Chapter 4 The Ones Who Stay

WREN

She lasted four days telling herself the thing in the garage hadn't meant anything, and four days was about as long as the lie held.

It wasn't one big moment that broke it. It was smaller than that....cage showing up at the kitchen table every morning at the same time she did, like it was coincidence, like either of them believed it was coincidence. Cage teaching her, without being asked, how to check her own oil on the loaner bike Ruth had produced from somewhere with the casual explanation that nobody walks around here, sweetheart, you'll learn to ride or you'll learn to hate walking. Cage standing a half-step closer than strictly necessary every time they ended up in the same room, close enough that she'd started, God help her, arranging herself to be in the same rooms.

"You're staring," Ruth said, not looking up from the ledger she was squinting at, on the fifth morning, when Wren had been very obviously not staring at Cage across the yard for a full two minutes.

"I'm not."

"You are. Everybody's noticed. Tiny's got a pool going."

Wren felt her face go hot. "A pool."

"On how long before you two stop pretending. I put money on next week. Personally I think you'll both hold out longer than that out of pure stubbornness, but the smart money's on next week." Ruth finally looked up, and whatever amusement had been in her voice softened into something more careful. "For what it's worth. He hasn't looked at anybody like that in three years."

"Since Delilah." Wren hadn't meant to say the name....had only heard it once, from Tiny in the garage doorway, in a tone that made clear it wasn't hers to ask about yet....but it came out anyway, testing the air.

Ruth's face did something complicated. "That's his to tell you. Not mine."

"Is it bad?"

"It's his," Ruth said again, gentler this time, and went back to the ledger, which was answer enough that Wren didn't push.

She found him that evening on the back steps again.....his spot, she was starting to think of it, though she was starting to think of a lot of things here as belonging to specific people in specific ways, a whole map of a world she hadn't lived in two weeks ago. He had a beer he wasn't drinking and a look on his face like a man doing math he didn't like the answer to.

"Ruth mentioned a pool," Wren said, sitting down beside him without asking, the way he'd done to her that first morning. Fair was fair.

Cage huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Tiny's pool's been running for a week. I told him to shut it down. He did not shut it down."

"How much is riding on next week?"

"More than I want to know." He turned the beer bottle in his hands, not drinking it, and the easy humor faded into something more careful.

"Wren, I've got to say something, and I need you to let me finish before you say anything back."

Her stomach tightened, the specific, familiar tightness of bracing for a version of a conversation she'd already lived once, with a different man, in a different life. "Okay."

"I like you." He said it plain, no performance in it, which was somehow worse than if he'd dressed it up. "More than is smart, more than makes sense for a man in my position with a woman in yours. And I've spent five days telling myself that the smart thing, the right thing, is to keep enough distance that when Crane's people finally catch up to whatever it is you're carrying.....and they will, Wren, that's not a maybe....it doesn't take this club down with it. Doesn't take you down with it."

"But."

"But I'm not good at the smart thing lately. Not around you." He finally looked at her, and there was nothing careful left in his face at all. "So I need you to tell me if I'm imagining this.

Because if it's just me standing out here doing math on my own, I can live with that. I've lived with worse. But I don't think it's just me."

CAGE

He watched her take her time answering, and made himself hold still for it, made himself not fill the silence the way he wanted to, because some part of him....the part that had learned this lesson expensive, three years ago, with a woman whose name still cost him something to say out loud....knew that pushing wasn't going to get him the truth. Only patience would.

"It's not just you," Wren said finally.

Something in his chest loosened that he hadn't fully realized was clenched.

"But," she went on, and he braced for it the way he'd have braced for a punch, "I've got a fiancé's ring in a drawer upstairs I still haven't figured out what to do with, and a father who probably thinks I'm dead in a ditch somewhere, and a thing in my bag that's going to bring real trouble to this door whether I want it to or not. I am not....Cage, I am not a good bet right now. On any level."

"I didn't ask if you were a good bet."

"You should have."

"I've made worse bets on better odds." He set the beer down, untouched, and turned to face her fully, close enough now that neither of them was pretending the closeness was accidental anymore. "I'm not asking you for anything tonight. Not asking you to hand me whatever's in that bag, not asking you to figure out your whole life in the next five minutes. I'm asking if there's a version of this where we let it move slow. Where I don't touch you until you tell me to, and you don't run until you've actually decided you want to, instead of just because running's the only thing you know how to do right now."

Her breath caught, audible in the quiet of the evening, and Cage watched her turn that over ....watched her, for the first time since she'd sat down on this stool five days ago, look at him without any of the bracing, careful distance she'd been keeping.

"Slow," she said, like she was testing the word for weight. "I don't know if I remember how to do slow. Aldous wasn't slow. Aldous was ....decided. Everything with him was already decided before I got a say."

"I'm not Aldous."

"I know that." She said it fast, fierce, like it mattered to her that he understood she knew it. "That's not....I'm not comparing you. I'm telling you I don't have practice at this. At someone waiting on my say instead of just deciding for both of us."

"Then we'll get you practice." He didn't reach for her. Wanted to, badly enough that it cost him something not to, but he'd meant what he said, and a man who didn't mean what he said when it mattered wasn't the kind of man worth her trusting. "No rush on it. I've got nowhere better to be."

She looked at him a long moment in the dying light, something working itself loose behind her eyes, and when she finally spoke, her voice had gone soft in a way he hadn't heard from her yet.

"Okay," she said. "Slow."

Neither of them moved. But she didn't get up and leave, either, and when her hand found the step beside his...not quite touching, close enough that the space between them hummed with the not-touching....Cage understood that slow didn't mean nothing, and found he could live with that math just fine.