“Five hundred dollars,” Moose said with genuine admiration. “He’s going to be insufferable.”
From the common room, I heard Twitch, who’d no doubt been listening from a distance and decided that distance was no longer necessary. He materialized in the doorway with a folded piece of paper that appeared to be a spreadsheet, printed out and annotated with genuine care.
“Okay,” he said, looking at me with bright, focused energy, “I need to know the exact date for settlement purposes. Because what we have is the date the license was filed, but I figure we’re going for the date of the ceremony?—”
“Kyle.”
He looked up from the spreadsheet. “What?”
“I’m not helping you settle a bet about my own marriage.”
“That’s fair. I’ll ask Ellie.”
“You will absolutely not ask Ellie.”
He folded the spreadsheet with the philosophical acceptance of a man accustomed to minor setbacks and tucked it in his pocket. “How’s Gus doing?”
The shift was so abrupt it took me a second to follow it. That was Twitch — chaos up top, genuine underneath. “Better than expected,” I said. “Still a long road.” Which was better than the alternative.
He nodded. Some of the brightness dialed down. “Good. I’m glad.” A beat. “Also, I’m stoked you finally married her because the pining was getting hard to watch.”
“I wasn’t?—”
“Meatball.” The pitying shake of his head made him seem somehow both twenty-four and ancient. “We share a building. I see things.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, which was its own kind of answer, so I picked up the wrench and turned back to the engine.
The problem with not denying it—with saying I did and also correct instead of it’s complicated or it’s not what you think—was that I couldn’t. Not without the risk of it getting back to Gus. Huckleberry Creek was not a town that kept secrets, as the last twenty minutes had conclusively demonstrated, and the last thing I needed was for someone to mention to someone who mentioned to someone who stopped by the hospital that the whole thing was a performance staged for a dying man’s peace of mind. So I’d smiled and accepted the spine-rearranging hug and said nothing that wasn’t technically true, and it was fine.
It was fine.
Except that it wasn’t, because with every I always knew and every you two finally and every variation on the theme that the crew kept producing, I felt the strange and inconvenient truth of it settling a little more solidly in my chest. The ribbing was landing differently than it should have. It should have seemed like something to manage. Instead, it felt like being seen. Like the crew was saying something accurate about a thing I hadn’t yet let myself fully consider.
Powell Ferguson appeared in the bay doorway late in the afternoon and looked at me like a man who’d recently survived his own romantic catastrophe and had developed opinions as a result.
“Took you long enough,” he said.
“Donkey.”
“I had you by Christmas.” He shook his head. “Lost fifty bucks.”
“I’m devastated for you.”
“No, you’re not.” He leaned against the door frame with ease, the picture of a man with nowhere pressing to be. “She good?”
He meant Ellie. He always cut to what mattered. “She’s managing,” I said. “Gus is improving.” We didn’t know yet whether that was a false hope or not. We hadn’t discussed what we’d do if it was the real deal because that seemed like tempting fate.
He nodded. “Good.” A pause. “You good?”
A deceptively simple question. One I’d asked him myself during the ten years he’d spent in an all-out war with Jess Donnegan—mostly on her side—before he’d figured out what he’d done wrong back in high school. I wasn’t quite sure if I was happy he had the chance to return the favor.
“Working on it,” I said.
He nodded again, like that was sufficient, because it was, and pushed off the door frame and went back toward the gym.
I let the station noise wash over me—the clang of equipment, the low murmur of the television in the break room, the distant thud of someone dropping weights in the gym—and kept my hands busy with the wrench while my mind stayed stubbornly elsewhere.
I thought about the kiss.
