Nobody answers that. Good.
Cam is behind the bar, and she watches me cross the room with that look she gets. The one that means she's already worked out what happened and has thoughts about it that she'll share whether you want them or not. She puts a beer in front of me before I've asked for it and leans on the bar.
"That wasn't a great thing to do, Austin. That's not you. You love that girl."
"I know that." I take a long drink and set the bottle down carefully. "I'm not good enough for her. She needs to go and live her life, and she wasn't going to do that if I just said goodbye to her. She'd have stayed or she'd have come back, and I couldn't let her do either."
Cam looks at me for a long moment with a look on her face that's complicated. The look isn’t quite disagreement, not quite agreement but sits somewhere between the two.
"It was the best thing to do," she says finally, "but you still feel like a fucking asshole."
"Because I am one."
"Yeah." She picks up a glass and starts polishing it. "You're a good one though."
I feel a hard slap on my shoulder and Seb drops onto the stool beside me. He's been a prospect a couple of months longer than me. He's got the look of a man who watched the whole afternoon play out and has a lot to say about it. He points at my beer in a question and Cam puts one in front of him.
"That's because you are a fucking asshole," he says. Not unkindly. Just stating a fact.
"I know. Don't remind me."
"I'm going to remind you every day for the rest of your life. Not about her," he adds, with a sideways look. "About the fact that you thought this was the way to handle it."
"It was the best thing to do for her."
"Yeah, probably." Seb drinks his beer and doesn't elaborate on that. He's not the kind of man who piles on once he's made his point. That's one of the things I like about him. After a while he says, "She's going to be a doctor."
"Yeah."
"Good doctor?"
I think about Savannah, the way she is when something matters to her, the absolute focus she brings to the things she cares about. "Best one anyone's ever seen."
Seb nods like this is satisfying rather than painful. "Then you did the right thing, even if you did it the wrong way." He holds up his bottle. "To doing the right thing the wrong way."
I touch my bottle to his. "To being an asshole for the right reasons."
We drink.
Cam shakes her head at both of us. "You boys know nothing about women."
We sit there drinking for a few hours. The clubhouse settles back into itself around us, the music, the voices, the ordinary noise ofmen at the end of a working day, and I drink steadily. I don't let myself think about Savannah in her bedroom crying, because if I do that I'll go to her, and going to her would undo everything.
The pain in my chest is going to stay there for a while. That's the deal I made.
I breathe through it. I drink my beer.
I let her go.
Razor callsme into his office at nine the next morning.
I'm already in the garage when Brick comes to get me, and there's a warning in the way Brick walks over and says, "Prez wants you." That tells me this is more than a casual conversation. I wipe my hands on a rag and follow him across the yard.
Razor's office is at the back of the main building, away from the noise. He's behind his desk when I come in and he doesn't look up straight away, just finishes what he's writing, caps the pen, and sets it down. Then he looks at me.
I've been around Razor enough by now to know that he doesn't waste words and he doesn't inflate situations. When he speaks he means exactly what he says. No more, no less. That clarity is one of the things that makes him easy to respect and uncomfortable to be in front of when you've done something worth discussing.
"Shut the door," he says.
