“Can we talk?” he asked, holding the door open with a worried expression written in his brown eyes.
Xavi
There was a heart-stopping moment where I actually thought that Rowe was going to tell me no, to get lost and never bother him again. Maybe his face would curl with disgust and he’d reveal how he really felt about the man who had basically paid him for sex: that he hoped he never had to see me again, preferably because I was rotting in a ditch.
But I’d seen him run out of the office and into the closet, and I had a feeling I knew exactly why, and I wanted to be there for him.
If only because it would be the first time in my life I could truly say I had been there for someone when circumstances didn’t force me to be.
“Yeah,” Rowe said, at last, breathing out the word like it was a relief. The supply closet was small, but big enough we would be able to stand facing each other. In fact, if we both leaned back against the shelves, we wouldn’t even really be in each others’ personal space. I stepped inside, gave Rowe a chance to move over so we both fit, and then closed the door.
And blinked.
“What were you doing in here in the dark?” I asked.
I heard Rowe make a choking noise, then a click as the lightbulb above us flared to life. “Thinking,” he said. “I don’t need light for thinking.”
I nodded and swallowed. I would normally try and break the tension here by making some lewd joke about what I thought he wasreallydoing in the dark and how we could do it together if he turned the light back off, but it didn’t feel like the right moment. I had to be sober and calm and actually talk to him, not hide behind the same things I always did.
“I saw you go and talk to Janice,” I said. I tried to keep my voice casual. I knew what she’d said to him, of course, but I didn’t want him to know that. “What did she want?”
Rowe gave a sudden burst of almost hysterical laughter that made me jump and stopped just as suddenly as he had started. “She wanted to offer me a promotion.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Well, that’s great!” I said. “Congratulations?” I had a feeling that maybe he wasn’t feeling like celebrating, given the look on his face and the way he’d had to run out here.
“It’s just…” he shook his head, rubbing the heel of his hand over one of his eyes and then throwing it out to the side in a gesture of frustration, narrowly avoiding knocking over several cartons of pens. “It would solve all my problems. But it’s a bit too late and I don’t know if I can take it.”
I stared at him, my heart thundering in my chest. He couldn’t take it?
It was too late?
“Why not?” I asked, begging whoever might be listening and floating around in the sky up there to give me a way to fix this.
Rowe gave a desperate noise, a wordless cry of defeat that seemed more than heartfelt. “This job, it would give me enough money to keep my apartment and pay for Daisy’s bills,” he said. “I could stay here and even give up some of my other jobs. But I already gave my notice on the lease. I have to be out by the end of the month.”
I tried not to react to his mention of working other jobs. I’d known he wasn’t flush with cash, after all. But he’d been working other extra jobs, too? No wonder he always seemed to need to rush off at the end of the day. And no wonder he’d made strange comments and excuses about why he was late to the rehearsal dinner. He’d been working.
“Can’t you go back to your landlord and ask him to stay?” I asked.
Rowe shook his head. “He’s got a young couple lined up to take it over,” he said. “I had to really plead with him to let me leave. It’s early. I’m supposed to have another four months before I move out, but I begged him and he finally agreed. There’s no way I can stay there now.”
“Okay,” I nodded, trying to roll with this and find a way to solve the problem. “Have you put down a deposit on a new apartment?”
Rowe shook his head. “I told you, I was planning to leave Crowhill Cove,” he said. “I was going out of state, to live with my uncle. He’s got a job lined up for me there. I won’t have to pay rent, and I can bring in a bit of money, and after Daisy’s surgery at the end of the month we were going to have her transferred to a hospital up there while she recovers.”
I chewed my lower lip. This was all getting complicated. Rowe had a lot of things organized already, and it sounded like rolling them back was going to be hard. “It’s a good job, the one you have waiting?” I asked.
Rowe’s shoulders sagged. “No,” he said. “Not as good as this one. Even if I stayed here and I was still paying rent on my apartment, I would be making more with this promotion – a lot more.”
I sighed. It all added up. Except where it didn’t. It made perfect sense for Rowe to take this promotion, but he couldn’t physically do it.
There had to be a solution. “We just need to think about it some more,” I said. “Have you looked at apartment listings around here?”
Rowe nodded. “I’ve been poring over them for months, looking for a way to stay here and save money. There’s nothing on the market as good as what I was paying before. Everyone raised their rents. I was getting a good deal because I’d stayed there a while and I kept signing to longer leases. Now I’ve left, I’ll never get a place that cheap around here again.”
It was a dilemma, to be sure. I stared down at a pack of plastic folders, all the colors of the rainbow. There had to be a way…
“I’m meeting Deon tonight,” Rowe said, making me look up at him. “He and a few other guests from the wedding stayed an extra day, so they’re having dinner together.”
