"Yeah," he said. "I am."
He kissed me then—slower, more deliberate, the kind of kiss that wasn't going anywhere in a hurry because it didn't need to. The kind that was its own destination.
Later, when the city had gone its deepest dark and the church bell somewhere over on Meeting Street had counted an hour neither of us acknowledged, he was on his back and I was tucked against his side and we'd been quiet long enough that I'd almost thought he'd fallen asleep.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Mm."
"What do you actually do?"
A pause. Not the pause of someone who didn't hear. The pause of someone deciding.
"I told you. Consulting."
"You told me a word," I said. "That's not the same as telling me."
He was quiet. I felt his chest rise and fall once, slow.
"I work for people who need problems solved," he said. "The kind of problems that don't have a standard solution. I go where they send me, I assess what I find, and I fix it, if I can."
"That's still not very specific."
"No."
"Is it dangerous?"
Another pause. Longer.
"Sometimes."
I let that sit. I didn't like it—the vagueness of it, the careful edges—but I understood, the way I understood the rooms he kept closed, that pushing would only get me the shape of the door and not what was behind it.
"Are you in danger now?" I asked. "In Charleston?"
He turned his head and looked at me.
"Not tonight," he said.
Which was not the same asno. I noticed that. I filed it somewhere I'd come back to later, and I let it go for now because his hand had moved to my waist and the lamp was low and the city outside my yellow curtains was doing its slow, dreaming thing, and later could be later.
"The consulting," I said. "Does it pay well?"
“Well enough.”
"I'm not asking because?—"
"I know why you're asking." He said it without edge. "You're asking because you're a woman who thinks about money honestly and you wanted to know the landscape."
I looked at him. "That's exactly why."
"It pays plenty,” he said. "More than I need. Which is a strange thing to get used to, coming from where I came from. Having more than you need." He paused. "We were genuinely poor when I was young. After my daddy left, my mama held the ranch together on not much and made it look easier than it was. Then when I was maybe fifteen, sixteen, somebody came out and walked the back forty and said there might be something underneath it. Turned out there was. Oil. Not a gusher—nothing dramatic—but enough. Enough that the math changed overnight in the way math sometimes does out in West Texas, where the ground decides it's done being poor before the people do." He was quiet a moment. "Strange thing, that. Watching your mama cry at a kitchen table because, for the first time in her life, the number on the paper had room in it."
"Did it fix things?" I asked.
"Some things," he said. "The ones money could fix. The others it just—illuminated. Made clearer. Turns out money doesn't solve what's already broken. It just stops you from having to ignore it."
"Yes," I said. Quiet and immediate. "That's exactly it. That's the thing I don't know how to explain to people who didn't grow up that way."
