Page 87 of Antihero

The tenderness of the impulse surprised him. It seemed to surprise her, too.

It brought him back to the times he’d spent with Mia. They’d had a closeness as well beyond the physicality that had felt as unsettling as it did intoxicating.

Candy tipped her head up at him. Her eyes scrutinized him. Now they looked sea-green, picking up hints from the bedspread, coiled around her hips like the bustled train of a dress. She lay on her side, tilted toward him. She pinched her lip between her teeth, pensive.

“Do you want to see my back?” she asked.

They’d faced each other the whole time.

He swallowed dryly. “Yes.”

She scooted over, still on her side. And then rolled flat onto her belly.

The contrast was breathtaking. The front of her was glorious and smooth. The back of her, seamed almost perfectly like one half of a mold, was mottled and uneven. Her nape and the backs of her arms had been spared as well as the dip of her lumbar curve, her shoulders and mid-back bearing the damage. Over the course of dozens of skin grafts, it had healed into a swirling landscape.

He was breathless.

She propped her chin atop her stacked forearms and studied him studying her.

“You can touch it,” she said.

He reached out and stroked the uneven flesh with his palm. It was smooth and rough at once. She didn’t wince.

He had done this. He had done this to her.

“It doesn’t weep anymore,” she said. “There’s barely any pain and not much itching. Mostly numb now. Pins and needles if I take a bath.”

He felt his focus loosen, his vision gone glassy.

She cocked her head. “What?”

“What am I supposed to say about this if we are…”

“If we are what?”

“Real to each other?”

She let the question settle. The song kept on, no cowboy, no white horse, no sunset, not there yet.

“I was trying to kill you. You were outnumbered eight to one. I fired at your face from close range. I’d brought the jugs of sulfuric acid myself, to dissolve your body after we killed you. I was in a different mode. Operational. And you were, too. So maybe? We don’t have anything to settle. Maybe more complicated isn’t more right. Maybe this”—a gesture to the room, the two of them, the rain-tapped windowpane—“is just as real, too.”

He brushed her bangs out of her face. She smiled and flipped over in a single quick motion, tucking into his side. The back of her head rested on the meat of his biceps and he looked down at her and she looked up at him.

She nipped his nose. Not too hard but hard enough to let him know she could do it harder.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Evan.”

“Evan.” When she giggled, she looked twenty-three years old. “I’m Candy.”

36Scary Fucking Friend

Manny Llorente was terrified. And profoundly sore.

His tendons hurt and his cartilage hurt and his fucking fascia hurt. His skin was marbled with purple blotches from popped blood vessels, which was evidently what happened when you got yourself vacuum-sealed like a chicken breast. The handcuffs hadn’t helped either, or the hard plastic backseat of the fed car, or the harder bench he’d slept on in holding.

Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was as bad as his worst nightmares, but the booking officer told him he was lucky the even-worse MCC had closed, said it had been nicknamed the Guantánamo of New York. Petrified, Manny watched a cockroach scuttle across the concrete seam where floor met wall.