Page 79 of Handful

He took a pull of his beer, eyes going out over the room. “But I wasn’t guessing about you. I’d already watched you do the work. I knew what was in there. I just had to make you sick enough of yourself to go dig it out.” He looked back at me. “You don’t hear soft. Never have. So I went hard.”

I remembered his words — and how they had gutted me worse than losing the girl had. “And if it hadn’t worked?”

“I’d have found a harder way. Knocked it into your skull if it came to that.” The corner of his mouth moved. “You were getting there one way or the other. I gave you the fast route.”

“Charming.”

“Not a charming man.” He looked at me a second longer. “I’m proud of you.” He slapped me on the back, hard. “You climbed out of a hole you dug, in the dark, with me standing over you telling you it might not be enough. That’s the man I wanted at my table. He showed up.”

I nodded, figured that was the end of it. But Dutch wasn’t done. He turned and found Austen — she’d stayed close, the way she’d said she would — and tipped his head, calling her over. She came. He bent and said something that I didn’t catch over the noise. She nodded, and whatever it was put a shine in her eyes.

“What’d he say?” I asked her when he’d moved off.

“Nope.” She shook her head. “My ears only.”

I didn’t push. I watched Dutch go back into the crowd, Indira folding into his side, and thought — not for the first time that year — that I’d have followed him into anything.

After that, a beer got shoved into my hand. Somebody tried to start a chant of my name and got three words in before it fell apart laughing. I lost track of all of it — the music, whoever was yelling — everything except Austen. She stayed mostly stuck to my side, and the couple of times she drifted an inch I pulled her back into me.

She tugged on my arm. I looked down at her, then followed her eyes across the room.

Glitch and Wren had found a table off to the side of the noise. Wren was tucked into him, looking up at him the way she always did — like he’d personally hung the stars — and Glitch had an arm around her, easy and sure, the way a man holds onto the thing he means to keep. She was giggling up at him.

“Made for each other, those two,” Austen said, soft.

“Yeah,” I said, watching them. “They are.”

She pressed in closer, fit herself under my arm, and slid her free hand inside my cut, flat over my heart, where her name was.

I stood like that a good long while — a beer I wasn’t drinking in one hand, her other hand in mine, lifting it every so often to kiss her knuckles for no reason except that I could — and let the party roar on around us.

A while in, she leaned up to my ear. “Tyler. You’re going to have to let me go.”

“Never.”

“I need the bathroom.”

“Straight there and straight back,” I said. “No stopping to talk to strangers.”

She laughed at me, kissed my jaw, and slipped out from under my arm. I let her go like it cost me something, because it did.

Then I watched her cross the room, because I couldn’t not. The last time she’d walked away from me in here she hadn’t come back, and it wrecked me for six weeks.

Halfway across the floor she looked back, caught me watching and blew me a kiss.

Fewin caught the whole sorry picture from a couple of feet away and laughed at me.

“She’s coming back, brother.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “And if she doesn’t — you know fucking her senseless works. Every damn time.”

And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, that’s exactly when Steph found me.

I hadn’t seen Steph in three years. Good-time girl, moved to Phoenix with some guy, no trouble to anybody — we’d had a couple of nights a long time ago. She came out of the crowd in a way I used to live for and put her hand flat on my chest.

“Handful! Look at you. SAA. I’m back in town, I heard you were the man of the hour—” Her hand slid an inch. “And I distinctly remember being very good at helping you celebrate.”

A year ago I wouldn’t have heard the end of that sentence. I’d have been halfway to a private room.

My only worry was Austen — whether she’d stepped out of that hallway and seen a strange woman’s hand on my chest, and what she’d make of it if she had. Not a flicker of doubt about me. I was hers down to the ink and I knew it. But I’d watched her decide about me once already, and I was never handing her another reason. I had Steph’s hand off me before she finished talking — friendly, done. “Steph. Good to see you. I’m spoken for.”