Page 66 of Roadrunner

I was good at that.

He walked away.

I heard him before I saw him.

His footsteps. The weight of them. I’d woken up to that sound for four years and apparently I still knew it, because every nerve in my body identified it before the door opened.

He came through.

He stopped.

We looked at each other across the length of the room.

He was older the way I was older. Not drastically. Just honestly. The lines around his eyes. The slight gray at his temples. He was still the same size. Still held himself the same way.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Years compressed into the space of that look, and I felt every one of them pass across his face in whatever order they meant something to him. I couldn’t read all of it. I could read enough. Surprise first, unguarded for exactly as long as it took him to notice he was showing it. Then something wary underneath that, the look of a man checking a door he thought he’d already locked. And underneath even that, so brief I might have invented it, something that looked almost like relief, like a held breath he hadn’t known he was still holding after all this time.

“Alex,” he said.

I gave a purposeful nod. “Riley.”

A silence fell over the room. The man at the table became very interested in whatever was in front of him.

Riley crossed the room.

He stopped a few feet away. Close enough that I could see his eyes clearly. They were doing something complicated that he wasn’t going to let reach his face.

He looked me up and down. He almost nodded. “You look good.”

“Thank you.” I swallowed something hard. “So do you.”

He looked at me steadily. “How long have you been in Marana?”

“Three days.”

Something moved across his face. “Three days.”

“I was working up to it.”

He looked at me a moment longer. Then the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something smaller than that. Something private.

“You want some coffee?” he asked.

“I would love some coffee.”

He turned toward the back. I followed him through the door.

The back room was smaller than I remembered.

Or maybe I was simply larger in it now, taking up more space than the girl who used to sit at this same scarred table doing homework while club business happened on the other side of a door that was never quite soundproof. The same calendar hung on the wall, a different year printed across the top of it but the same brand, the same faded photograph of a canyon at sunset that nobody had ever once commented on. A coffee maker that might have been the exact one from years ago, or its direct descendant, gurgling in the corner with the same asthmatic wheeze at the end of its cycle.

He poured two cups without asking how I took mine because he already knew. Black. He set one in front of me and sat across the table and looked at me with the same directness he’d always had.

It used to make me feel known. It still did.

I wrapped both hands around the cup and let the heat of it ground me, because I needed grounding, sitting three feet from a man I had spent years constructing entire imaginary conversations with, none of which had prepared me for how it would actually feel to have him looking back.