in the building to know it. Do it clean and quick. That’s more than he’s doing for you.”

I let him say a few more like it, each one more certain than the one before, a man laying out a life he’d already decided was his to run. I gave him the beaten nod, and I got up before he could. He wanted to watch me go anyway, so I gave him that too, the slow walk, the sagged shoulders, everything emptied out of me. Out on the street the light was flat and ordinary, and I stood in it for a second before I made my legs work.

By the time I reached the car, the last of him was off me, and what was under it was colder and cleaner than anything I’d shown him in that bar.

Because I had him now. Everything he was stood on one belief, that nothing could ever touch him, and he’d handed it to me across the table, proud of it. That was how I’d take him down. He’d never see it coming, because I’d just spent an hour teaching him I was already finished.

I got behind the wheel and pulled out toward home, toward the evening I’d set and the truth I owed Luke.

Chapter 13: I Believe You

Luke

I’d gone for a run to get out of my own head, and it hadn’t worked.

I ran down to the lake and back, hard, farther than I meant to, and I came in the door as wound up as I’d left. Ryan wasn’t home. He’d told me that morning, in a voice that didn’t leave any room to argue it, that we needed to talk today and it couldn’t keep waiting, and then he’d gone out on some errand he didn’t explain and made me promise I’d be here when he got back. He hadn’t said what the talk was. He hadn’t said where he was going. He’d kissed the side of my head on his way out, like he wasn’t sure I’d let him, and gone.

I stood dripping with sweat in the front hall with my pulse still going strong with no sign of going down. There was too much standing between us for me to guess what today’s discussion was about. Any one of the silences or lies could be the thing he’d decided to tackle, and the not-knowing was the worst of it.

What scared me wasn’t the talk. It was what it might cost. I loved him, and we hadn’t had that very long out in the open, and every day since Adam came back I’d felt him getting a little further from me. I was scared today was the day I lost him for good.

I got in the shower to wash the run off and give my hands something to do. Too bad it didn’t settle me either.

More than I wanted to know what he’d been carrying all day, I wanted us back. The real us, not the two careful people we’d been doing an impression of, handing each other files and being polite in our own home. Whatever today turned out to be, I was done lying to him. If he was about to hand me something hard, he was going to get the truth back, all of it, today. I’d decided that much before I turned the water off.