Chapter 11: The Friday Run
Niles hadn't slept. He sat on the kitchen counter at six in the morning with the phone in his lap like it might bite, smoking his third cigarette, ash falling into his bare feet. Gavin moved through the room behind him getting ready, and every sound of it landed in Niles's chest like a dropped wrench.
Zipper. Belt. The creak of the couch when he sat to pull on his boots.
"Say it again," Niles said, not turning around.
"You're gonna lose your voice if you keep this up."
"Say it."
Gavin came up behind him, and there was a moment where Niles felt the bandaged palm press flat against his shoulder blade, deliberate, so he'd know it was real. "I walk in. I buy the front. I walk out. Same as shopping."
"With my two forty stitched into the price."
"With your two forty stitched into the price," Gavin agreed. His mouth found the back of Niles's neck, dry-lipped, quick. "You'll have it counted by midnight."
Niles turned his head and kissed him, rough, tasting cigarettes and the sour edge of the morning. "You bleed on it, I'm not paying for dry cleaning."
"You're not paying for anything. That's the whole point." Gavin stepped back, tugged his sleeve down over the stitches, and Niles watched him do it, watched the gray cotton swallow the dark line of the wound. Gavin caught him looking. "It's a sleeve, Niles. Not a bandage. Nobody's gonna see a thing."
"Marcus's people see everything."
"Yeah," Gavin said, and smiled, and it was the conman's smile, the one with nothing behind it but gears. "And I'm gonna be a beautiful thing to see."
The door closed. Niles put the phone back in his lap and lit another cigarette off the last one, and the house went quiet the way it always did when Gavin left, like a room missing a wall.
The shop on the east side smelled like motor oil and rust, warm metal baking in the light through the high windows. Two men were arguing over an engine block at the far end. Marcus stood near the office door, smoking, and he looked Gavin over with the slow patience of a man who priced everything by its wait time.
"You Marcus," Gavin said. Not a question.
"Depends who's asking."
"Gavin Reed. Niles's guy couldn't make it today. He sent me." He crossed the concrete with his hands loose at his sides, sleeves down, steps unhurried. "And before you get cute about it: he didn't send me because he's scared. He sent me because he's stupid with money and I'm the one who does the math."
Marcus's eyebrows went up a fraction. One of the mechanics looked over, then back at the engine.
"Math," Marcus said.
"Your guy charged him street price on a front. That's a front, right? Front means you're investing in a customer. Means the price is the point." Gavin stopped close, close enough that the smell of his cigarettes mixed with the oil in the air. "Instead you made your money on day one and left him holding garbage terms. So either you don't want regular customers, or your guy was working his own angle and you ate the bad name for it."
A long beat. Marcus dropped his cigarette and ground it under his boot. "Which one you think it was?"
"Doesn't matter to me. Matter of fact it's better for me if it was the second one. Because the second one's fixable, and fixing it costs you a number instead of a reputation."
The mechanic laughed once, short, at something in the engine block. The sunlight through the grimy glass cut a dirty gold stripe across the floor between them.
"What's wrong with your hand?" Marcus asked.
"Cooking accident." Gavin didn't move, didn't glance at it. "You calling me here about Niles's debt or my fingers?"
Marcus smiled, thin, the kind of smile that meant he'd already decided to be entertained. "You got a lot of mouth for a guy I've never seen."
"You've never seen me because I'm the guy who doesn't get seen. I'm the reason guys like Niles keep coming back with money instead of problems." Gavin tilted his head toward the office. "So let's do the part you actually came out here to do. Clean count at front price, weekly. Two forty rolls in over the first three. You keep a customer who pays on time and shuts up. I keep my name. Everybody wins except the guy who did the math wrong, and he already got his."
"And if I say the price was the price?"
"Then I say thank you for your time, and Niles finds another house, and you lose the only customer in this city who never misses a Friday. His words, not mine. I'd have told you to burn the number." Gavin's voice stayed level, almost friendly, a man discussing carburetors. "But he's sentimental. Grew up together. You know how it is."
"You and him," Marcus said. "That a thing?"
"That's my business."
"It's my business what walks through my door."
"Then here's what walks through your door," Gavin said. "A guy with clean money, clean name, and no interest in whatever your runner's been skimming. I'm the easiest Friday you've got. The question is whether you're smart enough to know it."
The silence stretched long enough for the high windows to change the light, the gold stripe crawling a foot across the concrete. One of the mechanics killed the shop radio. Marcus looked at Gavin the way he'd looked at the cigarette butt on the floor, weighing what it was worth, and Gavin stood still under it with his hands hanging and his stitched palm burning under the sleeve.
"Front price," Marcus said finally. "Weekly. Two forty comes off the top of the first three weeks, then we talk volume." He jerked his chin at the office. "Count it with me. I don't want you telling people we did you favors."
"Course not," Gavin said, following him. "Favors are bad for your reputation."
Niles called the house at noon. No answer. He stood in the kitchen with the receiver hot against his ear, listening to the ring, and Hank looked over from the couch with a beer he'd opened at ten in the morning.
"He said midnight," Hank said.
"He says a lot of things." Niles hung up and lit a cigarette off the stove burner, hands not quite steady. "He's fine. He's probably fine."
At a quarter past one the truck pulled in, and Gavin came through the door with a paper bag under his arm and blood on his collar, none of it his, grinning like the whole east side had handed him the keys.
"Whose blood is that," Niles said, already on his feet.
"Runner's nose. He had opinions about me asking to count the product." Gavin dropped the paper bag on the kitchen table and shook it open. Inside sat a brick wrapped in brown paper and a rubber-banded fold of cash. "His opinion lost."
Hank leaned forward on the couch, beer dangling from two fingers. "The hell did you walk into?"
"A negotiation." Gavin pulled out a chair, sat, and rolled his sleeve back off the stitched palm like he was uncorking something. He caught Niles watching the motion and gave him a flat look. "It's fine. I didn't grip anything heavy. Sit down, both of you. This is a moment."
"North would hate that," Hank said.
"North isn't here. Moment's mine."
Gavin peeled the brick open first, showed Niles the cellophane and the stamp, let him hold it and nod, then set it aside. Then he took the fold of cash and started counting it onto the table, bills face-up, laid down one by one in neat stacks of ten. He counted with his fingertips, careful of the stitches, and his mouth moved silently with the numbers.
The room went quiet around the sound of it. Paper on wood, paper on wood. Hank drank. Niles stood at the end of the table with his arms crossed and his jaw working, watching the stacks climb.
"Six hundred gross," Gavin said, stacking the last pile. "Product cost five hundred out of Marcus, front price like we asked, which means your two-forty hole is sitting right there in this fold instead of in his pocket." He tapped the stack with two fingers. "One sixty net profit, first week. Plus the brick. Plus a standing arrangement."
"Standing arrangement," Niles repeated.
"Friday, nine a.m., front price, my name on the account. He likes me. Well." Gavin tilted his hand side to side. "He respects me, which for a guy like that is love."
"He said that? He said front price?" Niles came around the table, slow, like the money might rearrange itself if he moved wrong. "Marcus doesn't say front price to strangers."
"I'm not a stranger, I'm a solution." Gavin leaned back in the chair and finally looked up at him, and the conman smile was gone, replaced by something quieter. "I told him his runner skimmed him, made it his problem, made fixing it cheap. Gave him a customer who pays on time and a guy who does the math. He took it because taking it made him feel smart, which is the whole trick. You make them feel smart, they don't check the math."
"Whose math did you make him feel smart about?" Hank asked.
"His own. Doesn't matter, it wasn't wrong anyway. That's the beautiful part." Gavin pushed two stacks across the table toward Niles. "Two hundred forty. Your hole, closed. Count it if you want."
Niles didn't touch it right away. He stood over the stacks with the light from the kitchen window lying across them, and his hands stayed at his sides, and when he spoke his voice came out rougher than he'd aimed for. "You walked into his shop with stitches in your hand and a cracked rib and conned the only dealer in this city who still fronts."
"Somebody had to. You were gonna go back Friday with an apology and a shortfall, and he'd have smelled it on you." Gavin stood, joints cracking, one hand braced on the table. "You're a lot of things, Niles. You're not a conman. You show every card you've got. It's your worst quality and I like it, but it's not for this room."
Niles picked up one of the stacks and counted it himself, bill by bill, even though he'd watched Gavin count it. Twenty-four bills. He counted the second stack the same way. Then he put both down and pressed the heel of his hand against his eye for a second, and said nothing, which was the loudest thing he could have said.
"I need a shower and about fifteen hours of sleep," Gavin announced, heading for the hallway. "The blood is absolutely not mine, stop looking at it."
"It's on your collar."
"It was on the runner's fist first. Provenance matters."
"Hey." Niles caught his sleeve before he reached the hall, careful of the stitches without checking where they were. Gavin turned, eyebrow up, waiting. "Thank you," Niles said, like the words cost retail.
"Don't make it weird." Gavin patted his cheek with the bandaged hand, feather-light. "You can make it weird later. I've got plans for later."
He went down the hall. The shower started. Hank set his beer on the arm of the couch and looked at the money on the table, then at Niles.
"He did good," Hank said.
"He did good." Niles sat down in Gavin's warm chair and pulled the whole fold toward himself, then pushed half of it back across the wood. "His cut's in there. Don't let him pretend it isn't."
Hank nodded, and the pipes groaned upstairs, and on the table six hundred dollars lay in stacks that finally added up.
Hank left not long after, with a grunt about the liquor store and a look at Niles that said more than the grunt did. The door clicked behind him and the house went down to the sound of the shower running through the ceiling and the money on the table.
Niles stayed in Gavin's chair. He pulled the hoodie cuff of the chair's previous occupant over his fingers without noticing he'd done it, and smoked, and listened to the pipes. Around two he stubbed the cigarette out and carried the dishes from breakfast to the sink, because the kitchen was the one room he could clean without thinking.
The shower shut off. Water dripped. Then footsteps on the stairs, uneven, favoring the left side, and Gavin came into the kitchen in a towel with his hair dripping and the bandage gone from his hand, rewrapped in fresh gauze he'd done himself, crooked.
"You're doing my chore," Gavin said. "That's nesting. It's pathetic."
"You rewrapped that wrong. Come here."
"Doctor said keep it dry two days. That was four days ago. I'm ahead of schedule."
Niles put the plate down and took the hand anyway, careful, and unwound the gauze while Gavin stood there dripping on the tile and letting him. The stitches were clean, no red in the seams, the cut closed in a neat red line across the palm. Niles rewrapped it slower than the hospital had, tighter at the anchor, tucked flat.
"There," he said. "You wrap like a drunk."
"I am a drunk. Consistency matters."
Gavin tried to pull the hand back. Niles kept it. And that was the thing, neither of them moved, and the kitchen was quiet in a way kitchens in that house never were, no TV through the wall, nobody yelling, just the fridge humming and Gavin's wet hair hitting his shoulders.
"You scared me," Niles said. "This morning. When the door closed."
"I know."
"I sat there doing the math on what I'd do if you didn't come back. There's no version of it I liked."
"Come back from where? Marcus's?" Gavin's mouth twitched. "Or in general?"
"Either. Both." Niles looked at the hand he was holding, at the stitches under the gauze he'd just tied. "I didn't like any of the math."
Gavin was quiet for a second. Then he said, "You're doing the thing where you say something real and wait for me to ruin it."
"Yeah."
"I'm not gonna ruin it. I'm just slow." He stepped in, close enough that the wet heat of him came off his skin into the space between them, and his free hand came up and flattened against Niles's chest, over the sternum, no grip in it at all. "Sit down or something. You're hovering."
"I'm not hovering."
"You're a full head taller than me and you're using it. Sit."
Niles sat in the chair and Gavin, absurdly, in the towel, sat sideways across his lap like it was nothing, like it wasn't the first time in two years they'd been in the same space without a fight under it somewhere. His ribs had to ache. He didn't flinch. He put his wrapped hand on Niles's shoulder and looked at him from four inches away, and his eyes were tired and clear, still damp at the edges from the shower.
"Say the thing," Gavin said quietly.
"Which thing."
"You know which thing."
"Mine," Niles said. His voice came out low and rough and there was no fight left in it to hide behind. "You're mine. That's all it ever was."
"Yeah," Gavin said. "I know. Took me a while, but I know."
Niles kissed him.
It was nothing like the kitchen floor, nothing like the hospital bed, nothing like the bridge with the cold coming up through the railing. He cupped Gavin's jaw with one hand, thumb along the bruised cheekbone, barely any pressure, and kissed him slow, mouth closed at first, then open just a little, like they had time, like the money on the table and the blood on the collar and the two-forty had all happened to other people. Gavin made a small sound into it, surprised, and then settled, and his hand slid from Niles's shoulder to the back of his neck and just rested there. Holding on without holding on.
The water in Gavin's hair ran down and dripped off his jaw onto Niles's wrist. Neither of them wiped it away. The kiss went on past the point where either of them usually got bored or mean or hungry for the next thing, and it didn't turn into anything else, and that was the whole miracle of it. Just mouths and breath and the fridge humming.
When they broke apart Gavin didn't retreat to the far end of anything. He put his forehead against Niles's temple and stayed there.
"Don't tell anyone I did that," Gavin said.
"Did what."
"Gentle. There's a reputation."
"You started it."
"I'm aware. That's why it's a secret." Gavin shifted, winced once at his ribs, and didn't get off his lap. "You rewrapped the hand right, by the way. Don't let it go to your head."
"It went there years ago."
"Yeah, I noticed." He was quiet a moment, thumb moving in a small slow arc against Niles's neck, and then, without looking up, "The quiet thing. Under Marcus's fluorescent lights, halfway through his speech about volume, I thought about your kitchen. That's it. That was the whole thought, and it got me through the room."
Niles turned his head and kissed the corner of his mouth, brief, careful of the split lip's old scar. "You're not getting the quiet again. That's still the deal."
"Still the deal," Gavin said, and reached across him for the dish towel to dry his hair, and stayed right where he was.