Page 75 of Wreckage and Rain

I'm taking Bex's Reclamation class twice a week. I don't always look at the mirror while I'm dancing. I try to stay in the movement and the moment. When I do catch myself, the woman in it is starting to give a glimmer of someone I might know.

I go to Vibes most nights. You could say I'm a regular by now. I know the dancers and staff by name and they know mine. Marisol's daughter Lucia calls me "corner lady" and has developed a two-year-old's version of a loyalty program where she brings me a crayon drawing every week in exchange for letting her touch my earrings. I have friends. I have my writing. I live in a city I chose, a life I built from scratch and it's small and imperfect and entirely mine.

And I have Sam.

I don't know when we started being whatever this is. I came here to drink alone. Somewhere in there, I started looking forward to walking in. I take the same bar stool every night. He pours my bourbon before I order. He leans on the back bar when the room is thinning out and we end up talking until two AM about things we don't tell anyone else.

His sister's wedding next month and the suit he hasn't picked out. The bar he wants to open in Pilsen if Vibes ever pays itself off. The night his ex put both her hands on his chest and told him she'd been sleeping with his business partner for nine months. He told me that on a slow night six weeks in.

I told him everything. The night at the Butcher Block. The IG photos at the gas station. Leaving my rings on the dresser with a note on yellow legal paper. Driving to Chicago with very little plan and a broken heart. The drift before any of it. The cancelled plans. The midnight phone calls I pretended I didn't hear. All of it. Three hours of it, at the bar after close, with no one else in the room. He listened. He didn't interrupt. He didn't try to fix it. He didn't try to redirect me to silver linings. When I was done he refilled my bourbon and he said that's a lot to carry and then he poured himself one and sat with me until I stopped shaking.

He noticed the night I stopped sitting in the corner booth and moved to the bar stool. He noticed the night I started wearing red. He noticed and he didn't make a thing of it. He just poured my bourbon and said new earrings and kept his eyes on the glass.

I was building a new family here. We had game nights at Sam's apartment above Vibes with cards and Mexican food from the place across the street. Bex and Marisol would be there most nights while Lucia would color on the couch. I was starting to feel more like myself, and these people saw me. The night I beat them at gin rummy by twelve hundred points and Sam made me wear a paper crown for the rest of the evening. The night I sat next to Sam on his couch and laughed so hard at something Marisol said that I tipped sideways into him, and he caught me with a hand flat against my back and steadied me, and I let him, which I had not let anyone do since Charleston.

His arm brushes mine when he pours and I have stopped pulling away from it. He watches me when he thinks I'm too caught up in the show to catch him, and I have started watching back. Last week he walked me home at one in the morning and we stood at my door a little too long, and neither of us did anything about it, and both of us knew that was a decision with a shelf life.

We've been circling for weeks.

It is late. The bar is empty. The music is off. The string lights over the back bar are the only light in the room. I'm on my usual stool. Sam is on the other side of the bar pouring me a bourbon. His arm brushes mine as he sets the glass down. His eyes find mine and don't leave. He raises one brow. The question is in it.

"I don't want to use you to disappear, Sam. You're the one person in this city I can't afford to turn into a mistake."

He's quiet. Careful, unhurried, the same as everything he treats as serious. He lets it settle.

He sets the bottle down. Walks around the end of the bar. He doesn't step between my legs. He leans against the bar beside me, shoulder almost to shoulder, facing the same dark room I'm facing.

"Good," he says. "Because I'd have been kind about it, and we'd both have hated it by Thursday." He turns his glass a slow quarter. "I'm not built for being anyone's anything right now anyway. Not you. Not anyone. The wiring's still scorched from the last time. Here's what I've actually got for you." He sets one finger under my chin and turns my face until I have to look at him. "You've been holding yourself up alone since the day you drove into this city. You decide everything. You carry everyone. You haven't actually let go for two months. So tonight you don't perform that you are okay for me. You don't perform anything for me. You sit here and you come apart if you need to, and I hold everything for you so you don't have to. That's the whole job. Can you give me that?"

The yes is out of me before I've checked it against anything, and the speed of it tells me how long I've been waiting for someone to offer.

"Yes." It comes out cracked down the middle.

He pulls me off the stool and into him, one arm banded across my back, one hand cradling the back of my head, and he holdsme like you hold someone who's been standing at attention for two months and is finally allowed to fall down.

So I fall down.

I don't manage how it looks or keep it pretty or keep it quiet. I cry into his shirt with both hands fisted in the cotton and the sounds that come out of me don't sound like me, and he doesn't flinch and he doesn't shush me and he doesn't tell me it's okay, because it isn't, and he isn't going to lie to me. He just holds me up. One hand at the back of my head. His chin on my hair. The whole of him a wall I get to lean on instead of be.

I don't know how long. My ribs ache with it. The string lights blur and clear and blur.

And somewhere in it the grip I've kept white-knuckled since Charleston goes slack, because for the first time since the night the phone lit up I am not holding myself together for an audience. There is no one here to manage. No mask to keep on. No version of me to protect from anyone. Just Sam, who has already seen the worst of it and is still standing here with his arms around me like I am not too much to hold.

"There it is," he says into my hair. Low. "I've got you."

***

Eventually the crying wrings itself out. My eyes are swollen to slits and the shoulder of Sam's shirt is soaked through and neither of us says a word about either fact. He hands me a stack of bar napkins. I blow my nose with no grace at all. He watches me do it like it's the most ordinary thing in the world, which, in this room, with this man, it somehow is.

He locks up the bar. We go upstairs to his apartment. It's small and clean and full of books. He has a real couch and a bed that takes up most of the bedroom and a kitchen with one good knife and a half-stocked fridge.

I order pad see ew from the place around the corner. We eat on his couch, me swimming in a hoodie of his that smells like barsoap and bergamot, the cuffs hanging past my hands. I tell him about the worst date I went on before Colt. A junior year guy who couldn't drive yet, so his mama drove him to the diner and then sat in the booth behind us pretending to read a Reader's Digest. She looked over the top of it every two minutes. He kept telling me she was fine, totally fine, like I was the one who needed reassuring. Sam laughs so hard he chokes on a noodle and I pound his back and we're both crying with laughter.

"I'm going to say something and you're going to make fun of me."

"Almost certainly."

"That's the safest I've felt in months."