Rye was back.
Charlie saw him come in from the doorway to the office and stayed out of sight.
He looked tired, angry, and sheepish, and Charlie’s heart beat a little faster. Rye looked like a wild animal that had crept cautiously close enough to feed.
He said something to Marie that Charlie couldn’t hear and Marie pointed him toward the back.
“So,” Rye said, standing in the doorway. “You, um, helping me. With the house...thing. What would that look like?”
He had his arms crossed over his chest, nearly hugging himself.
Charlie felt a rush of satisfaction and relief. He was going to be able to fix this. He wasn’t going to have to watch Rye get crushed by a falling beam, or do everything wrong, or get taken advantage of by untrustworthy contractors.
“Well,” he said, keeping his voice calm so he didn’t scare Rye away with his enthusiasm. “I’d need to come into the house and see what we’re dealing with. Then you and I would talk about what your goals are for the space. And we’d go from there.”
“Fine.”
“I’m assuming there’s no electricity?”
“So?” Rye was instantly defensive.
“So, I’d like to come while it’s light out so I can see.”
“Oh. Right. Okay.”
Rye glared at the floor, hands fisted by his sides.
“I could meet you there in about an hour if that works?”
“Okay.” Rye almost seemed to squirm away from the word. “I don’t know why you’d want to do all this work to help me, but okay.”
“I’ll meet you there in an hour,” Charlie said.
Rye nodded and took a shuffling step.
“Thanks.” He said it without turning around and left before Charlie said anything. He seemed be limping a little.
Rye was sitting outside on the sagging front step, hood up and arms wrapped around his knees, when Charlie pulled up. His long, dark hair tumbled out of the hood and around his shoulders, and when he looked up his gray eyes flashed. He looked young and sad.
When he stood, though, that glare was back; Charlie was starting to think it was just his default expression, so he decided to ignore it.
In fact, Charlie decided he’d just do what he’d do if he were alone, and not worry about Rye. He’d walked through a lot of houses and evaluated a lot of construction jobs. This wasn’t any different.
His willpower on that front was instantly shattered when they walked inside and he saw a hole in the floor and Rye’s wince as he put weight on his right leg. His heart started to beat faster at the thought of what might have happened.
“Did you fall through the floor?”
“Uh, kinda stomped through it.”
Charlie got slowly to his knees and shined his keychain flashlight into the hole in the floor. The boards were water-damaged, certainly, but he couldn’t see enough this way to determine if there was foundation damage too.
He didn’t even like to contemplate all the things Rye could’ve been exposed to—six different types of mold, animal droppings, rabies—
He cut off his thought spiral and pictured windshield wipers clearing the troubling images from his mind.
In the first year after his parents’ death, Charlie had been in survival mode. Take care of Jack, make sure they didn’t lose the house or the business, learn how to be a grown-up.
It was the year after that, around his nineteenth birthday, when the images had begun—broken, bloody thoughts forced into his head against his will: turn on the garbage disposal—see a mangled hand. Stop at the gas station—see it going up in flames. Watch a coworker climb a ladder—see it falling and smashing them to the ground. That they didn’t feel like his thoughts at all made them even more upsetting.
He’d gone to a therapist then, trembling as he told her about the horrifying pictures slipped unbidden into the slide projector of his mind. He had admitted his deepest fear: that they were his thoughts—dark, violent thoughts that meant something dark and violent about him.
She’d settled that fear by giving them a name—intrusive thoughts—and an antidote: the windshield wipers that scraped the images away as if they were a fallen leaf or a sluice of rain. He’d used the trick ever since. The intrusive thoughts had lessened over the years, but had never gone away. Now when they happened, they were mostly about Jack. The fall he’d taken in the autumn had exacerbated them for several months.
He’d begun to get them back under control recently. At least he’d thought so.
Still on his knees, he took a deep breath and put a hand on Rye’s shoe.
“Can I see?”
Rye looked down at him, frowning, but then he bit his lip and gave one short nod.
Charlie lifted the leg of his jeans gently. Rye’s ankle looked slightly swollen, but probably just tweaked, not sprained. He untied the gray bandana. The bottom half of Rye’s shin was a mess of bruises and a long, fairly deep cut ran through the middle.
Rye was holding his breath. The cut looked painful but probably not so deep that it required stitches. Charlie could see just by looking at it that it hadn’t been well cleaned, though.
Infection, disease, blood poisoning, gangrene, amputation—
Charlie pictured the windshield wipers, scraping every frightening thought clear.
“Come home with me,” Charlie said, chest tight. He retied the bandanna and rolled down Rye’s pant leg. Then he stood and made for the door.
“What? No.”
“We need to clean that cut. Dress it properly.”
“I thought you were gonna look at my house.”
“That can wait.”
“But you’re here now,” Rye said, looking genuinely confused.
Charlie sighed.
Wipe, wipe, wipe. It’s not an emergency. Rye isn’t going to die. It’s okay to wait. Waiting won’t make things worse.
“All right. I’ll look at the house, then you’ll come home with me. We can take care of your leg and talk about the house then. Okay?”
“Sure.”
Charlie walked through the house, testing the floors, prying back boards to look at the joists, and tapping at the drywall, trying not to imagine infection blooming in Rye’s blood and traveling through his whole body. Rye trailed behind him, asking questions and biting his lip when Charlie found something structurally unsound. Which was a lot of things.
When he was examining the fireplace, Rye pointed to some fragments of wood that lay unburnt among the ash.
“I think someone burned the dresser from the bedroom. Maybe the bed frame too.”
Charlie looked closely at the wood.
“Could be.”
“Maybe kids, hanging out? Or, uh, you know, satanists.”
Charlie assumed he was kidding.
“Guess it depends on whether you found candy bar wrappers or a goat carcass in a pentagram,” Charlie said dryly.
Rye grinned. A real, natural, can’t-help-it grin, and it was like someone turned on the sun. He had two perfect dimples and his crooked teeth were utterly charming. The smile lit up his eyes and made his face inviting and warm.
Damn.
“I found cheap candles,” Rye said.
“Hmm. Could go either way.”
That got a laugh out of Rye, who looked surprised by it. Charlie was used to that. People told him all the time that he had no sense of humor.
Something niggled at the back of Charlie’s mind and he looked up into the chimney to check the flue.
“In the fall, my brother told me he saw smoke coming from over here,” Charlie remembered. “He kept saying the smoke was coming at a different time than usual. I thought it was just because he’d broken his leg and was going all Rear Window, making up a mystery to occupy him. But now I wonder if he saw people squatting here.”
Rye’s eyes cut to his sleeping bag and duffel bag in the corner at squatting and he walked away. Charlie followed him up the stairs. It was a small space relative to the rest of the house, as if Rye’s grandfather was so sure that he’d always live alone that he didn’t even leave space for that to change.
The idea made Charlie sad.
He’d spent the last two years turning his own house into a place with the possibility for anything. Some days—many days—he’d wondered why he was doing it. Sure, Jane loved to roll around in the sawdust and plaster dust his renovations created, but beyond that...
Because the truth was that he could have turned the spare room into a woodworking studio. He didn’t need a bigger kitchen because he cooked basic, practical meals for one. When he wanted to see the sky and the trees he simply walked outside.
But something had driven him to create something more. More flexible, more welcoming...just more.
Only very early in the morning and very late at night was Charlie able to admit to himself that maybe it wasn’t his dream house he was building. That maybe he was building it for someone he hadn’t met yet; for a life he didn’t yet have.
“So?” Rye was looking up at him in a way that made Charlie realize he’d been standing at the top of the stairs, staring.
Mismatched chairs were set up in a circle around a milk crate with candles on top; the mattress pushed up against the wall.
“Probably kids,” Charlie said. “If it was squatters, I’d think the mattress would be on the floor.” Rye bit his lip, frowning. “Chances are they started burning the dresser and bedframe when it got seriously cold.”
Rye nodded.
“Where are you from, anyway?” Charlie asked.
“Seattle.”
“Hear it’s nice there. Temperate.”
Rye nodded. So much for conversation, then. Charlie got back to his inspection. When he began to tug a piece of fabric out of the wall, Rye stopped him.
“Oh, wait. Leave that. It’s...there’s a squirrel...situation. I don’t want it to get stuck again. It screamed.”
Rye shuddered and a tiny warmth bloomed in Charlie’s gut, imagining scrappy, tattooed Rye rescuing a squirrel.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“You’re done?” Rye asked.
“I’ve seen all I can see without tools. Let’s take care of your leg.”
“But—”
“There’s nothing more we can do here today. So let’s see to your leg and talk this over,” Charlie said firmly.
Rye frowned. He took the stairs slowly, as if now that their business was done he could let himself acknowledge that he was in pain.
On the ground floor, Rye made a kissing sound and the hell beast that had attacked Charlie came prancing in.
“Can I bring Marmot?” Rye asked.
Charlie frowned. “Why?”
Rye’s eyes flashed. “Because.”
Well that explained that.
Charlie ran a hand through his hair.
“I have a cat. Not sure they’ll get along.” He eyed the tiny cat suspiciously, imagining it hurting Jane.
“Oh.” Rye chewed his lip mercilessly. Marmot sprang into his arms and then his shoulder, purring audibly. Rye pressed his cheek into the cat’s fur. “She could—” he started to offer, then shook his head. “Never mind. It’s fine.”
“Does she just stay with you? She doesn’t run away?”
“She always comes back,” Rye said. Marmot curled her tail around Rye’s neck like a scarf, tip twitching against his throat.
Charlie reminded himself that although Rye was a little snarly, he was in a brand new place, clearly roughing it in a house he was now responsible for, with no idea how to take care of it. The cat seemed to relax Rye, so if that’s what it took to keep him calm enough to care for his leg, Charlie could make it work. Jane would probably be curled up on his bed, happy to snooze through the whole incident anyway.
“She can come,” Charlie said, mentally rolling his eyes at himself for being such a sucker for Rye that he was letting a hell beast come to his house.
“Yeah?” Rye’s face lit up and he quickly looked down. “Okay, thanks. C’mon, Marmot.”
“Why don’t I drive. I’ll drop you back after.”
“Do you have a phone charger thingie?”
“I have a USB adapter.”
Rye nodded and grabbed a cord from his car. “You mind?”
Charlie plugged the cord in and handed Rye the end. He put his phone to charge.
Marmot sat on Rye’s lap as they drove, occasionally putting her front paws up on the dashboard to peer out the window. It was a little bit cute, Charlie decided.
“She’s pretty fierce for a tiny little thing.”
“Yeah, she can take care of herself.”
“Why’d you name her Marmot?”
“Oh, uh. I found her stuck in an oil can outside where I used to work. And when I pulled her out she was all sticky and covered in oil. I thought she looked like one of those little seals—the kind that get stuck in oil spills. And I kept calling her a little marmot because I thought it was a kind of seal, cuz there’s the outdoor company Marmot, right, and that’s where I got my sleeping bag and it’s called something like a seal sleeping bag. I don’t know. I googled marmot later and realized it’s not a seal—it’s like a big squirrel, but whatever.”
Charlie found that utterly adorable.
It was about a twenty-minute drive to his house. Rye fiddled with his hair, untangling the long, dark strands, and Charlie forced himself not to look at him. When he finally allowed himself to glance over at a stoplight, Rye was asleep, head resting against the back of the seat, Marmot curled up in his lap.
In sleep, Rye’s face was lovely. The angles of his cheekbones and jaw, his expressive eyebrows, and delicately pointed chin. The curve of his lips and the long line of his throat. Inky barbs clawed their way out of his collar, but Charlie couldn’t tell what the tattoos were of.
He must have been exhausted to fall asleep so quickly. Charlie drove carefully, avoiding any bumps that might wake him.
He turned off the truck in the driveway and had the strangest sensation of something momentous occurring.
Even after they stopped moving, Rye didn’t wake. Charlie kept expecting him to, but one minute turned into five, and five turned into ten, and Charlie realized he was watching Rye sleep as if he had any right to such intimacy. Marmot yawned, blinked her eyes open, and stared at him from Rye’s lap.
“We’re here,” Charlie forced himself to say, under the cat’s scrutiny.
Rye blinked awake and as the second consciousness returned so did his furrowed brow.
“Did I fall asleep? Jeez, sorry.”
“It’s fine. Come on in.”
Rye carried Marmot from the car, eyes everywhere.
“Whoa. Did you really build this?” he asked, taking in the not-quite-finished addition to the side of the house.
A rush of pride washed through Charlie.
“Not all of it. It was a small house originally. I gutted it and redid the interior about ten years ago. I’ve been adding to it over the last few years.”
When he closed the door behind them, he heard the familiar thump that was Jane jumping off the bed to greet him.
A minute later, she appeared at the end of the hallway and slunk majestically toward them.
“That’s Jane.”
Rye snorted. “I guess that makes you Tarzan?”
Charlie shook his head. It was exactly what Simon, Jack’s partner had said, when he’d begun feeling comfortable enough around Charlie to joke around.
Before Charlie could say anything, Marmot jumped from Rye’s arms and shot down the hallway. Charlie rushed after her, ready to throw himself between this cat bullet and Jane, but his movements were slow motion in comparison.
He had visions of a vicious fight—tufts of fur flying and claws scratching at his sweet Jane, who might’ve been large but would never hurt anything. He vibrated with tension, ready to pluck the hell beast off Jane at any sign of aggression.
But Marmot didn’t attack. She slid to a halt a foot from Jane and stuck out her nose. Half Jane’s size and sleek where Jane was fluffy, Marmot circled Jane, sniffing at her. Jane stood still and let herself be sniffed.
Marmot yipped and Jane meowed her ripping metal meow. Then Jane plopped down in the middle of the hallway and Marmot began licking her all over as Jane purred.
Charlie couldn’t believe his little lone wolf was instantly won over.
“Not what I thought was going to happen,” Charlie said. No longer worried about Jane, he could focus on Rye. “Let’s get you taken care of.”
He led Rye to the master bathroom. He loved this bathroom. The floor was a deep indigo penny tile and the shower a herringbone of a sea glass blue so light you had to look twice to be sure of the color. It had taken two weeks to tile.
The shower was the most luxurious thing in the house. Once his back had begun to ache at the end of a long day and his knees twinge with too much kneeling, he stood under the shower and let the heat pour over his aching body and imagined that the warmth of it could follow him when he dried off. It was the one thing in the house he’d designed just for himself.
Charlie got the first aid kit from under the sink and turned to find Rye staring at the shower with naked longing. Probably sleeping on the floor of an unheated house with no water didn’t provide many opportunities to take one.
“You wanna take a shower?” Charlie offered.
He could see the moment when Rye’s kneejerk no was coming—the flared nostrils and narrowed eyes—but then Rye looked down.
“So bad,” he said sheepishly, and raised his eyes to Charlie’s.
Charlie forgot to speak for a moment. In the light of his bathroom, Rye’s gray eyes were the same saturation as that sea glass tile—luminous and tumbled smooth by the violence of the oceans that surrounded them.
“Uh, yeah, be my guest,” Charlie said.
He looked at Rye’s clothes. Jeans streaked with dirt, a faded black long-sleeved T-shirt for some band he’d never heard of, a too-big jean jacket lined with fleece.
“If you put your clothes outside, I’ll stick them in the wash and leave you some sweats,” he offered.
Rye’s pupils dilated.
“Thanks,” he said softly. “Or...maybe you better let me do it. They’re probably a little ripe.”
Charlie waved his concern away.
“Take your time. I’ll just...check on the cats.”