Page 25 of Crowbar

He shook his head, but his thumb was tracing a slow circle against my hip through the fabric, and the motion was so distracting I nearly walked into a parking meter.

We passed Lamar’s Diner. The hardware store. A barbershop with a spinning pole that Noodles tried to attack. I drew a tiny dog face on the sling in purple glitter, complete with oversized ears, and held my arm up for Crowbar’s inspection.

“Masterpiece,” he said flatly.

“Your enthusiasm is overwhelming. I can barely contain myself.”

“It looks like a gremlin.”

“It looks like our daughter, and you will respect her likeness.”

His stride hitched. Just barely, a half-step stutter that he corrected immediately, but I caught it. Our daughter. The words had slipped out, like they’d been waiting in line and finally reached the front.

I didn’t take them back.

We turned the corner onto Second Street, where a bookshop sat between a florist and a candy store. Noodles was trotting ahead, ears bouncing, tail high, completely unbothered by the concept of leash tension. Crowbar let her have the slack, his long stride eating up the sidewalk while I took two steps for every one of his.

I was adding a heart to the sling in red glitter, right inside the letter C I’d just drawn, when the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

Not a breeze. Not the sun shifting behind a cloud. Something older than that, something wired into the base of my skull from two and a half years of learning to read the air in a room before a hand connected with my face.

I was being watched.

My fingers tightened around the marker. I didn’t stop drawing, didn’t change my pace, didn’t look up. But my eyes moved, scanning the reflection in a shop window as we passed.

Across the street. Leaning against a grey sedan parked in front of the pawn shop. Arms crossed. Watching.

Ken.

My heart slammed so hard I felt it in my throat. The marker slipped, leaving a jagged red line across the sling like a wound. He was wearing the grey Henley again, the one I’d bought him. His posture was calculated. The same way he’d held his hands up like he was harmless while he tried to detach my arm.

The same arm he’d broken a year prior.

He wasn’t approaching or calling out. Just standing there, watching me walk down the street with another man’s hand in my back pocket.

The expression on his face was the one I’d learned to fear most. Not anger. Anger was loud and fast and left marks that faded. This was the quiet version. The one that sat behind his eyes like a pilot light, small and blue and patient, waiting for enough gas to lift off.

I looked away and kept walking. Drew another star on my sling with a hand that trembled just enough to turn the points into jagged teeth.

Crowbar’s thumb was still tracing circles against my hip. He was saying something about the bookshop, about a mechanic’s manual he’d been looking for, and I held on to the sound of his voice like a rope thrown into dark water.

I didn’t tell him.

Because he would do something. I’d known the man less than a week, and I already understood that telling him Ken was fifty feet away would end with someone in an ambulance, and it wouldn’t be Crowbar. And then there’d be cops. And questions. Handcuffs. And a report that put Crowbar’s name next to words like assault and battery. I’d watched enough people I cared about get destroyed by the fallout of my choices to know that this particular grenade needed to stay in my pocket.

So I swallowed the fear. Tucked it behind my sternum next to all the other things I carried. Drew another glitter star on my sling, laughed at something Crowbar said about Noodles trying to eat the leg of a bench, and pretended the tremor in my hand wasn’t there.

My arm throbbed.

A sharp, insistent pulse that radiated from the spot where Ken’s fingers had wrenched, as if the injury itself recognized its maker across the street and was sounding an alarm my mouth refused to voice.

I shifted closer to Crowbar, pressing my shoulder against his arm. He glanced down at me, those storm-cloud eyes searching my face for half a second before his hand tightened in my pocket, pulling me closer.

“Cold?” he asked.

“Little bit.” I wanted to curl into his arms and stay there forever. “The sling doesn’t exactly insulate.”

He shrugged off his leather cut one-armed and draped it over my shoulders without breaking stride. The weight of it settled around me like armor. It smelled like him. Motor oil and sandalwood and something underneath that was just Crowbar, solid and safe.