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“I mean, mine isn’t. I go to the shooting range all the time.”

“Yes. I forgot that you carry some protection.”

“You can’t take the street out of the kid, even if you can take the kid off the street, or something like that.”

“I know.”

He said that so heavily that it turned the key inside of her. Undid a lock. She knew it, of course, that this was what he was struggling with. That their past haunted him. And that there were things in his she didn’t know about. But it all seemed so clear right then.

That for him, right now the past was closer than it had ever been. And he was struggling trying to get away from it. To try to push it back down where it belonged.

“We could do painting?”

“That is a little bit pastoral.”

“I’ve never done it before.”

“I don’t think that I have an artistic bone in my body.”

“How do you know?”

“Plenty of kids who live on the streets find ways to express themselves artistically. That’s why graffiti exists.”

“I thought it mainly existed for gang signs.”

“That too. But you know that there’s more to it than that.”

“Yeah. Well, what if we tried?”

That became the theme of the day. They had all the equipment, so they might as well try. And they did. They did try painting, and Esme got extremely frustrated with it and discarded hers after an hour, opting instead to watch Adonis complete an art lesson with a maddening amount of precision and skill.

“You are good at it,” she said.

“All I did was follow the instructions. That is not art. That is a glorified paint-by-number.”

She gestured to her messy canvas. “Look what I did.”

“You didn’t follow the instructions,” he said. “You thought that you knew better, and that you could improvise.”

She growled. “Whatever. Maybe I did think that. And it didn’t work.”

“It is one of the things I admire about you, Esme. You jump into things, and you tend to think that you know better, even if you don’t know how to do the thing at all.”

“That is a very backhanded compliment.”

“It’s not. Like when you walked into that club wearing a dress that might as well not have been there at all, looking for sex when you knew nothing about the act.”

Her jaw dropped. “I did know plenty about sex, thank you very much. How do you think I knew exactly what I wanted?”

“You are a nightmare,” he said.

“I’m your nightmare.”

“How true that is.”

They did archery next, and she found that she was much better at that, because there was an element of intuition involved, and she already knew how to aim for targets with her handgun. Of course, Adonis was good at that too. There was actually nothing he was bad at. He destroyed her at tennis, which was very annoying, and she decided to blame her pregnancy for the fact that she was moving a bit sluggishly.

“You should probably not overexert yourself,” he said.