Page 30 of Roulette

“Watch it, sugar,” Deb called from a lawn chair near the fire pit. I’d met her briefly the other day. “He’s been hopped up on soda since three. Won’t sit still till he crashes.”

“He comes by it honest,” I said, and Deb laughed, the sound carrying over the murmur of the crowd.

The women were settled into their usual formations -- some in lawn chairs pulled into a loose circle, others leaning against tailgates with bottles dangling from their fingers, a few perched on the edges of picnic tables with their legs swinging. When I reached the nearest table and set the potato salad bowls down, Sal pushed a cold beer across the wood without looking up from her conversation.

“You’re late,” she said, not unkindly. “We already ate the deviled eggs.”

“I was making potato salad.”

“Yeah, and we were starving. Priorities, honey.”

I popped the beer open and took a long pull. It was cheap and cold and exactly what the evening called for. The women shifted on the bench without being asked, making room for me to drop down between them. Raven’s hand landed on my knee -- warm, callused, the same hand that had wrestled a fitted sheet into submission the first week I’d known her -- and squeezed once. I squeezed back, and the conversation continued around me like I’d been sitting there all afternoon, which, in compound time, I practically had.

The gravel drive caught the last of the evening light and threw it back in long copper streaks. Beyond the fence, the trees stood dark against the fading sky, and the perimeter lights were flickering on one by one as the temperature dropped. Roulette’s house sat at the edge of the yard, its porch visible from where I sat, the swing hanging motionless in the still air. I’d left the kitchen window open. I could see the curtain stirring faintly, pushed by the fan we’d installed after the first heat wave convinced us that air conditioning was no longer optional in Missouri.

Roulette stood near the grill with a cluster of brothers. His cut was on -- the black leather vest with the Hades Abyss patch riding high on his back, the colors catching what little light reached them. He had a bottle of beer loose in one hand, his thumb hooked in the mouth, and his shoulders carried none of the tension they’d held months ago, back when I’d pour his coffee some mornings and his gaze would track the door behind me like he was already working out how trouble might come through it. The change was subtle. His brothers had noticed it before I had -- how the ever-present tension along his jawline had softened, how his gaze tracked the yard now with something closer to contentment than vigilance.

Bear caught the direction of Roulette’s gaze and elbowed him hard enough to slosh beer over both their boots.

“You gonna stare at her all night or actually go talk to her?”

Roulette took a slow pull from his bottle. His gaze didn’t leave me, and the corner of his mouth did something -- not quite a smile, not quite not one -- and he said nothing, which made the brother laugh harder, the sound carrying over the grill smoke and the murmur of the crowd.

“Man’s hopeless,” the brother said to nobody. “All this time and he still looks at her like she hung the fucking moon.”

Roulette drained his beer and set the empty on the rail behind him. His hand found another from the cooler at his feet without looking, and he twisted the cap off, took a long pull, and the brother clapped him on the shoulder and said something else I couldn’t hear. Roulette’s expression didn’t change, but the set of his shoulders eased another degree.

The women talked around me. Tomatoes. Math grades. Somebody’s cousin who’d gotten engaged to a man nobody at the table approved of. I laughed into my beer, halfway through my second one now and pleasantly warm, and let the evening settle around me. For once, I didn’t have to keep watch. The man by the grill had it handled, and his shoulders were relaxed.

Then somebody by the grill said, loud enough to carry across two tables and the ten yards of gravel between us, “I’m telling you, the man’s domesticated. Bought throw pillows. Actual throw pillows. With his own money.”

The table went quiet. Not the women -- they kept talking, their voices dropping half a register into the confidential murmur they used when the men were performing. My ears tuned to the grill like they’d been wired for it, as they always did when Roulette’s name surfaced in a tone that suggested he was the subject rather than the participant.

“Not just bought them,” another voice added, louder. “Knows what they’re called. Uses the term in conversation. Has opinions about thread count. Thread count. Roulette. The same man who once slept on a bare mattress for six months because he ‘didn’t see the point’ of sheets.”

I looked up. The brothers had clustered thicker around the grill, drawn by the spectacle of Roulette being the center of attention for reasons that had nothing to do with violence or any of the qualities they usually associated with him. He stood in the middle of them, his beer in one hand, his expression giving away exactly nothing, which only encouraged them more. Bear was grinning like he’d won something.

“He picked them out himself,” I called across the yard. My voice carried without effort, the same voice I used at Patsy’s when the diner was loud and I needed to be heard. “I just pointed at the shelf.”

The brothers lost it. The sound hit the yard like a wave -- deep, rolling laughter that rose from six or seven chests at once and carried across the gravel and bounced off the clubhouse wall. Bear doubled over, one hand braced on his knee, the other still clutching his beer bottle, and Spider, beside him, clapped Roulette on the shoulder hard enough to make him sway.

Roulette cut a look at me. His gaze crossed the yard and landed on my face with the focused intensity he reserved for moments when I’d surprised him. His jaw was set, and his eyes gave away nothing and everything at the same time, then the corner of his mouth pulled up. Just a fraction. Just enough I could see it from where I sat, the involuntary lift that happened when whatever he was feeling bypassed the usual filters and reached his face before he could stop it.

Bear caught it. Of course he did. The man missed nothing, which was probably why he’d survived this long in a club full of people who made a habit of noticing things other people tried to hide.

“She’s got you figured out, man,” he said, his hand still on Roulette’s shoulder, his voice pitched with the same gruff affection these men used whenever they were teasing someone they loved. “It’s over. You’re done. The great Roulette, brought down by a woman and a throw pillow. History will remember this day.”

“Next thing you know, he’ll be asking about curtains,” Spider said, recovering enough to wipe at his eye with the heel of his hand. “Standing in some store aisle, touching fabric, talking about natural light.”

“Already did,” someone called from behind the cooler.

The laughter kicked up again, louder this time, and Spider made a wounded sound like the information had physically struck him. “Jesus Christ. Curtains too?”

Roulette tipped his bottle toward me without looking away from the men around him. “She likes them.”

That shut them up for half a breath. Not because it was defensive -- it wasn’t. If anything, the answer was worse for them -- plain, settled, delivered with the same calm certainty he used to state facts nobody sane argued with. Bear’s grin spread, slow and delighted. “Man stood in Church and claimed her in front of the whole club without blinking,” Hornet said, shaking his head like he still couldn’t get over it. “But you ask him if he likes the curtains she picked out, and he lights up like it’s Christmas morning.”

“It’s the little stuff that gets you,” Gunner added, grinning. “Always is.”