Page 75 of Hard Check
He wasn’t calling Phil. He wasn’t calling his mother. He wasn’t going to fix this by running because the thing about Port Haven—the thing he hadn’t expected and still couldn’t fully articulate—was that leaving would hurt worse than staying, and that had never been true before.
Leo turned off the kitchen light and walked down the hall to his bedroom. His grandmother’s blanket was folded at the foot of the bed, shipped from Orlando in a box his mother had packed without being asked. Three months ago, there’d been nothing in this room that was his. Now, it was starting to feel like home in a way Florida never had.
Leo lay on his back, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling. He thought about whata few dayssounded like to a man who’d never had anything more than casual, and he almost picked up the phone to take it back. Almost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dawson dropped the magnetic tray for the second time that morning. It hit the concrete and bolts scattered under the lift, under the rolling cart, one of them pinging off the drain grate and disappearing. He stood there with the C-clamp in his hand, looked at the bolts on the floor, and didn’t move.
From the next bay, Ethan glanced over but didn’t say anything. He walked over, crouched, and started picking them up.
“I got it,” Dawson said.
“Cool.” Ethan dropped the bolts back in the tray and set it on the cart instead of the fender. Went back to his bay.
Dawson finished the brake job. He pulled the truck out, parked it in the lot, and wrote up the ticket. None of it required him to think, which was the only reason it got done.
The bay smelled like brake cleaner and cold air. November had settled into the county like something permanent, the mornings gray before the sun came up, the wind off the lake carrying a bite that found every gap in his jacket. Dawson stood in the openbay door and drank coffee that had gone cold while watching the road.
He checked his phone. The screen was blank. There’d been no new messages since three nights ago, Leo’s words sitting in the thread like a line drawn in the dirt.
I’m not going anywhere. But I need a few days.
Dawson had read it so many times that the words had gone flat, drained of whatever they’d meant when Leo typed them. The first night, he’d stared at the screen until it dimmed, then lit it again, then set the phone on the nightstand and lay in the dark, listening to Ethan go to bed and the house ticking around him.
He’d typed responses and deleted them.I’m sorrywas too small.I’ll never do that againwas a promise he didn’t know whether he could keep, not because he wanted to shove Leo away but because he didn’t know what he’d do the next time he was confronted with someone finding out about them.You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to mesat in the text field for two full minutes before he deleted it. It was true, but sending it now felt like using the truth to make Leo forgive him faster.
He put the phone back in his pocket.
Dawson didn’t get a damned thing done the rest of the morning. Ethan covered for him. Took the calls, ran the front counter, didn’t ask again if Dawson was feeling okay. Dawson kept trying to work because it was what was expected of him, but he kept stopping. He’d be tightening something and his grip would go slack, and he’d stand there staring at the wrench like he’d forgotten what it was for. Ethan would appear in his peripheral vision, take whatever Dawson was holding, and finish the job without a word. It happened three times before lunch.
Dawson washed up in the utility sink. The orange soap cut through the grease, the water ran gray, and he scrubbed until his knuckles were raw because scrubbing was something to do with his hands that wasn’t checking his phone. He dried off and stood at the sink with the towel in his fists and his head down and thought about how he’d hurt the man he loved.
And wasn’t it a load of shit that he was finally in love but no one knew, not even Leo…
Leo had stayed. That was the thing Dawson kept circling back to, the fact that made everything worse. The man who’d been traded against his will and dropped into a town he’d never heard of and spent his first month looking for the exit, had stopped looking for an out. And the reason was Dawson. He wasn’t conceited enough to think he was the only reason Leo’d stopped talking about getting traded, but he was pretty sure that was part of it. Leo had stayed, and Dawson had shoved him into a hallway like a secret that needed to be cleaned up before they were found out.
If Leo left now, Dawson would have no one to blame but himself.
Three days. Leo had said a few days, and it had been three, and Dawson didn’t know if three was a few or if a few meant more. He didn’t know if the silence was Leo processing or Leo deciding he couldn’t go back into the closet for a guy too scared to be honest with his own brothers.
He hung the towel on the hook. Went back to the bay. Looked at the board for the next job.
Justin’s truckwas already in front of the barn when Dawson pulled up early that evening, parked at an angle with the tailgate down and a toolbox open on it. The big doors were cracked, light spilling out onto the gravel in a narrow stripe.
Dawson needed this. He didn’t want to go home and have Ethan watching his every move, trying to figure out why he was so out of sorts. He needed to get his hands dirty and maybe drink a couple beers.
Justin was at the workbench with the injector manifold spread out in front of him, cleaning jets with a wire brush. The radio was off. The overhead fluorescents buzzed. The rig sat in the middle of the floor with the engine pulled, the bay where the block lived an open cavity of brackets and hoses.
“Hey,” Justin said without looking up.
Dawson walked to the bench. Picked up a wrench. Set it down. Picked up a different wrench. Set that one down too. He stood there with his hands at his sides and stared at the manifold as if it were written in a language he used to speak.
Justin kept cleaning. The wire brush scraped against aluminum, a small, precise sound. He worked one jet, then another, lining them up on the bench in order.
“You gonna tell me what happened,” Justin said, “or did you come over to make sure I didn’t steal any tools from your box?”
Dawson opened his mouth but no words came out.
