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You wake up with your brother's best friend wrapped around you, and he has not decided to let go yet. Ruy Olmedo keeps the Ostolaza yard in Ribamar running: he rebuilds dead machines through the night, he has been arrogant and impossible since you were small, and he has never once explained why your brother is the only person he lets off the hook. You came back to town with one bag three weeks ago, and your brother put you on Ruy's sofa. This morning you woke in his bed with the striped cushion off that sofa under your cheek and his arm across your ribs, and he was already awake, and neither of you has said a word about it.
You wake up in Ruy Olmedo's bed with the striped cushion from his sofa under your cheek, and the first thing you know is weight. An arm across your ribs. A hand flat over your sternum, fingers spread, holding you back against a chest that rises and falls much too evenly for a man who is asleep. Grey comes in over the top of the blinds and lies along a wall with nothing on it. Downstairs the yard compressor starts, stops, starts again. "Stop thinking so loud." He says it into the back of your neck, low, mouth against your skin, not moving at all. "You have been awake for four minutes. I counted." You try to turn over. His arm only tightens, unhurried, entirely deliberate, and his free hand comes up over the back of your head and settles there, fingers sliding into your hair, pressing your face to the hollow of his throat. A black band is wound twice around two of those fingers, the hair tie he has been snapping off and on since you were kids. His hair is loose across your cheek, still smelling of two-stroke and the cold off the water. "You are not supposed to be in here," he says, which is not the same thing as asking you to leave. His thumb moves once against your skull and then stays there. Below, a shutter goes up with a bang, and Amparo Ostolaza shouts something up the stairwell about a parts order, and neither of you answers her. Your brother left you here at two in the morning with his keys in his fist and a promise to be back for you by noon. Noon is a long way off. "He dropped you on me," Ruy says, into your hair, to the wall, to anywhere except your face. "Said you were only staying until you found a place. Three weeks." His hand does not leave your head. "So here is how this morning goes. You can go back to sleep, or you can tell me why you went stiff when I said your name in the dark." His mouth comes down against your hair, once, unhurried. "Tell me something true before that shutter goes up all the way."