Page 75 of Havoc

It's small. If I hadn't been standing behind that bar for seven hours I'd have missed it. Two men at the pool table look up and then very deliberately look back down. A patch by the door says brother and puts a hand out and Havoc takes it, and it's fine, and it's completely fine, and it is nothing at all like the way that same man said brother to the fella who came in behind him.

He's in a black t-shirt.

Everybody in that room knows exactly where his cut is sitting.

* * *

We don't make it out of the kitchen.

I'm not going to pretend it's anything but what it is. He gets the door shut behind us and I've got both hands in the front of his shirt and I'm hauling him backward and my hip catches the counter hard enough that I'll find the bruise tomorrow, and neither of us says one word for about a minute and a half.

Eleven days. It doesn't get less. Nobody tells you that.

He gets me up on the counter and there's a bowl or something that goes off the edge and breaks on the floor and neither of us looks at it.

"Eli."

"Yeah."

"Don't stop for the⁠—"

"Ain't stoppin' for anything," he says into my neck, and his hand's already at the button of my jeans, and I've got a fistful of the back of his shirt and I am done being careful about the noise⁠—

Headlights come across the kitchen wall.

We both go still.

"That ain't the road," he says. "That's the drive."

Storm is out of the truck by the time we get to the porch and he doesn't come up the steps.

He stands in the yard with his hands down and the headlights behind him and his shadow going up across the front of the house, and he looks at Havoc.

"Give me twenty minutes with her."

"No."

"Havoc."

"I said no."

"It's all right," I say.

"Lennox—"

"Eli." I put my hand flat on his chest, and I feel him take it, and I watch a man do something he does not want to do. "Twenty minutes. Go inside."

He goes inside.

He goes about six feet inside and stands where I can see his shape through the screen, which is fine, and Storm looks at the door and doesn't say anything about it either.

He turns the headlights off and comes and sits on the bottom step, which puts him below me and I don't think it's an accident.

For a while he doesn't say anything. He takes his hat off and holds it in both hands between his knees.

"I've had four days to work out how to say this," he says. "I ain't got it. So I'm gonna say it badly and you can do whatever you want with it."

"Okay."