He’d begun to get them back under control recently. At least he’d thought so.
Still on his knees, he took a deep breath and put a hand on Rye’s shoe.
“Can I see?”
Rye looked down at him, frowning, but then he bit his lip and gave one short nod.
Charlie lifted the leg of his jeans gently. Rye’s ankle looked slightly swollen, but probably just tweaked, not sprained. He untied the gray bandana. The bottom half of Rye’s shin was a mess of bruises and a long, fairly deep cut ran through the middle.
Rye was holding his breath. The cut looked painful but probably not so deep that it required stitches. Charlie could see just by looking at it that it hadn’t been well cleaned, though.
Infection, disease, blood poisoning, gangrene, amputation—
Charlie pictured the windshield wipers, scraping every frightening thought clear.
“Come home with me,” Charlie said, chest tight. He retied the bandanna and rolled down Rye’s pant leg. Then he stood and made for the door.
“What? No.”
“We need to clean that cut. Dress it properly.”
“I thought you were gonna look at my house.”
“That can wait.”
“But you’re here now,” Rye said, looking genuinely confused.
Charlie sighed.
Wipe, wipe, wipe. It’s not an emergency. Rye isn’t going to die. It’s okay to wait. Waiting won’t make things worse.
“All right. I’ll look at the house, then you’ll come home with me. We can take care of your leg and talk about the house then. Okay?”
“Sure.”
Charlie walked through the house, testing the floors, prying back boards to look at the joists, and tapping at the drywall, trying not to imagine infection blooming in Rye’s blood and traveling through his whole body. Rye trailed behind him, asking questions and biting his lip when Charlie found something structurally unsound. Which was a lot of things.
When he was examining the fireplace, Rye pointed to some fragments of wood that lay unburnt among the ash.
“I think someone burned the dresser from the bedroom. Maybe the bed frame too.”
Charlie looked closely at the wood.
“Could be.”
“Maybe kids, hanging out? Or, uh, you know, satanists.”
Charlie assumed he was kidding.
“Guess it depends on whether you found candy bar wrappers or a goat carcass in a pentagram,” Charlie said dryly.
Rye grinned. A real, natural, can’t-help-it grin, and it was like someone turned on the sun. He had two perfect dimples and his crooked teeth were utterly charming. The smile lit up his eyes and made his face inviting and warm.
Damn.
“I found cheap candles,” Rye said.
“Hmm. Could go either way.”
That got a laugh out of Rye, who looked surprised by it. Charlie was used to that. People told him all the time that he had no sense of humor.
Something niggled at the back of Charlie’s mind and he looked up into the chimney to check the flue.
“In the fall, my brother told me he saw smoke coming from over here,” Charlie remembered. “He kept saying the smoke was coming at a different time than usual. I thought it was just because he’d broken his leg and was going all Rear Window, making up a mystery to occupy him. But now I wonder if he saw people squatting here.”
Rye’s eyes cut to his sleeping bag and duffel bag in the corner at squatting and he walked away. Charlie followed him up the stairs. It was a small space relative to the rest of the house, as if Rye’s grandfather was so sure that he’d always live alone that he didn’t even leave space for that to change.
The idea made Charlie sad.
He’d spent the last two years turning his own house into a place with the possibility for anything. Some days—many days—he’d wondered why he was doing it. Sure, Jane loved to roll around in the sawdust and plaster dust his renovations created, but beyond that...
Because the truth was that he could have turned the spare room into a woodworking studio. He didn’t need a bigger kitchen because he cooked basic, practical meals for one. When he wanted to see the sky and the trees he simply walked outside.
But something had driven him to create something more. More flexible, more welcoming...just more.
Only very early in the morning and very late at night was Charlie able to admit to himself that maybe it wasn’t his dream house he was building. That maybe he was building it for someone he hadn’t met yet; for a life he didn’t yet have.
“So?” Rye was looking up at him in a way that made Charlie realize he’d been standing at the top of the stairs, staring.
Mismatched chairs were set up in a circle around a milk crate with candles on top; the mattress pushed up against the wall.
“Probably kids,” Charlie said. “If it was squatters, I’d think the mattress would be on the floor.” Rye bit his lip, frowning. “Chances are they started burning the dresser and bedframe when it got seriously cold.”