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FOOL AGAIN | Michael Robinavitch

Robby rides his 'Deathbike' out on sabbatical, despite Jack's protests. Only he washes up, soaked, in the very town of a wedding he promised to come back for. Behind the bar of the shore, there's you, six months into a hideout of your own. Over a fortnight he gets impossibly tangled up with the town and its people, and with you. The writing's on the wall, but what will the two of you do about it? ㅤ

PAIRING. dr. robby × f!bartender!reader WORDS. 8.4k GENRE. heavy angst but in the shape of a rom-com WARNINGS. post S2 and slightly off canon, grief and bereavement (cancer mentions), survivor's guilt, suicidal ideation (past, referenced), canonical medical trauma references (COVID, mass shooting, death of a mentor), avoidant attachment and self-sabotage, implied smut, slight age gap (reader is implied to be younger than robby but not specified), mentions of tinnitus, two (2) pregnancy mentions, BUT IT HAS A HAPPY ENDING I SWEAR!!! ㅤ NOTES. if you're seeing this on your feed for a second time in just as many days, nuh uh, no you aren't this was my first ever full-blown fic that i wrote, and i couldn't stop obsessing over the little details. so i gave her a good honest re-write. many of the pivotal scenes have fundamentally been altered. so if you're reading this a second time, then i thank you very kindly and hope it's worth your time! title inspo: Voices by Cheap Trick ㅤ

ㅤ Michael Robinavitch rides into the storm because turning away from it would mean admitting he still cares whether he lives or dies.

The sky over the flatlands has gone the color of a bad bruise. Yellow at the edges, black in the middle. The rain hasn't started but it's coming. It’s been chasing him for three states, nipping at the rear wheel of his 1969 Triumph Bonneville like a dog that knows he’s too tired to outrun it. The Triumph is a scrap-heap resurrection that he and Duke had pulled out of a field in pieces and spent two years making a motorcycle out of. It’s about the only thing Robby owns that he's sure about.

Jack Abbott’s voice loops somewhere in the back of his skull, a recording he can’t shut off. “You gotta find someone to help you dance through the darkness, man. And if you pull a Thelma & Louise on that bike, I’m gonna be pissed. I’m your emergency contact, and I don’t want to be contacted.”

Jack had said it in a hallway, not on the roof. The roof was the year before. This was later, Jack's hand heavy on his shoulder, the two of them pretending it was a normal conversation. “My brother’s wedding. Three months. You promised.” “Where?” Robby had asked.

“Little town called Millwood. You ever heard of it? It’s in Ohio, middle of nowhere. My brother’s fiancée grew up there. You’d like it.”

Robby had filed the name away without meaning to. He didn't examine why. Now he’s somewhere in Ohio, soaked to the bone, and the name surfaces like a buoy. Millwood. It’s not far. He tells himself he’s just scouting the location for Jack’s brother’s wedding. A practical stop. A night, maybe two. Then back on the road.

The dive bar appears through the sheeting rain like a hallucination: a low, squat building huddled on the shoulder of a two-lane road, its parking lot cracked and bleeding weeds through the asphalt. A neon sign blinks erratically: LUCKY’S. Though the C and the K have burned out, leaving LU Y’S.

The whole thing browns out and comes back, and he can hear it doing it from the road, a wet electric fizz.

Robby kills the engine. The sudden silence is worse than the high-pitched ringing, the tinnitus, that’s lived in his ears since COVID, since the mass shooting, since the day he watched his mentor die in the same ER where he still works. He swings off the bike, boots splashing in a puddle that’s already forming, and pushes through the door. ㅤ

ㅤ It's a Tuesday, which at Lucky's means the same six people it means every night. Plus the ordinary weather.

You can name them without looking up. Glen's in the corner where Glen is always in the corner, nursing the one beer he'll make last three hours, watching the door like he's expecting someone who's been dead a while. Margie's at the middle of the bar with a rum and Coke and a captive audience of nobody, telling the story about her sister's second husband again, the one with the boat. Leo's got quarters lined up on the rail of the pool table and no one to play, so he's practicing bank shots and missing, and every few minutes he glances over to see if you saw him miss. You did. You always do. It's the kindest thing about Leo and the most exhausting.

Pete's on a stepladder behind you, swearing at the sign panel, because the LUCKY'S out front has been dying by inches for a month.

"It's the frame," he says, to you or to God. "Whole thing's rotted through. Water gets in the wood, wood swells, pinches the wire. Electrician wants two hundred just to look at it."

"So don't call the electrician then."

"So it falls on a customer and we get sued, real smart, thanks." He climbs down, wipes his hands on a rag. "Margie, you want another, or you gonna keep watering that one down with your own spit?"

"You're a horrible man, Pete."

"Thirty years and you keep coming back."

"Where else am I gonna go?" She says it happily. It's true and it isn't sad, and that's the thing about this place, the thing you didn't expect when you washed up here six months ago with a duffel bag and a resignation letter, still unsent. It closes over people. Nobody asks you what you're running from. They just make room.

The door opens and a storm walks in.

That's the honest first impression. He stands in the doorframe a beat too long with the rain coming off him, backlit gray, like he's forgotten the last step of coming inside. Then he does it, and the door bangs shut on the wind, and he's just a guy. Older than you. Dark hair gone silver at the temples, soaked flat. A face that's had a hard decade and lost. Leather jacket, wet through. He stands there dripping and reads the room before he moves, and you clock that, because you do it too. He counts the exits. He finds the wall. Then he takes the far stool with his back to it, and you think, oh.

"Well," says Margie, at a volume designed to be overheard. "Look what the storm dragged in."

He doesn't rise to it. You drift down the bar.

"What'll it be?"

He looks up and it's a lot of eye contact, more than you're braced for. Not a leer. Assessment. The look of a man who's spent years figuring out fast whether the person in front of him is going to bleed out or lie about their pain level.

"Whiskey. Neat."

"Any particular kind, or are we going for effect?"

The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Perhaps a hint of one. "Effect."

You pour him two fingers of the bottom shelf, the stuff you keep for people who aren't drinking for the taste. He knocks it back clean. You watch his throat and don't bother hiding that you're watching.

"Another."

You pour. This time he leaves it, turns the glass in slow circles. Steady hands. Very steady, which usually means the opposite of what steady hands are supposed to mean.

"You're not from here," you say.

"Is anyone?"

"Margie was born upstairs, so."

"That's a lie," Margie calls, delighted. "I was born in Akron. But I've been here since Nixon."

The guy almost smiles again. Almost like he's rationing them. "It's a nice town?"

"It's a town," you say. "There's a diner where there’s meatloaf. And a hardware store run by a man who's been about to retire since I was in diapers. And this. This is the nightlife."

"Hey," Leo objects from the pool table, offended on the town's behalf. "There's the lake."

"Leo. The lake is where the youth of Millwood go to get pregnant and disappoint their parents. It's not a selling point."

"I like the lake," Leo mumbles, and banks a shot that actually goes in, and looks so pleased that you don’t have the heart to keep at him.

The guy watches the whole exchange without joining it, the way you'd watch a show in a language you sort of know. You put your elbows on the bar.

"So what brings a wet stranger to Lucky's on a Tuesday? And don't say the whiskey, we established that it's medicinal."

"Passing through."

"To where?"

"Haven't decided."

"A man of mystery. Margie, we've got a man of mystery."

"I heard. He's very handsome under all that self-pity." Margie leans down the bar toward him, conspiratorial, loud. "You want my advice? Whatever she did, forgive her. Life's short."

"There's no she," he says.

"There's always a she. Or a him. Or a whole," she waves her glass, sloshing "... situation. You don't ride a motorcycle through a hurricane into a bar in Millwood, Ohio because everything's going great at home."

"Margie," you say. "Let the man drink."

"I'm just saying what everyone's thinking."

"Nobody's thinking it but you."

"Glen's thinking it. Glen, you thinking it?"

Glen, in his corner, doesn't turn his head. "Leave him alone, Margie."

"See, that's a yes." But she settles back, satisfied, and starts in on her sister's boat again, and the pressure comes off the stranger like a change in the weather.

He looks at you. "Is it always like this?"

"This is a slow night." You reach for a rag, do the honest kind of wiping. Actually wiping, not the performative bartender wipe that’s just moving a rag around to look busy. "Tuesdays are contemplative."

"What are the loud nights?"

"Friday. And the third Thursday, which is karaoke, which I recommend you schedule the rest of your life to avoid."

"You don't sing?"

"I sing beautifully. That's the tragedy. Everyone else sounds like a cat in a dryer, so my gift goes unappreciated." You deadpan, pouring yourself a soda water. It's a long night and you learned the hard way not to match customers. "And what do you do, mystery man? When you're not passing through."

There's a small hitch there. Not a lie, exactly. A door he decides whether to open. "I'm a doctor," he says.

You raise the soda water an inch, a toast. "That explains the hands."

"The hands?"

"Steady. Guys who work with their hands, they've all got a way of holding a glass. Carpenters, surgeons, drunks. So you're a surgeon." You tilt your head. "Or a drunk. Jury's out."

That gets a real smile. Small, but it reaches his eyes and it costs him something, like a muscle he hasn't used. "You're very confident about people you just met."

"It's the job." You gesture at the room, the whole warm and shabby length of it. "Six months of this, you get quick. Him—" Leo "—crush on someone unavailable, tragic, ongoing. Her—" Margie "—wants to be needed, will talk to a wall, has buried two husbands and refuses to be sad about it in public. Glen." You pause. "Glen's harder. Glen lost his wife four years back and he's been keeping her seat warm."

The doctor looks at Glen's corner, at the empty stool beside him nobody sits on.

"And you?" he says.

"Me?"

"You do everyone else. Not yourself."

The rag stops for half a second. Just half. You start it up again, and you make your face do the thing it does, the easy thing.

"I pour drinks and mind my business. It's a whole lifestyle. You should try it." You slide his tab across, blank so far. "You’ll want a room, by the way, since you're not deciding where you're going. Pete's got a cot in the storage space upstairs. No shower, but the bathroom's yours and the price is arguing with Pete."

"I've got a tent."

"In that?" Outside, thunder rolls low enough to move the glasses on the shelf. "Suit yourself. Frontier spirit."

He looks up at the ceiling, where the storm is coming down like it's got a grudge. Then, quiet enough that only you hear it, mostly to himself: "That sign out front's going to catch fire before it falls."

You blink. "What?"

"The frame. It's shorting. The wood's holding water against the wire." He shrugs, a little embarrassed to have said it. "Sorry. Not my business."

Behind you, Pete, who hears everything: "That's what I've been saying." ㅤ

ㅤ You don't see him leave and you don't see him stay. When you come down in the morning he's in the lot in the gray after-light, crouched at the base of the sign pole with the panel open, and Pete is standing over him with two coffees, one of which he is not offering.

"He said he can fix it," Pete tells you, like it's your fault.

"I can fix it," the doctor says, not looking up. "The wire's fine. It's the housing. Whoever framed this used pine and didn't seal it. I can pull it, cut new, seal it right. Day's work. Maybe two."

"You're a doctor," Pete says, plainly.

"I was a carpenter's apprentice for about six months when I was nineteen, before I was anything else." He sits back on his heels. "My mentor made me learn. Said a man who can't fix things with his hands is only half a man."

"Your mentor sounds insufferable."

"He was." Something passes over the doctor's face and is gone. "He's dead. But he was right about the wood."

Pete chews on it. "You fix the sign, you can have the cot till it's done. I'll knock it off the tab."

"I don't have a tab."

"You will," Pete says, and stomps back inside, and the deal is made the way all his deals are usually made, by him walking away before you can argue.

You lean in the doorway with your own coffee and watch the man take the sign apart. He's careful with it. Methodical. He lays the old frame pieces on a tarp in the order they came off, like he might have to put them back, and there's something in the neatness of it that tells you more than anything he said last night. This is a man who needs his hands full. Give him an idle minute and something in his head starts talking, and he doesn't like what it says.

You bring him a coffee at ten. Black, no sugar, and you don't know why you know he takes it black except that you do.

"You didn't take the tent," you say.

"Storm let up." He doesn't sell it. You both know the tent was never happening.

"There's a hardware store in town. Gus's. He'll have cedar, and he'll try to sell you a smoker you don't need. Don't let him."

"You offering to come with?"

"I'm offering to keep you from getting robbed. There's a difference." You hand him the coffee. Your fingers touch and neither of you makes anything of it. ㅤ

ㅤ Here's how the two weeks go, if you had to say it in one breath: he fixes the sign in two days and then finds nine more things to fix.

The sign is only the start. Once it's up and glowing clean and even, LUCKY'S all the way through for the first time in a year, Pete gets ideas. There's a door that's hung wrong since the Clinton administration. There's a section of the back deck you've been told not to stand on. There's the storeroom shelving, half of which is holding on out of habit. The doctor, whose name is Robby, works through the list like a man doing penance. And maybe he is.

You learn him in pieces, the way you learn all people, by not asking directly.

You learn that loud noises do something to him. Not a flinch you'd catch if you weren't looking. But you were looking. Glen drops a glass one night, and Robby's whole body reorganizes for half a second, hands going still and flat, before he lets it back down. You don't ask. You bring him a whiskey and set it in front of him without a word, and he looks at you like you've done something, and you say, "You looked thirsty," and let him have his dignity.

You learn he's funny, underneath, in a dry gone-to-seed way. That he and Glen have started talking. That Margie has decided to adopt him, and tells him things about the town he did not ask to know. That Leo tried to be short with him for exactly one afternoon before deciding he liked Robby too much, which is the most Leo thing that has ever happened.

What Robby learns about you, he mostly learns from Glen.

You find that out later. That there was a night, the first week, when you'd gone up to change a keg, and Glen leaned over from his corner, and in the flat way he has of saying true things, told Robby the part you don't tell.

That one behind the bar. She's been half here since she showed up. Lost somebody. She'll joke you to death before she'll say it, so don't wait for her to say it. And then, because Glen is Glen: Don't be another thing she loses. She's had enough.

Robby doesn't tell you Glen said it. But he stops asking you the sideways questions after that, and starts just being around. Easy, no pressure, refilling the ice well without being asked, walking you up the stairs at close so you're not doing the lot alone in the dark. And it's that, more than any line he could have delivered, that gets under your armor. Not being seen. Being tended.

You bring him up to your apartment on the ninth night, or he brings you. You take the stairs badly. He's got a hand at the small of your back and then his mouth at the side of your neck before you've found the top step, and you lose track of which one of you started it. Nine days of him keeping a careful foot of air between you, of not-quite-touching when he passed you a glass, and it turns out the foot of air was him holding something down with both hands. Now it's up, and it has weight.

He kisses you urgently. There's nothing steady about the hands now. They're everywhere and they're not sure of anything. This deliberate man gone suddenly greedy and graceless with it, forgetting the door, forgetting his own name, walking you backward into the dark with his forehead against yours like he's trying to get inside your actual skull. You get his jacket off him. It takes both of you and neither of you laughs. The rain's come back loud on the skylight and you can taste the whiskey on him and something warmer under it, and the part of you that reads people for a living has gone quiet for the first time in six months. All the way quiet, and there's only the sound he makes low in his throat when your hands find skin. Like it hurts. Like it's been so long it hurts. Afterward he lies there with his eyes open at the water-stained ceiling and you can feel him thinking again, the machinery starting up, and you put your hand flat on his chest, over the noise of it, and say, "Stop that."

"Stop what?"

"Whatever you're about to do to this. Stop it."

He's quiet a while. Then: "I'm not good at this part."

"Nobody is." You turn your face into his shoulder. He smells like cedar and sweat and the cheap soap from the bar bathroom. "Go to sleep, Robby."

He does. You don't, for a long time. You lie there listening to him breathe and you think about how you're going to feel when he leaves, because he's going to leave, they all leave, and you already know it's going to be bad, and you let yourself have it anyway. That's new. Six months ago you wouldn't have. Six months ago you were a stone at the bottom of a well. So. Progress, maybe. Or just a better class of mistake. ㅤ

ㅤ He asks about her at the lake.

It's the first clear evening in two weeks, the sky doing something pink and gold over the water, and you've got a six-pack going warm between you on the dock. Leo was right about the lake. You'd never admit it out loud.

"You had a friend," Robby says. Not a question. Glen's work.

You could deflect. You've got six ready. Instead you peel the label off your beer and watch your own hands do it.

"Mara. We taught at the same school. Third grade her, fifth grade me. But we'd known each other since college. She was my…" you look for the word and it's stupid, there isn't one "... she was my person. You get one, if you're lucky. She was mine."

"What happened?"

"Glioblastoma." You say the word flat because if you say it any other way you'll cry, and you're not doing that on the dock. "Brain tumor. The bad kind. The kind where they tell you the number of months up front so you can, I don't know. Budget."

"How long?"

"Four months, they said. It was more like three and a half." You drink. "You want to know the part nobody tells you? It's not the dying. I could've done the dying. Maybe. It's that it took her before it took her. It's in your brain, so it's you it eats first."

He doesn't say anything. He's a doctor, he knows all this, and the kindness of him is that he doesn't say I know. He lets you say it like it's news.

"She got mean," you say. "Not her. The tumor. She'd say things. Cruel, specific things, things she'd have to have known to hit that clean, and then ten minutes later she'd have no idea she said them. And you can't be mad, right, because it's not her, it's the thing in her head, and everybody keeps telling you it's not her, it's the disease, like that helps. Like knowing the difference makes it hurt less when your best friend calls you a selfish coward and means it, and then asks if it's Tuesday."

Your voice has gone somewhere you didn't authorize. You stop. You drink.

"There was a day near the end I didn't go," you say, quieter. "Just one. I was so tired. I'd been there every day for months and I was so tired, and I told myself I'd go tomorrow, I'd be better company tomorrow, and I stayed home and I watched garbage TV and I felt guilty the whole time, which is the worst of both, you don't even get the rest." You breathe. "And that was the day she went under for good. She was still alive after. A week, more. But she never really came back up. So the last time she was Mara enough to know me, I wasn't there. I was on my couch. Watching a fucking show I don't even remember."

The lake is very still. Somewhere a fish takes something off the surface, one clean plip, and the rings go out and out.

"People keep telling me she wouldn't want me to feel bad about it." You laugh, and it comes out wrong. "Like that's a comfort. Mara would've absolutely wanted me to feel bad about it. She'd have held it over me for years. That's how I know they didn't know her. The real her wasn't a saint. She was a pain in the ass. She'd have said, you missed the good ending, dummy, that's on you." Your throat closes. "And I'd give anything to have her say it."

You're crying now, quiet, the leaking kind, not the loud kind. Robby doesn't reach for you right away, which is right, because there's nothing to do with this, no fixing it, and he's a fixer and he knows better than to try. He just moves his hand along the dock until it's next to yours. Not holding, next to. So you can take it or not.

You take it.

"I don't tell people that part," you say, when you can. "The couch. I tell them about the cancer."

"You just told me."

"Yeah, well." You try to chuckle, wiping your face with the back of your free hand. "You caught me on a dock with three beers in me and a pretty sunset. Cheap. I'm cheaper than I look."

He almost laughs. Then, because you gave him yours, he gives you a piece of his, which is the only trade that matters. "I held my mentor's hand while he died," he says. "Adamson. It was COVID, the bad part of COVID, and he was in a bed in the department I run, and there was nothing to do. We'd run out of things to do weeks before,” His thumb moves once over your knuckles and stays. “But I kept him on the machine. Seventeen days.”

The words just sit there. You don't touch it, and he's grateful, you can feel him be grateful, the way he keeps going.

"There was a kid down the hall that could've used what he was using. Better odds than he had. I knew it every morning, did the math, and every morning I found a reason to keep him on it one more day." He says it flat, to the far shore. "Kept telling myself I was fighting for him. I just couldn't be the one to say when."

"Robby."

"You want the punchline? I run the place. I'm the one who teaches the residents the most important thing in the room, to know when to stop." The edge of his mouth quirks up remorsefully. "Physician, heal thyself."

"So we've both got a day we didn't get right."

"Mine's got a body count. Beats sitting on a couch."

"It's not a competition."

"Little bit it is."

And that's the thing that finally cracks it, the both of you going over to the wrong side of a laugh, low into the darkness that's come up off the water while you weren't watching. You don't tell him it wasn't his fault. He'd hear the lie in it, same as you'd have heard it in yours. You just work your fingers deeper into his and hold on.

He looks at you then. The sun's about gone and the shadows have come back up under his eyes, but there's something open in his face that wasn't there two weeks ago.

"I wasn't going to stay past the first night," he says.

"I know."

"I keep not leaving."

"I know that too." You lean into his shoulder. "Don't make it a whole thing, Robby. You'll ruin it."

So he doesn't. For once, he doesn't. You sit on the dock until the mosquitoes drive you off, and you don't talk about him leaving. You both know he's going to. ㅤ

ㅤ The stupid thing is that it starts as a good night.

Pete's gone home. It's just the last-call regulars, Glen nursing the dregs of the one beer he's made last since eight, Margie holding court about a man she almost married in 1974, and Robby down the far end doing the thing he does now where he pretends to read the paper but is actually listening to Margie with the delight of a man at a play. You're closing out the register and losing, because you're always eleven dollars off and you've stopped caring which direction.

"Eleven dollars," you announce. "Again. Same as Tuesday. I think this bar is haunted by a ghost who steals exactly eleven dollars."

"It's you," Glen says, not looking up. "You can't count."

"I have a degree, Glen."

"In what?"

"Elementary education."

"So no."

Robby laughs, this quiet huff behind the paper, and you point the pen at him. "Something funny, Motorcycle?"

"He agrees with me," Glen says.

"He does not. Robby. Do you agree with him?"

Robby lowers the paper about an inch, deadly serious. "I've watched you give a man change for a twenty out of a ten. Twice."

"That was hospitality."

"That was a felony," says Margie, and the whole end of the bar goes up, and you throw a bar rag at Robby and he catches it without looking, which is somehow the most annoying thing a person has ever done, and you're laughing too, actually laughing. It occurs to you distantly that you haven't been eleven-dollars-off and happy about it in a very long time. You don't examine it. You just let it be nice.

Glen finishes his beer and stands, joints announcing it. Margie gathers her enormous purse and kisses you on the cheek and Robby on the top of the head like he's hers now, which he sort of is. And then it's the two of you and the hum of the cooler. You lock up, and it's a good night, it's such a good night, that you can start to feel the gravity of an impending moment, a moment coming up right after this.

You're wiping down the last of the bar. He's still on his stool with the paper, not reading it.

"You didn't turn the page once," you say. "The whole time."

"I was listening to Margie."

"You were listening to Margie for forty-five minutes on a single page of the Millwood Gazette, which has, I happen to know, four pages total and one of them is coupons." You toss a scrap in the bin. "What's the article?"

He glances down like he genuinely doesn't know. "Zoning."

"Zoning."

"There's a dispute. About a fence."

"You've been staring at a fence dispute so you didn't have to look at me." You say it lightly, still teasing, and it's only when it's out of your mouth that you feel it turn true in the air between you, and his face does something small, and the good night tips over so quietly you almost miss it.

He folds the paper. Sets it down. Squares the edges, which is a thing he does when he needs his hands occupied. You’ve catalogued all his tells by now.

"I fixed the bike," he says.

You wait, rag still in your hand, for the part that makes that a normal thing to say.

"The carb's been running rough since Missouri," he continues. "I did it tonight, at Leo's. Runs clean now."

"Okay."

"Full tank."

Out front the sign buzzes clean, LUCKY’S. All seven letters, because he made it.

"Okay," you say again, and it comes out different this time.

He doesn't look up from the squared-off paper. And here's where a lesser man would give a speech, and you almost wish he would, because a speech you could argue with. What he gives you instead is worse. He gives you the truth in the smallest possible unit.

"Every morning I decide to leave," he says. "And every morning something's broken, so I fix it, and then it's not broken, so I stay one more day. The sign. The door. The deck." A breath. "Last night the bike was the last broken thing. And I lay up there thinking, thank God, the bike's broken, I can't go." He finally looks at you. "That's not a normal thing to be relieved about."

"So you fixed it."

"I fixed it. And now I can leave."

You don't say anything for a second. You pick the rag back up. You need your hands doing something, same as him. And there it is, the recognition: you're squaring your edges too.

You go to the register. You open it, and you count out what's in the tip jar. His cut of the two weeks of work that was never on any tab, and you fold the bills once and set them on the bar in front of him. Then you take the spare key off your own ring, the one to the storeroom cot, and set that next to the money.

He looks at the little pile. "What's this?" "Your cut." You keep your voice even, which costs you everything. "You want the math? Two weeks. The sign, the door, the deck, the shelving. For a cot with no shower and my coffee." You slide it an inch closer. "That's the worst deal anybody's made here, and Pete knows it. He'll want you paid right. So there's your key back, and there's your pay, and Gus opens at seven if you want coffee that isn't mine before the highway."

"So you're not going to fight me on it?" he says. Not quite a question. Something off-balance under it.

"No."

"Why not?"

And here's where the old you would've made a case, or made herself small enough to fit through the crack in the wall. Instead you just hold his eyes, and let him sit in a doorway with someone standing in it. Not blocking the way, for maybe the first time in his life.

"Because I know what you did," you say, finally. And you don't say Adamson, you don't say seventeen days, you don't say any of the words that would make it a speech, either. You just let the weight of the afternoon on the dock sit between you, and watch it reach him. "And I'm not gonna make you do it again. Not with me. If you're going, I'm not gonna be the one making you say when." His face goes. You've never seen it go like that.

"So take your key back," you say, softer, "Or don't. But it's a door, Robby. And it opens both ways."

He looks at the money and the key and doesn't touch either.

Then he pushes it back across to you and leaves his hand flat on top on your side of the bar, where you'd have to move his hand to get to it.

"I don't want to be paid," he says. Low. Like it's being pulled out of him by the root.

His jaw works around something and nothing comes, and you watch him hit the wall he built, from the inside, watch him get a hand on the top of it and find he can't say what's on the other side.

So he stops trying to say it.

He comes off the stool. He's got your face in both hands before you've put the rag down. Both hands, gone unsteady, and he kisses you like it's the sentence he couldn't finish, all the words he doesn't own delivered at once and out of order. You get a fist in his shirt. The money's still under his other hand on the bar one second and it isn't the next. It's on the floor, and neither of you looks. You break long enough to get a breath. His forehead's on yours. His eyes are shut.

"That's my tip jar all over the floor, by the way," you say. "You're picking that up."

A sound comes out of him that's half a laugh. "So," you go on, "you're officially out of things to fix. Sign's lit. Door's hung, deck holds weight. Which leaves you unemployed and homeless, and I happen to have a room." You bump his nose with yours. "I'd charge rent, though." His mouth twitches against your cheek. “But you can't count."

"I can count to one. Watch." You turn to peck his lips. "One."

"That the whole lease?"

"Renews nightly. Terrible terms. No exit clause." You feel his hand tighten on your waist. "Landlord's a menace."

"Tenant's a flight risk. So we're perfect," you say, and it comes out with the laugh riding under it.

"Don't." He warns, gently.

Don't make the joke, don't help me pretend this is small. He leaves that part unspoken, but you hear it, hanging over the inch of air still left between you and him.

So you stop. You put your hand flat on his chest, over the part that's working too hard, and you don't say anything. ㅤ

ㅤ Two nights later is the third Thursday. It's karaoke night, and the bar is a different animal.

Somebody's dug out the machine that's older than Leo. Margie's Christmas lights are still up from December because nobody ever takes them down, blinking out of time. The place is packed, regulars and half of Millwood and faces you don't know, and the air is beer and body heat and the particular joy of people who cannot sing agreeing to cannot care.

Robby's at his stool with a whiskey, watching you work, and you're not just working tonight. You're in it, arguing with Margie, dodging Pete, laughing at Glen who has been talked into holding a tambourine he refuses to shake. You feel him watching. You feel, more than that, the specific weight of a man deciding whether he gets to have a thing.

Margie clocks him. "There he is!" She points across the room with a whole arm. "Motorcycle! Get up here, we need fresh meat."

"I don't sing," Robby says.

"Nobody here sings, sweetheart, that's the point."

And the bar takes it up, because the bar will take up anything, a low chant, and Leo's whooping, and Glen is almost smiling, and you catch Robby's eye across the whole warm mess of it and you raise one eyebrow.

Come on. Prove you're not a coward.

You watch him hear it. You watch him decide.

He gets off the stool.

The song's already cued, Pete's doing, and when the opening riff of ‘Voices’ comes crunching out of the tinny speakers the whole bar loses it. And then you're up there next to him with a mic in your hand and no plan.

You go first. You're loud and off-key and you do not look at the screen. You look at him.

Hey, it's me again, plain to see again.

I'm a fool again, I fell in love with you again.

You try not to mean the words. That’s stupid, too on the nose and too perfect. But the words are doing something to his face anyway, and you keep going, brave and terrible, and you hold the mic out to him.

He takes it. Please, can I see you everyday?

He can't sing. Neither can you. It does not matter even slightly. The whole bar's singing now, drunk and joyful, Margie on some harmony that exists only in her heart, Glen finally shaking the tambourine, Leo filming it on his phone, and Robby opens his mouth and sings this stupid perfect song badly, and something in his face comes loose.

When it ends the place comes apart cheering, and you throw your arms around his neck and kiss him right there on the little stage, and he kisses you back like you're the last solid thing in a spinning room.

"Our song," you say, breathless, dumb. Happy.

"Our song." he agrees.

And for one night he lets himself believe he gets to keep it. You can see him let himself. That's the part that guts you next. That he let himself, and it was true when he did it, and it still wasn't enough. ㅤ

ㅤ You wake up alone.

The sheets are cold on his side, which means it wasn't recent. Which means he did it in the dark. He did it while you slept next to him, and that's the detail that'll live on in your head. Not the leaving. That he made himself do it slow and quiet so you wouldn't wake, that he had the discipline for that, the same steady hands.

You know before you check. You check anyway. The bag's gone. The boots. You go down in your shirt and shove the back door open and the spot where the Triumph sits is a wet rectangle of nothing, oil sheen and rain.

No note.

Of course no note.

You stand in the cold with your breath going white and you wait for it to hit, the rage, the wreck of it, the thing that makes you throw a glass. It doesn't come. Not yet. What comes is the ringing, the specific high whine of nothing where a thing used to be, and you think, absurdly, oh, this is the tinnitus, this is what he was talking about, and you almost laugh, and that's when you know it's bad, when you can't even cry, when the sound in your ears is the sound of a person leaving through a wall you helped make a hole in. And the person you want isn't Robby. She comes up the way she always does. When it's bad, uninvited and too clear, the exact pitch of her voice before you've decided to remember it. From the back of your skull where you keep her always running, even when you don’t let her visit. 'Well,' Mara says. 'We saw that one coming from outer space.' 'I know.' 'He literally rode in on a storm,' she continues.

'That too.'

'You got up and sang,' she says. 'In front of the whole town. For him. You don't even sing for me.'

'I’m not going over this with a dead woman.' You tell her. She does the thing with her eyebrow, the one that meant she was waiting for you to catch up. 'Well, you already are.'

The actual bad part comes later. It comes at close, when Margie asks where your broody boyfriend's got to and you have to say the words. It comes when Glen doesn't say anything at all, just looks at you across the bar with his old ruined patience, and that nearly finishes you, because Glen told him. Don't be another thing she loses. And he was, anyway. It comes when Leo tries to cheer you up and you have to walk into the storeroom to pretend it doesn’t affect you, past Pete’s shoulder and past the shelves Robby fixed.

You did know. That's the thing you'll keep telling yourself. You saw the wall, the writing on the wall. You heard him at the bar, stuck between choosing to lose you or risk it getting done to him. You knew the song was too perfect and too on the nose and you let it mean something anyway.

You go back inside. You close the door. You start the coffee, black, no sugar, out of habit, for a man who isn't there, and you pour it down the sink, and you go open the bar. ㅤ

ㅤ He rides for twelve hours and it does not help.

Every reason he had comes apart the second he looks at it in daylight. She's better off. I'm doing her a favor. This ends bad no matter what. He's used all of these before, on other exits, other doors he walked out of clean. Not one of them was ever true. He's a smart man who knows the lie while he's telling it, and tells it anyway, which is the worst kind of smart to be.

The song loops. There’s a specific image of you in his head. Your voice, off-key, fearless, not looking at the screen. Looking at him. I'm a fool again. He's the fool.

At the Pennsylvania line his phone pings.

Jack Abbott: Still alive?

He pulls into a rest stop and sits over the phone a long time.

Define alive, he types.

Vertical and breathing. That's the bar. And then, a second later, because Jack knows him: You're coming to the wedding. Millwood. In two months. You're on the list, Robby.

Millwood. It goes through him like cold water. He'd let himself forget the wedding was there, in your town, that Jack had said the name in a hallway months ago and some animal part of him had steered toward it before he understood he was steering. He'd ridden into Millwood chasing something he couldn't have named. And now he's ridden out of it, away from the one thing he found. The one you.

I'll do you one better. I’m coming back, he types. It sounds so far off in his own head that he's sure he doesn’t mean it.

But he kicks the bike over and rides back to Pittsburgh. Back to the department, back to the life he tried to leave behind. Well, he was trying to leave behind living at all. This is better then. Vertical, breathing, and on his way back home. It doesn’t feel like it, though. Home was the darkness of an upstairs room with a leaking skylight and you who told him to stop thinking because he was terrible at it. He knew that the whole ride. He rode anyway.

That's the disease he actually has, and it doesn't have a number of months on it. ㅤ

ㅤ You don't leave Millwood, even when confronted with something forceful enough to displace you.

Each time you tell yourself something new. It's money, it's Pete, it's the school district not posting anything. This time the truth is smaller and much worse: leaving means those two weeks fade, and the two weeks are all you've got of him, so you stay where they happened, like a person keeping a light on for someone who isn't coming.

Then the wedding happens, because the universe is not subtle.

It's a niece of a friend of Margie's, marrying some guy from Pittsburgh, whose brother is a doctor. And doctors have colleagues, and you'd have connected the dots weeks ago if you'd wanted to, and you very much did not want to.

Lucky's is doing the bar. That means you. You'll take it because the money's good, is what you tell yourself.

The venue's a restored barn on the edge of town, strung with lights and wildflowers. You're behind a folding bar in your Lucky's shirt, pouring champagne for people in better clothes than you own, cracking wise with the groomsmen, doing fine, doing genuinely fine, right up until the DJ puts on a song and your whole body stops.

That riff. Bright, dumb, unmistakable. Perfect and on the nose. Hey, it's me again.

Across the barn, near the doors, a man in a dark suit that doesn't fit with the ease of everything else. Silver at the temples. Shadows under the eyes. A glass of whiskey held like it's holding him up. He's already looking at you. He's been looking at you. But you notice her first before you register anything else. There she is, uninvited as ever, right at the edge of it. ‘Tell me not to,’ you say.

‘No,’ Mara says back.

‘I'm working.’

‘You're a bartender, not a surgeon. Put the bottle down.’

‘But he left,’ you tell her.

‘And he came back.’

‘I could get it wrong.’

‘You'll almost definitely get it wrong.’ She gives you the raised eyebrow. ‘So what?’

The room tips. Your limbs are moving before you decide to, setting down the bottle, cutting through the dancers, and he's moving too, off the wall, weaving toward you, and you meet somewhere in the middle of the floor under the ugly beautiful lights.

"Hi," he says.

And before he can get out whatever careful thing he's rehearsed for two months on the back of that bike, you hear your own mouth go:

"Good that you showed. I'm pregnant, and it's yours, you know."

His face does the whole cycle. Shock, then something like terror, then, God help him, a flicker of hope, all inside one heartbeat, and you let it hang there in the golden light for exactly as long as it takes to be cruel, and then you crack.

"I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Oh, your face." You're laughing and it's a little unhinged and you don't care.

The terror drains out of him. And then, slow, disbelieving, like it's been sitting unused in his chest for two months, Robby laughs. A real one. Rusty. It changes his whole face, the way it did on the stage.

"That was evil," he says.

"You ghosted me. So."

"Fair." He's still half-smiling, but his eyes have gone serious under it. "You're really here."

"Lucky's is doing the bar. I live here, Robby, remember? You're the one who left." You cross your arms. "Why'd you go?"

He doesn't dress it up. "Because I'm a coward. You already knew that, you even told me to go."

"I wanted you to prove me wrong."

"I know."

The song plays on. Please, can I see you every day? Somebody's aunt is crying at a table. The lights sway.

"I had a whole thing," he says. "Two months of a speech. And it's gone, standing here, so I'll just…" He stops, starts over, and it comes out plain and a little broken. "I stayed two weeks. I've never stayed two weeks. Not since I was young. And it was you, it was all of it. The bar, that stupid goddamn sign, and Glen, and Margie, and everyone. And I still left." He shakes his head. "I couldn't stand to stick around. I didn't deserve to. I still don't know if I do. And you're the first thing that made me forget all that in a long time, and I ran from that, because I'm an idiot, a fucking idiot. And I'm so sorry."

You make him stand in it.

"I'm still really mad," you say after a beat.

"You should be."

"You don't get to give a nice speech at a wedding and have it be fine."

"I know."

Outside the open barn doors it's started to rain. Soft. Not a storm, just a turn of weather. The ordinary kind.

"I'm not fixed," you say. "I want to be clear. I don't know if I'm ever going back to a classroom. And I still talk to my dead best friend sometimes. I'm not some healed-up version of me who's ready for you. I'm just me."

"I don't want the healed-up version." He says it too quickly, like he's afraid you'll finish the sentence for him. "I want you."

You look at him a long time. This wrecked, brilliant, maddening man who rode a motorcycle into your bar in a storm and fixed a sign and broke your heart with the discipline of steady hands. And you understand, clean as a struck bell, that you want him too.

"And I'm going to yell at you a lot. A lot. You've got a running balance."

The corner of his mouth goes up. "I know."

Behind you the DJ's still got the song running, well past reasonable, and you're pretty sure that's Margie's doing, working the guy from across the room, buying you both the time. Over Robby's shoulder you can see her at a table, watching, not even pretending not to, one hand pressed to her chest like she's at the movies. Glen's next to her, of course he's here, one beer, and he lifts it an inch when your eyes meet. Small. Just enough.

"Do you want to dance," you say. "Before this song finally dies of old age? I'll make you look real bad. It's the least you owe me."

He laughs, the real one, and pulls you in, and his arms come around you like he's had two months to practice and got it wrong every time until now. Your head finds his chest. The song is ending.

Outside, it keeps raining. The soft and ordinary kind that eventually clears up, to give way to the sun. ㅤ

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