“Are we going to be doing this all night?” I tease.
We smile again and the flash goes off. Benji looks at the screen.
“Perfect,” he says, his voice cracking.
He hands me the phone. “What do you think?”
There we are. Two smiling men. One in a wheelchair in a sheriff’s uniform. One crouching beside him wearing a wide smile that I’m grateful for after the weekend we’ve had.
“This is the one,” I say. “I’m uploading it now and I’ll pick it up at the drugstore on my way into work in the morning. It’ll be on my desk before my first cup of coffee.”
He stands and looks at the photo on the screen one more time. “We look good together, Mickey,” he says. Then he stepsback and the bright smile for the photo fades. The hurt is still there. He’s been holding it in.
“Come here, sweetheart,” I say, holding out my arms to him.
“You’ve never called me sweetheart before,” he says, moving towards me.
“I should’ve. There’s a lot of things I should’ve done. Please, come sit with me.”
He walks over. I pull him down onto my lap the way we’ve done a hundred times in this room — his legs across mine, his arm around my neck, his weight settling against my chest.
“I owe you more explanation than what I said on the porch,” I say.
“Mickey —”
“I need you to hear it and I need to say it while I’m looking at you.”
He doesn’t answer but he doesn’t move. His hand finds the collar of my uniform shirt and his fingers rest there, against the fabric.
“Do you remember the day you were sitting at the bar talking to Sheila about the lighting? You were arguing about the overhead fixtures.”
“I remember,” he says. “They’re still too harsh.”
“A guy named Ernie came in that day. He’s a regular. Retired plumber. Good man. He looked at you for one secondlonger than he’d look at anyone else and then he moved on. That was it. One second. No big deal.”
Benji doesn’t say anything.
“My brain took that one second and ran it through every person who might walk into the bar that night. The Saturday crowd. The bikers. The tourists who’ve had too many drinks and get loud. I sat there running scenarios about what might happen while you were three feet away from me talking about light fixtures.”
“What kind of scenarios?” he asks.
“Someone deciding your eyeliner is a problem. A hand reaching for your shirt. A man calling you a word I can’t unhear. And me sitting in this chair unable to stand up. Unable to get between you and whatever might happen.”
His fingers tighten on my collar.
“That’s when I moved my hand,” I say. “You reached for me on the bar top and I held it for a second and then I let go. I put my hand on the armrest. You thought I was tired.”
“I remember,” he says. “I noticed. Figured you might be tired.”
“I was putting distance between you and a target. Because I decided — without asking you, without telling you — that if someone in that bar saw my hand touching yours and had a problem with it, they wouldn’t come for me. I’m in a wheelchair. They’d come for you. And I can’t get out of this chair fast enough to stop it.”
He pulls back enough to look at me. I can’t read his face and that scares me because Benji’s face is an open book.
“Are you telling me that every time you pulled your hand away from me,” he says, “you were running a threat assessment?”
“Yes.”
“On Ernie. An old retired plumber who is a good man.”
