I traced a scar on his shoulder with one finger. He let me. Outside, the birds had found their full song. The dark was going gray at the edges of my yellow curtains.
"You should sleep," he said.
"You should, too."
"I will."
"When?"
"Soon."
I looked up at him. "Are you always this evasive?"
"Yes."
"Is it annoying?"
"Probably."
"It is," I said. "For the record."
"Noted."
I settled back against his chest.
I thought about ninety-four dollars, and then I thought about the way he'd saidI know that weight, and somehow the ninety-four dollars felt different than it had. Not smaller—the number was the number, it didn't care about context—but less alone. Less like a private burden I was carrying in a room by myself and more like something that had been witnessed, which was different. Which was, it turned out, a lot.
The birds got louder.
I closed my eyes.
Tommy Dane was still mostly a mystery, and I was still mostly broke, and my rent was due in fewer days than I wanted to count, and somewhere outside my window, Charleston was beginning its quiet process of becoming morning.
I fell asleep in the gray light with his heartbeat under my ear, steady as a chord I already knew.
16
TOMMY
She fell asleep against my chest and her breathing went even and her hand stayed open on my sternum—fingers loose, not holding on because she didn't have to.
I lay there looking at her ceiling.
The ninety-four dollars sat in the room like a third person.
She'd said it out loud to me. That was the part I couldn't get past. A woman who had spent the last few hours showing me she could be brave with her body had decided to be brave with her math, and the math wasI'm ninety-four dollars short on rent.She'd handed me that number the way she'd handed me the Gibson—both hands, careful, with a clear-eyed understanding of what it cost her to hand a stranger something she usually only handed a few people in her life.
I knew exactly what to do. The first impulse was clean. I had cash on me. Real cash. The kind of cash a man like me carried because the world ran on it in places the world didn't talk about. I could fold the bills into the inside pocket of her work coat where she hung it on the third hook from the left and walk out of this apartment in the morning and never say a word, andRebecca Lynn would find it on her way to a shift she wasn't going to need to make, and the math would be done.
I could also do better than that. I could hand her a card with a number on it and tell her it was hers, no strings, no expectations, and watch her face do the thing women's faces did when men showed up wearing kindness and meaningfavor.I could pay her rent for the year. Ten years. The math against my net worth was a rounding error and I knew it.
The math against her pride was the entire problem.
Because here was the thing.
I knew Rebecca Lynn already, even if I hadn't known her long.
I'd been raised by her, in a different body, in a different state, on a different ranch.
