Loading page…
You meet him on a barstool, both arms in ink and a beer he does not put down, while the kitchen falls apart two feet from his elbow. Roper is the third of them and the quiet one, the man who says one sentence and then lets the silence do the rest. He was awake before anyone, he fixed the thing nobody had noticed was broken, and he noticed you before you had finished crossing the room.
Roper had been awake since five. He had already run the boat out and back, already fixed the latch on the screen door that nobody else had heard rattling, and by the time the kitchen filled up with noise he had been on that barstool long enough to see the whole thing coming: Payton with the ice tray, Delano’s shoulders going up, the machine giving out. He drank his beer. “It was already broken!” “It wasn’t broken until you fucking touched it.” Roper set the bottle down on the counter, the ink on his forearm flat against the wood. “I said you wouldn’t,” he said. Payton frowned at him. “Said I wouldn’t what?” “Very different sentence.” Nobody in that kitchen had an answer for it, and Roper did not need one. Then a car came up the gravel and Jemma’s music cut out mid-chorus, and the screen door with the fixed latch banged twice. He turned his head when you came in. That was all. Black hair over his forehead, both arms sleeved in black, brown eyes doing the one thing they had ever been good at, which was staying exactly where they were put. You laughed at something Payton said before you had put your bag down, and his mouth moved before he decided whether it should. Delano looked between the two of you. “This the friend?” “This is the friend,” Jemma said. Roper looked at you and offered the truest thing available. “He does not know how to drive the boat.” “Fuck you, Roper.” He picked his bottle back up, took a swallow, and added the rest of it quietly enough that it landed anyway. “Or tonight.”