Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85885 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 429(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 286(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85885 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 429(@200wpm)___ 344(@250wpm)___ 286(@300wpm)
He studied Charlie, large frame overwhelming the bank chair. Charlie, with his warm hazel eyes and his lumberjack beard and his strangely excellent posture and the way he knew how to do things. He wanted Charlie to like him, to respect him, and this sure as hell wasn’t helping on either count.
“You didn’t ask,” Charlie said.
No, he hadn’t asked—his very being was the request; the need.
Freeloader, loser, moocher, sponge.
Anger fizzed up his spine. The same powerless anger that he’d felt when he was ten and he’d come home to find his mother packing his things into garbage bags and his father stuffing a hole he’d punched in the wall with balled-up toilet paper and glue.
“Where are we going?” Rye’d asked.
“We’re moving,” his mother had said.
“But I don’t want to move.”
Rye had a favorite corner of his bedroom where he’d set up his dinosaurs and his books and a blanket to sit on to read them. He had a spot under the bed where he hid his box of treasures—special things he found outside that he rescued and brought home.
“Well it’s happening,” had been his mother’s reply, one that echoed through their life for the next six years and three apartments, until Rye left home at sixteen.
The same helpless anger he’d felt when his best friend Ruth’s sleeve had snagged on a branch at lunch in tenth grade and revealed her wrist braceleted in bruises. And when he’d gotten the final eviction notice that had sent him to a friend’s couch.
An outward-facing anger that had nowhere to go so it stayed inside, racing through the veins like acid, eating away at everything it touched.
“I need to use the bathroom,” Rye said, standing abruptly.
Mike pointed behind him and Rye made his escape.
He stared in the mirror. Plain black shirt. Hair tamed into a braid. The most respectable version of himself that Charlie had been able to cultivate given what little he had to work with. Rye glared at his reflection and pulled the hair tie from his braid.
He shook his head until his hair rioted around his face in messy waves.
The door opened and Charlie’s face appeared in the crack.
“You okay in here?”
Rye glared at him.
“Yes. Jesus. What, is it unprofessional to have to use the bathroom now? Do they deny your loan if you’re a human being who needs to take a shit?”
Rye could hear the defensiveness in his own voice and he knew well that Charlie wasn’t the appropriate target, but he couldn’t help his snarl.
Charlie came in and closed the door behind him.
“What’s up?”
He said it calmly but Rye could sense his impatience. His desire to get back out there, sign the paperwork, do the deal. Fix the problem. And, of course, the problem was Rye.
Rye swallowed in an attempt to keep the anger inside him where it belonged.
“This is bullshit, Charlie,” he hissed. “I’m not letting you get yourself on the hook for this. You barely fucking know me.”
If he hadn’t been watching in the mirror he might have missed Charlie’s faint wince. But he just cleared his throat and moved on.
“I would just be an insurance policy for them. Just another mechanism for Mike to point to and say everything is going to go fine. It’s just a formality.”
“When banks and signatures are involved it’s a whole hell of a lot more than a formality! And I can’t believe you would do this when you actually have something to lose. What if I’m a...a...a total con and I disappear and leave you owing the bank a bunch of money? And you have to sell the store or your house or...do whatever? It’s stupid!”
Rye heard the word echo in the small bathroom. It was a word he tried not to use anyway, and directed at Charlie who was anything but...
“Shit, sorry,” Rye said. “You’re not stupid. It’s reckless, I meant. You’ve gotta take care of yourself.”
Charlie’s brows drew together and he stroked his beard. He was so damn beautiful.
“I think this is your only shot,” he said seriously. “If you don’t want to sell the property, there isn’t another option.” He faltered and added, “Unless you do want to sell it. Go back to Seattle.”
Charlie’s voice tumbled over the words like water over rocks, a slight disturbance that clued Rye in that maybe Charlie didn’t want him to leave.
“I don’t want that,” Rye said.
And it wasn’t until he said it that he realized how completely true it was. He didn’t want to go back to Seattle where there was nothing waiting for him but friends who’d forgotten about him, a string of interchangeable and temporary retail jobs, urban landmarks of who he’d failed and how, and always—always—the ineluctable push of new money, crowding him farther and farther out of the city.
“Well, then.”
Rye sighed and shoved his hands into his hair.