Page 23 of Philly
She remained silent, and he harbored hope that she’d turn and walk away. Only a tiny part of him recognized that wasn’t true. Or not entirely true. He didn’t want to talk about Laura Nolan. He didn’t want to talk at all. But he wasn’t quite sure how he really felt about her being there.
“Okay,” she said.
He looked up again only to see her bend down and grab a bottle of beer from the six-pack he’d brought out with him. She twisted the top off and dropped it back in the holder, then took a seat in the chair beside his.
He should be on guard around her. She wanted something from him he couldn’t—wouldn’t—give. But exhaustion pressed in on his heart and soul, and he was too tired to care. The past few days had drained him. He’d find his stride again, but not tonight.
They sat in silence for an indeterminate amount of time—honestly, he had no idea how many minutes passed, maybe even an hour. They each sipped their drinks, watched the fire, and kept their thoughts to themselves.
“Why are you here?” he finally asked. “You want to talk to me, I get that. But why are you sitting here now?”
She set her drink on the arm of the chair, her fingers loosely holding the bottle. “Something happened to you. I’m not asking you to tell me. But something did. I’ve seen the look. I’vehadthe look when a case went south,” she said. “Sometimes it helps to be with someone who understands. Someone you don’t need to talk to, because talking doesn’t help—not then, anyway.”
She worked white-collar crime. He’d never thought of her as having shit days. Or days that included violence and murder. But what did he really know about her? Not a whole lot. Intentionally.
“I’ll go if you want me to,” she added.
Did he? He honestly didn’t know. And now probably wasn’t the right time to think about it.
Suddenly, the fatigue that occupied his body stripped away another layer of the emotional wall he’d built to keep Callie out. He wouldn’t forget the day that she changed everything between them, but he was tired of letting it define him, define how he interacted with her. Yes, she’d taken something good and ground it to dust. But before that…before that there’d been so much more. Friendship, laughter, adventures, late nights lying on the roof of her grandparents’ house looking at stars. She’d been the one and only person he truly trusted other than his brother.
They had a decade of good memories that he’d refused to remember after that one night. But now, sitting in the dark, his defenses low as he recovered from the brutality of what he’d witnessed, he let his mind inch down that path.
He’d loved her in the way a seventeen-almost-eighteen-year-old could. It hadn’t started out that way, not at six and seven, but it had grown into that. She brought a light to his dark world that no one else ever had. He never told her that, of course. He never talked to her about his home life at all. He hadn’t wanted to drag her into his misery. She’d been his anchor. His one beautiful, good, kind thing in the storm of his childhood.
At seventeen, it had taken all his courage to ask her to his senior prom. A declaration. A step toward shifting their relationship to something more than friends. Even all these years later, he remembered the way her eyes lit up when hefinally managed to say the words. And for a moment, joy held him suspended, as if they were flying. His life was perfect.
But in the next second, her eyes shuttered and the light extinguished. He remembered the moment it happened. And the confusion that followed. She said no. But that wasn’t all she said. She’d hurled words at him that never, in a million years, would he have imagined hearing from her—not curse words, but ugly ones. Ones so unlike that girl he’d always known. The girl he loved.
He took a sip of his drink, letting the memories roll over him. She hadn’t said anything to him that night that his father hadn’t spewed a hundred times before. But coming from her, it had been worse than a surprise one-two punch to the gut. With time, he realized that it wasn’t so much the words that had destroyed him, but what he’d seen—felt—as her betrayal. In those five minutes, she changed from the girl he loved into someone he didn’t know. Someone he didn’t recognize.
Twenty years later, she was still someone he didn’t know. Did he even want to? And if he did, would he ever trust that who she showed him was real? Did it even matter? All she wanted from him was information. Maybe all this rumination was his way of avoiding thinking about the past few days.
Taking his silence for a “no,” she leaned back and let her head fall against the chair, turning her face toward the clear night sky.
“It’s beautiful here,” she murmured, more to herself, he thought, than to him.
It was a little surreal sitting there with her. Never in a million years would he have pictured the two of them like this—her a federal agent, him a former Spec Ops soldier and current business owner living in a home of his own in Northern California.
The warmth of gratitude wrapped around him. Yeah, the last few days had been complete shit, but overall, his life was prettydamn good. A thousand times better than he ever thought it would be—ever imagined it could be.
The remaining tension in his body—from Stacey’s murder to Callie’s arrival—leached away, and he relaxed. Truly relaxed for the first time in a long time. Letting his head fall back against the chair, too, he took in the stars spread across the sky in an almost unfathomable blanket.
They lapsed into silence again, but when the flames began to die, Callie uncrossed her legs and stood. He watched as she stepped close to the fire, absorbing the last of its heat.
A few minutes passed, then she turned and set her empty bottle back in the holder. She paused, hesitated, then laid a hand on his shoulder. A brief touch, then it was gone.
“I’m sorry for whatever happened, Gabriel,” she said sincerely, reminding him of the girl she’d been all those years ago. The kind one, the one who cared about him.
And then she was gone. Leaving him to wonder what the hell would happen next, because nothing was over between them. Not anymore.
13
Callie tied her running shoes and idly wondered how many more days she’d have before the snow came and trail, or even street, running became too hazardous. Would she need to find a gym? Or would she be back in DC by then, working out of the HICC headquarters?
Without an answer, her thoughts drifted to Gabriel as she rose from her squatted position. She had a lot of questions about last night. What had happened? Why was he alone and not with his brothers? Why had she stayed?
The answer to that last question came from the first two. Something badhadhappened. She could see it on his face, the weary knowledge that sometimes people could be truly horrendous. And it bothered her that he’d chosen to ride it out alone rather than with his family. And that his family had let him. She didn’t know them all that well, but it had taken her all of thirty seconds the first time she met the Falcons to understand how tight the family was.
