Page 40 of Property of Prophet

He stands, reaches across the table, and his hand closes around the collar. He lifts it, turns it, and reads the back panel. His knuckles don’t whiten, nothing so legible as that. What happens is smaller. His hands go still. Not the deliberate stillness he uses when he’s listening hard, but the involuntary kind.

He reads it twice, maybe three times.

I don’t look away.

He sets it down and looks up at me. “Why did you hide it?”

The coffee isn’t ready. I pour it anyway, something to do with my hands, and bring both cups to the table and sit across from him while he waits. Prophet has always been patient, from the first week, that measured, unhurried quality, the man who knows the value of letting silences run out on their own rather than cutting them short.

Honesty has been getting easier. Not easy. I don’t think it will ever be easy, not with the history I have with people I trusted my honesty to, but more possible. Something about the last weeks has worn down the mechanisms I’ve built.

“Why did you hide it?”

“Two reasons,” I say. “The first one is that I didn’t want anyone to come.”

He doesn’t fill the pause. He’s learned not to.

“The cut meant people. People meant the end of whatever was happening here, and I wasn’t—” I stop. The sentence has an honest ending, and I am finding it harder to look at him while I locate it. “I wasn’t done. With this. With whatever this is.”

There it is. I’ve said it flat, the way I say everything I can’t afford to dress up. Five years of building a life with no margin for anything I couldn’t account for. Then this man lands in a crater on my ridge. I hide his cut in a chest, watch him learn the shape of himself over weeks, and tell myself the whole time it was only because he was injured and needed care. The lie wasn’t convincing even when I was the only one telling it.

He is very still.

“The second reason...” I say, “... is that I didn’t want you going back before you knew what you were going back to. Before you knew who you were, period.” I turn the coffee cup in my hands. “It seemed the right thing to give you some say in it, rather than have it decided by a name on a piece of leather.”

I look up.

He’s watching me with the specific quality of attention he gives to things he considers important enough not to rush. The look goes both ways now. The lines around his eyes run deeper than a man’s should. The silver at his temples catches what little morning light comes through the window. He is, by any reasonable measure, a fallen angel who landed in a crater on my property weeks ago. He has been occupying the left side of my life ever since, my stove, my table, my dog, and the particular hour before dawn when I can’t make myself stop watching him breathe.

I’m not going to say any of that because I have said enough.

“I didn’t want you to leave,” I say instead. “Not before it was time. That’s all.”

It isn’t all. We both know it isn’t all. But it’s the version of the truth I can hand him across a table at six in the morning without both of us having to figure out what to do with the larger version.

He nods... once, slowly. The nod of a man receiving something he’s going to be careful with.

Prophet looks at me across the table for a long moment. Outside, dark spruce line the ridge, the sky above that coming up pale and clear. Bear sighs and relocates himself to my feet, which is his way of saying someone in this room needs settling, and he’s decided it’s me.

He might not be wrong.

“How long...” Prophet says, “... did you know what I was? Not a biker. The other thing.”

“I knew something was different from the crater. The way you healed. The wing prints in the permafrost.” The coffee is too hot, but I drink it anyway. “I knew what the word was for it before I let myself use it. About week three.”

“But you kept me.”

“You were injured.”

“I was less injured by week three.” He’s not accusing me of anything. His voice is level, careful, carrying the same quality it always carries—the man who has heard confessions for longer than he can remember and learned not to press on the thing being confessed. He’s only making sure we’re being accurate with each other. That’s the thing about Prophet—he doesn’t let comfortable imprecision stand between us.

“Yes,” I say. “By week three, you were less injured, and I still kept you.”

He watches me for a long moment. “You could’ve told me.”

“I know.”

“I would have stayed.”