Page 21 of Her Off-Limits Mountain Man

Dinner happens anyway, because nobody says no to Wes twice. It's exactly as advertised. Wes narrates the Kingston field office, the Rangers tickets, the saga of Brady failing a hotel's sprinkler retrofit in front of its own ribbon-cutting — "he made the mayor reschedule, I'm not kidding, tell her" — and Brady says "the standpipe was dry" like a man reading his own deposition. He sits across from me and looks at his water glass, the middle distance, my brother, the server, the wall art.

Not me. Twice, maybe, by accident, and both times something flinches behind his eyes before the drawbridge catches it.

Meanwhile my brother, God love him, spends the entire entrée building his best friend's case for him without knowing there's a case. "You know what this guy did in March?" — fork aimed at Brady — "Drove four hours in an ice storm because I got stuck in Utica with a dead alternator. Four hours, no complaints, brought COFFEE. Correct coffee! He knows my order, he doesn't even like me—" and "Tell her about the Line Creek thing. He won't tell you, he got a commendation and mailed it back because the report had an error IN HIS FAVOR—" and every anecdote lands on me like evidence in a trial I've already lost, exhibit after exhibit of exactly who this man is when he thinks nobody important is watching.

"He's not going to tell any of the stories, is he," I say to Wes.

"He's never told a story in his life. He was born filled out and notarized." Wes slings an arm across the back of the booth, expansive, happy, surrounded by his two favorite people, the poor sweet oblivious golden retriever of a man. "That's why he needs us, Sloanie. We're the color commentary."

Us. The word goes down sideways, and across the table Brady's water glass stops an inch from his mouth, and neither of us looks at the other, which is of course its own kind of looking.

And it stings. It stings so much more than a decade of the same treatment ever did, because now I know what the other thing feels like. I've had the coffee handoffs and the wheel measure and the two inches of air. I know what his voice does when it's just us and he forgets to flatten it. Ten years I thought his distance was indifference, and I made my peace with that. This isn't indifference. This is a man performing indifference, for an audience of one unsuspecting brother, and doing it so well that I finally understand — the wedding, the tents, the decade. He's not rude.

Halfway through dessert nobody ordered — Georgie brings it, "on the house, for the fire tables" — Wes gets a work call and steps out, and for ninety seconds it's just us and the wall art. Neither of us says anything. Brady looks at me for the first time all dinner, one long unguarded second, apology and hunger and misery all filed in the same folder, and then Wes bangs back in mid-sentence and the folder closes.

He's practiced.

And here's the thing about watching a man be practiced at hiding you: it rearranges the past faster than the present. Because if THIS is what discipline looks like — the water glass, the middle distance, the careful nothing — then that's what I've been looking at for ten years and calling it dislike. The wedding wasn't a snub, it was a fire watch. The skipped Thanksgivings were a man removing fuel from a room. I sit in this booth watching him not-look at me with a decade of professional-grade discipline, and I want, absurdly, to stand up and apologize to him — for every year I made it harder by being in the room, wearing perfume, telling stories that killed.

Instead I eat my fries and add it to the list of things we're going to have to say out loud eventually, which is getting longer than my launch checklist.

"—and THAT'S why he's not allowed back in Poughkeepsie," Wes finishes, wheezing at his own story, and slaps Brady on the shoulder with the confidence of a man who has never once wondered what his best friend isn't telling him. "God. Okay. I gotta drive back tonight. Sloanie, walk me out?"

At his truck, my brother hugs me hard, then holds me at arm's length under the parking lot light, and for one alarming second his face goes almost perceptive.

"He's being good to you, right?" he says. "Brady. I know he's a lot of gravel, but he's — there's nobody better, Sloane. I mean it. If he signs off on your event, it's because it's actually safe. You can build on what that guy says."

"Yeah," I say. "I'm learning that."

"Good." He grins, kisses my forehead, climbs in. "Love you. Text me a picture of the fire tables. Tell Brady the Rangers thing is happening whether he answers the group chat or not!"

And he's gone, taillights down Main past the burned bandstand, the most trusting man in the Catskills.

Brady's waiting in the lot, because of course he walked out to see the truck off, and because of course he won't leave until I'm safely to my car. Standing security. Practiced.

The air is cold and charged and smells like woodsmoke off somebody's legal, contained chimney, and we look at each other across six feet of asphalt with everything from 11:40 a.m. rushing back in like the tide.

"I'm sorry," he says. "About dinner. I was⁠—"

"Shut. Yeah. I've got a translation guide going." I close the six feet to four. "You do it whenever he's within a hundred yards. You did it at the wedding. You've done it my whole adult life. You know what I spent ten years thinking, Brady? I thought you didn't like me. I built a whole personality wing around it — funny story at Thanksgiving, dead silence from the corner, girl, he thinks you're a lot, adjust accordingly." Four feet to three. His jaw is doing granite things, and his eyes are doing the opposite. "But that's not it. It was never it. Because a man who doesn't like me doesn't memorize my field. So here's my question, and I've earned it, so don't you dare go assessor on me."

The parking lot light hums. Somewhere on Main, the cruiser rolls past on its slow loop, keeping the town safe from everything except this.

"Why did you avoid me for ten years?"

The question stands in the parking lot with us like a third person. I watch it hit him — watch him take it the way he probably takes everything, straight, no flinch, filing the impact for later — and I press on before my nerve files for an extension.

"Because I've run the numbers, Brady. Ten years of tents and tailgates. You showed up for Wes's graduation and left before cake. You skipped Thanksgiving four consecutive years and my mother thinks you're in witness protection. And the whole time, the entire time, I told myself: he's just like that. Except you're not just like that. You drove four hours in an ice storm with correct coffee. You're — whatever the opposite of just like that is, with everyone else on earth. Everyone except me." My breath is fogging faster than his. "So either I did something unforgivable when I was twenty-two, and I'd like the citation for it, in writing. Or."

"Or," he says. Low. Careful, like the word's load-bearing.

"Or it was never dislike," I say. "And I've been reading the entire pattern upside down."

He doesn't answer.

He looks at me — really at me, no drawbridge, no middle distance, and it's staggering, actually, what this man's face does when he finally aims it — and his hand comes up like it's going to find my jaw again, and stops, and drops, and he doesn't answer.

But he doesn't leave, either.