It had been three days and Rye hadn’t come.
The day after he’d taken Rye home with him, Charlie carefully folded his laundered clothes into a bag and added first aid supplies. He took the bag to work and waited all day for Rye to come.
The next day, he got up early and went for a run, and then he did it again. For reasons he didn’t care to examine, he washed Rye’s clothes again, folded them again, placed them in the bag again. Rye still didn’t come.
Rye, dead from blood poisoning, or lying on the ground unable to come in because of infection and pain.
He told Marie what had happened. The kiss. But when he told her Rye was probably just trying to say thank you, she frowned.
“Did it ever occur to you that someone might want to kiss you just because they like you?” she asked.
He dismissed it.
That night, Charlie made chicken in mushroom soup. He made it every Thursday. Monday, it was meatloaf; Tuesday, spaghetti and meatballs; Wednesday, pizza; Friday, beef burritos. On the weekends he ate the leftovers.
As he was eating, Jane on the chair next to him eating her chicken pâté—he matched her meals to his; it was companionable—he thought about Rye.
What was Rye eating for dinner? Did he eat real meals at restaurants, or was he subsisting, as Charlie suspected, on gas station offerings? He put some leftovers for Rye into a container. Then he took them out again.
He wondered a lot of other things about Rye too. Like, did he feel the need to kiss anyone who did something marginally nice for him? And if Charlie hadn’t pulled away, what else might he have done? Pressed his lithe body against Charlie’s and let Charlie feel the lines of muscle and bone, the whisper of soft skin? Put his hot mouth on Charlie’s neck and his hands all over Charlie? Charlie shivered with desire at what could have happened next, if Charlie had let him.
Rye was exasperating, defensive, stubborn, and snarly. But he was also determined and brave. He’d moved a thousand miles from home and taken on a huge project by himself. Charlie admired that, even if watching Rye take on that project completely wrong made Charlie want to scream.
On the third day that Rye didn’t come into the shop, Charlie went to him.
Rye’s car was there, but all was quiet when Charlie pulled up. He knocked, then called, “Rye?” when he didn’t hear anything.
He heard swearing, then creaking wood, then Rye yelled, “What?”
“It’s Charlie.”
“Yeah, I know. What?”
Charlie rolled his eyes.
“You were supposed to come to the store so I could take care of your leg. Lemme in and I’ll look at it.”
“Um. That’s okay.”
“Rye.”
Charlie heard his voice do that thing that Jack always called his dad voice and forced himself to change his tone.
“Do you want your leg to fill with pus and go septic and—”
The door cracked open before he could finish painting his grisly picture.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than chase after people and tend to their wounds?” Rye grumbled.
Nope.
“Yeah, I do,” Charlie said.
Rye eased the door open just enough to slide his slim form through. His hair was a mess and there was a crease in his cheek. He pushed his hair out of his face, crossed his arms over his chest, and stuck out his leg.
“You want me to do this standing outside.”
Rye sat down on the step and stuck out his leg.
That’s when Charlie noticed Rye was still wearing the sweats he’d given him the other day, only they had a layer of...was that dust? Dirt? It was in Rye’s hair too. There was even a patina of it freckling his face. Charlie leaned in closer and swept a finger down Rye’s nose.
“What the hell?” Rye said.
Charlie’s heart sped as he recognized the grit.
“Did a wall fall down?”
Rye’s eyes went wide, then narrowed.
“No,” he snapped. Then added, “Not exactly.”
Charlie pictured Rye sleeping in the house as it crumbled around him; Rye trapped under falling debris, screaming with no one to hear or help him.
Charlie’s heart started pounding. He flung the door open and went inside, avoiding the hole in the floor. He could smell destruction. The half clean, half dirty scent of ozone and rotten wood.
The wall between the staircase and the living room gaped, its rough-hewn beams a naked skeleton and splintered wood and plaster in a heap on the floor.
There was a band of tight heat around Charlie’s chest, constricting his lungs. Terror. He swung around to Rye.
“Did this wall fall down and you stayed here anyway?”
Rye’s gray eyes were narrowed, ready to fight.
“Not...exactly...”
Charlie narrowed his eyes. “Rye. Did you tear this fucking wall down?”
The flicker of Rye’s gaze told Charlie he was right and he wheeled around and looked again. The load-bearing post was still in place, but he figured that was because Rye didn’t have the tools to remove it, not because he knew what it was.
“The whole second story could have fallen on you!” Charlie yelled, breath coming shallow and heart slamming against his ribs. “What the hell possessed you to do such an idiotic thing?”
Rye glared beams of fire.
“You’re the one who said we’d need to demo the inside before we could fix the house!”
Charlie gaped. “I—You—So—I—”
It was so reckless, so unthinking, so foolish! He could’ve been killed.
Rye scowled and hugged himself, Charlie’s sweatshirt swallowing him up.
“You can’t just demo a house! You need to know which walls are load bearing and you need a dumpster to haul the debris to. It could be full of lead or black mold or...or...anything. You need a mask and gloves and you can’t do it by yourself. Jesus, the ceiling could’ve collapsed on you as you slept. You can’t just stay here while you demo—”
He cut himself off, voice shaking so hard he was sure Rye could hear it.
Charlie felt a familiar tingling in his fingertips. The buzzing in his ears came a few seconds later and he fled from the house and into the clearing behind it.
He searched for the roof of Jack’s cabin to steady himself.
He stared at the tiny distant triangle and forced himself to breathe through his nose. He dug his thumbs into the pressure points on his wrists and tried to calm down. It had been months since he’d had to do this. Not since Jack’s accident last year. But Jack was fine now. Better than fine. Jack was thriving.
Charlie clenched his eyes shut, but all he saw with closed eyes was his parents, dead two days before his eighteenth birthday. Jack’s face when Charlie told him they were gone. Jack’s chin wobbling like it had when he was a little boy. The nights when Charlie would wake from nightmares into one.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
Rye stood to his left, Marmot in his arms.
Charlie nodded automatically.
Rye held out the cat like he was sharing a stuffed animal with a friend on the playground. Charlie shook his hands out, trying to dispel the tingling. When he took Marmot she put her paws on his shoulder and plastered herself against his chest over his heart. Her rumbling purr vibrated against his neck.
“I’m fine,” Charlie said blankly.
“Yeah, you’re clearly doing great,” Rye muttered wryly.
Charlie kept his eyes on Jack’s house. He wished he could see Jack right now. Just to make sure he was all right. Maybe he’d just send him a quick text—
“So what’s the deal with your brother? You guys estranged or something?”
“What? No. Why would you think that?”
Rye shrugged.
“You’re looking at his roof like it’s the closest you’ll ever get to him.”
“No I’m not,” Charlie grumbled. “We’re not estranged,” he felt compelled to add again.
They stood in silence for a while. It was a cool, sunny day, and the breeze felt good ruffling Charlie’s hair and kissing his face.
When Rye spoke again there was a softness to his voice.
“I didn’t just tear the wall down without thinking, you know. I googled it. I watched a bunch of videos.”
Charlie sighed. It was mildly comforting that Rye hadn’t simply started swinging a sledgehammer, but only very mildly.
“There’s stuff you can’t learn from a video. It’s... I’m sorry I yelled. But it’s so damn dangerous. Even if you’ve demoed a hundred houses, you can never completely predict what will happen. Sometimes there are places a house has settled or buckled or been eaten by termites and things just...happen.”
“I get it,” Rye said. “That’s why I stopped.”
Charlie nodded and his eyes scanned the horizon. Sometimes you could see elk around this time of year.
“Why didn’t you come into the store?” he asked finally. “I—” Waited for you. Wanted to see you. Needed to make sure you were okay.
Rye’s eyes darted to Charlie’s mouth.
“Because I was fucking embarrassed. Obviously.”
His voice was acid but his eyes were pained and his cheeks flushed.
“About the kiss.”
“Yeah, about the kiss. Of course about the kiss,” he snapped.
Charlie didn’t know what to say. He was embarrassed too, just for different reasons. Ones he had no intention of discussing with Rye at this time.
After a few moments, Rye sighed. “Okay, can we do this?” He gestured to his leg and Charlie nodded and followed him back to the porch.
“You have demo dirt all over you,” Charlie muttered, rolling up the leg of his sweatpants.
“And you have a really irritating way of making every sentence sound like an insult. Did you know that?”
Charlie looked up into gray eyes narrowed with anger. Jack had told him that before. Okay, Dad, Jack would say in his late teens whenever he thought Charlie was being overbearing. A silly choice, since their own father hadn’t been overbearing himself. Whenever Jack would say it, though, Charlie was hit with a complicated wave of anger and shame and satisfaction that usually made him walk out of the room and squeeze his eyes shut until the wave broke over him and he stopped shaking.
“Yeah. I guess I did,” Charlie said. “Sorry.”
He unpeeled the dressing and Rye hissed as the gauze stuck to the wound. That wouldn’t have happened if Rye had just let him take care of it the day after like he’d said—but he stopped himself from verbalizing that, since it would sound very, very disapproving.
Charlie had thought they’d be doing this in the store, so he’d assumed they’d have running water. But he was pretty sure if he asked Rye to come back to his house he’d get a door slammed in his face.
“Hang on a sec,” he said, and jogged to grab a bottle of water from the truck.
Despite Rye’s neglect, the wound looked no worse for wear. It wasn’t inflamed or weeping, and Charlie’s heart stopped pounding. He applied more antibacterial ointment and put on fresh gauze. He carefully rolled the sweats down over Rye’s leg and stood, offering him a hand up.
“Thanks,” Rye said softly, gesturing to his leg and to the bag of his clean clothes Charlie’d brought.
Clearly, this was the way it was with Rye. He would never seek help out; he would only accept help that came to him.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Charlie said. “I’ll help you.”
Rye blinked at him.
“Help me.”
“With the house. Obviously, with the house,” he teased.
Rye quirked a small smile.
“I’ll help you demo. I can get some friends to help. We’ll tear it down and get a sense of what would need to be done to rebuild. Then we’ll make a plan. But this is not a joke or a game. If we do this, you have to listen to me when I tell you shit’s not safe.”
“Why?” Rye asked.
“Because that shit will get you killed! I already told—”
“Why are you helping me? After what I did,” Rye clarified.
Rye’s lips, soft on his for just one moment.
Charlie windshield-wipered the thought away.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Is that supposed to be an answer?”
Charlie couldn’t tell Rye the real reasons. I couldn’t stand to see anything bad happen to you. I don’t really wanna let you out of my sight in case something bad does happen. You make me happy for some reason I haven’t quite figured out yet. You’re the most interesting thing to happen to me in years. I don’t want you to go back to Seattle because you can’t make this work.
“I like demo,” Charlie said simply. “I like projects. You’ve got a project. Besides, you’re clearly helpless without me,” he added just to watch Rye’s nostrils flare wide enough to swallow his nose. “It’ll be fun.”
“Yeah, fun, great,” Rye murmured. “I can’t pay you. I have, like, a thousand bucks to my name. I don’t suppose that would cover building a house?”
Obviously Rye knew it wouldn’t, but Charlie was pretty sure he had no clue the magnitude—in time, work, or money—of a project like building a house.
“No,” Charlie said. “But there are loans and ways to get cheap materials. We’ll talk to the bank and see what your options are. As for demo, though, I can get Jack and Simon to help, and a few buddies who’ll help us do the work if we buy pizza and let them listen to terrible honky-tonk while they work.”
“Why?” Rye asked again.
“I guess they just really like a banjo.”
“No, I mean—”
“I know what you meant. Because sometimes people like to help and it has nothing to do with who they’re helping. Because there’s not that much to do around here on the weekends. Because these folks grew up building things themselves and this is what they do. Because they like me and want to help me out. Take your pick.”
“I don’t know if I can get a loan,” Rye said. “I’ve probably got pretty bad credit.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“And you trust me enough to do that? You don’t even know me.”
“It’s a house. What are you gonna do—steal it?”
Rye was staring at the ground and when he glanced up his eyes shone. Charlie tactfully pretended not to notice.
“Okay,” Rye said. “I think you’re bananas, but okay.”
Charlie winked. “Potassium’s good for you.”
Rye snorted.
“There’s just one thing,” Charlie went on, ignoring Rye’s look of suspicion. He aimed for casual, but his muscles were tight with worry that Rye would say no.
“You can’t stay here.” Rye opened his mouth but Charlie waved him off. “No. We’ll be ripping up the whole floor, Rye. The walls will come down. You might as well sleep on the ground outside.”
“Maybe—”
“Please don’t tell me you’re such a city boy that you don’t know why it’s a bad idea to sleep in the middle of the woods with a cat.”
“Don’t worry, they have murderers in Seattle.”
“Do they have bears in Seattle?”
“Sure, if you go to the right bar on the right night.” Rye waggled his eyebrows. “I can’t afford a hotel, man. I’ll get a tent or something. I’ll be fine.”
“God, you’re infuriating!” Charlie roared. Rye was like a cat with its claws caught in fabric that tried to bite you if you attempted to free it. “I have a guest room.”
Rye snorted and clutched at his head, dragging fingers through his hair.
“You don’t even know me!” he said again. “I could murder you in your sleep. Or, or steal your stereo, or...”
Charlie was beginning to think Rye was reminding himself of the fact that they didn’t know each other.
“I know you don’t know me, but there are locks on the bedrooms and I’m gone at the store all day. I promise, you’re safe with me.”
“Yeah, I bet Bluebeard gave the same speech.”
Charlie laughed. “Well my locks are on the inside of the doors. But feel free to check the basement for murdered wives before you commit to anything.”
Rye looked at his blighted house, then back at Charlie.
“Marmot can come?”
“Marmot can come.”
Charlie could see the struggle inside Rye.
“I can just crash on the couch—”
“Why would I want you taking up my couch when I have a spare room?”
Charlie couldn’t read the expression on Rye’s face so he decided to interpret it as cautiously optimistic.
“You’re, like, not a real person,” Rye said. “You don’t just invite strangers to live with you. You don’t just offer to help strangers rebuild creepy houses they inherited from grandfathers they’ve never met.”
“Is that a yes, then?” Charlie asked.
When Rye gave a slow, puzzled nod, Charlie felt like he had won a prize.