Page 230 of Slashed Bonds

“Anything that isn’t trying to kill you sucks balls, Monarch.” He puts it in his jacket. “Come on. Out of the car.”

We get out.

He comes around to my side. Not to open the door, I’ve already done that, but to be there when I stand up on heels I bought with a black card in a store with lights, and I stand up, and he’s there, and I don’t let him turn toward the house.

I grab his hand.

It stops him. Pulls him around, and the pulling brings him against me, the whole front of him, and he doesn’t hesitate. He presses in. I’ve got to look up, far up, the height difference between us a thing I only notice when we’re standing and I’m not in skates, and he looks down into my eyes and holds there.

I love a fucker who can hold eye contact. I’ve said that before. I’ll say it on my gravestone.

“You don’t need to quit.”

“I want to.”

No hesitation. None. The words land like stones set in a row.

I look at him. Something like wonder in it, I think, because men don’t say I want to about things that are good for them, not in my experience, not the men I’ve known. And he leans down, until his mouth’s at my ear, and the bass from the house goes through both of us.

“I do all this shit to run from the pain of losing the ones I care about.” Low. A confession, not a speech. “The pills. The smoke. The blindfold. If I can get far enough away from the noise, it never happened. Right?”

Right. God. Right.

We look at each other. And I understand him. Not the way you understand a sentence. The way you understand a room you’ve lived in. Four deadbolts. A chair under the handle. A shed on the edge of the world where nothing could reach me because I’d made sure nothing could, and if nothing reaches you, nothing happened.

I nod. Slowly.

He takes my chin in his hand.

And kisses me.

Gently. So gently I almost don’t recognize it as him. There’s a softness in it, a tenderness that doesn’t hurry, like we’ve got the whole night and the whole street and the whole bass line to ourselves and nothing to get to. His mouth on mine with the cold around us and his thumb under my jaw.

“I’m tired of running.”

He says it into my lips. Then he seals it with another kiss, and this one ends with his teeth on my bottom lip, tugging it, a slow suck that goes down my spine and settles somewhere low.

“I was rejected,” he says, “because at the peak of my career, my mom got sick.”

I look up at him.

He’s pulled back exactly far enough that we can keep looking at each other, no farther. The conversation’s gone to a register under the music, a thing said in a confessional, and I don’t move because moving might end it.

“Terminal. A downhill spiral, fast, the kind where every week there’s less of her. And instead of going to the finals, the ones that had scouts in the building, the ones that were supposed to be the whole point of everything I’d done since I was six, I stayed at her bedside. I held her hand when she took her last breath.”

Korean. The language on one side of the wall. The one that wasn’t safe either, but was hers.

I think of my own mother. Elowen, with her hands over her mouth in the third row. The last time I saw her she was being put into a car outside a courthouse by a woman with a lanyard, and she didn’t look back, because she’d been told not to, because looking back would make it harder for the children. I’ve never been able to decide whether she chose that or had it chosen for her.

He got to hold a hand. I got a photograph through a lawyer. Neither of us got to keep what we had.

My heart clenches. It’s the only word for it. A fist closing in my chest.

“My punishment was for not submitting. To a system that doesn’t give a fuck about the bonds we make. Slash them. Ruin them. Burn them to ash.” Each word placed. “None of that matters when there are millions on the line. A program with a defenseman who chose his dying mother over a final is a program with a problem, and they solved it.”

He lays one more kiss on me.

Brief. Final. A full stop.