Chapter 23
David
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere useful,” Nora says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting.”
Nora is driving my car. This fact alone should bother me more than it does, given that I haven’t voluntarily relinquished the wheel of any vehicle since I was seventeen and Caleb backed our mother’s Volvo into a mailbox. It should bother me a lot. Control is one of the few currencies I trust.
But right now, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of my Audi with my tie half-torn loose, my pulse still trying to claw its way out of my throat, and Nora’s hands are on my steering wheel at ten and two like she was born to command hostile machinery.
The fact that she isn’t driving aggressively is somehow more disorienting than if she were.
Chicago slides past the windows in gray blurs of traffic, glass, and wet-looking pavement.
I don’t remember getting into the car. I remember her taking my keys.
I remember the weight of her in my arms in the parking lot and the humiliating, violent relief of discovering there was still one place left in the world where I could break and not hit the ground.
After that, everything goes white at the edges.
“Nora.”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
The car is quiet except for the low hum of air through the vents and the slow, deliberate click of the blinker when she changes lanes. I keep my eyes on her hands, watch every small movement, and remember what they feel like at my collar. At my jaw. On my body.
It has been, by my count, thirty-six days since she invited me into her home and I wrecked my self-control on her kitchen counter in a way that should have left me unable to look her in the eye ever again. One night. One flash flood out of months of tension. We never even made it to her bed.
We agreed it couldn’t happen again.
We’re adults. This happened. It doesn’t have to mean anything beyond what it was.
A single mistake, one that would never be repeated because I have “rules.” Rules that protect Michaela. Rules that were supposed to provide her with stability.
Fuck.
Look where those rules got me.
We exit the expressway in Lincoln Park and turn into the residential grid, chain pharmacies and dead-windowed boutiques giving way to brownstone rows and the faint, insistent crush of wet leaves.
The neighborhood shifts—commercial, industrial.
Nora’s lips are pressed together, her brow knotted in a kind of determined calm.
I stare at her profile and think of kisses—how they tasted, and how I justified remembering.
She pulls into a parking lot beside a low concrete structure with a sign I don’t immediately parse.
WRECK ROOM CHICAGO.
“What is this?”
“Exactly what it sounds like.” She kills the engine and looks at me. Her eyes are red-rimmed—she’s been crying too, I realize, quietly, while driving, the tears she wouldn’t let herself shed in the courtroom paid in private. “Have you ever hit something with a baseball bat?”
“Not since Little League.”
“Then you’re overdue.”
The inside of a smash room isn’t what I expect—which is saying something, because I didn’t have expectations.
The lobby looks like any small business.
It has a front desk, waiver forms, a kid in a black T-shirt who hands us safety goggles and asks if we want the “standard package” or the “total annihilation.”
“Total annihilation,” Nora says, without hesitation.
“I didn’t realize there were tiers.”
“There are always tiers.” She signs both waivers with the speed of a woman who has done this before. “You get more stuff to break.”
We’re shuffled into a changing area, where we put overalls over our clothes and find safety gloves and steel-toed boots that fit.
When we’re dressed appropriately for destruction, they lead us to a room with concrete walls, concrete floor, industrial lighting.
Against the far wall is a shelf of old printers, ceramic plates, glass bottles, a keyboard, a defunct television set, and what appears to be an entire tea set.
A row of baseball bats lean against the wall. Aluminum. Scarred from use.
Nora picks one up, tests the weight, and turns to me.
“This,” she says, “is where I came during my divorce.”
I look at her. “Your divorce.”
“Twelve sessions. Every other Saturday. I went through six printers and a truly unconscionable number of wine glasses.” She offers me one of the other bats. “It’s cheaper than therapy and significantly more satisfying.”
I take the bat. The handle is cold through my glove. The weight of it is grounding—solid, purposeful, designed for exactly one thing.
“Rules,” Nora says, pulling on her goggles. “Don’t aim at each other. Don’t aim at the ceiling. Don’t think. That last one’s the most important.”
“Thinking is my entire—”
She swings.
The printer on the end of the shelf explodes. Plastic shrapnel sprays across the concrete. The sound is enormous—a sharp, percussive crack that echoes off the walls and stuns me to silence.
Nora lowers the bat. Chest heaving. Eyes bright.
“Your turn,” she says.
I look at the shelf. At the plates. At the keyboard with its orderly rows of keys.
I think about the judge saying, however.
I think about Kelsie’s mouth curving behind the tissue.
I think about the next twelve weeks.
I swing.
The keyboard detonates. Keys scatter across the floor like teeth knocked from a jaw. The impact vibrates up through the bat into my arms, my shoulders, and something in my chest that has been clenched for hours—months—years—loosens by one degree.
Again. I swing at the glass set—coffee mugs with dead company logos, chipped tumblers, and a single pristine wine glass on the end of the row.
The wine glass goes first—a crystalline shriek, then nothing, just dust in the air.
The mugs follow. Each impact fills the room with a sound that is both violence and relief.
Nora is a menace. She breaks a monitor into perfect halves, then beheads the ceramic bulldog they’ve put on the floor for variety. The fragments spray her goggles, her forehead, her hair. She laughs—a bright, unselfconscious sound that bounces off concrete and wraps around my bones.
She glances at me over her shoulder, breathing quick. “Your technique is very repressed.”
“Says the woman who just murdered a bulldog.”
She snorts and takes another swing, this time at a stack of plates. “Come on, Kingsley. Don’t think. Just hit.”
I try. This time, I pick up two bats at once, channeling my inner Dominic, and do a full windmill at a defunct coffee maker on the ground. Glass, plastic, and something dark and metallic fly everywhere. The force is so violent it jolts the sleeves of the coverall on my skin.
I let myself swing again, and again, and again. I don’t stop until there’s nothing left of the appliance except a mangled shell with wires and jagged edges unspooling onto the floor.
Nora lets out a whistle. “That’s more like it.”
I nod, breathing hard, and stare at the rubble. The inside of my head isn’t empty, but it’s quieter than it has been in weeks. I feel the pulse of my heart in the tight skin over my knuckles. The set of my jaw.
We move down the line. Three plates at a time.
Old rotary phones. A computer monitor that resists destruction so we take turns battering it to death.
At some point, sweat beads at my temples, and I realize I haven’t thought about Kelsie in at least five minutes.
I haven’t done anything except swing and shatter and listen to the weird, cathartic music of rupture.
“Why didn’t you tell me we were coming here?” I ask after the third round.
Nora wipes her brow, grinning under the plastic fog of her goggles. “Would you have agreed?”
“No,” I admit, “but I would have had respect for your premeditation.”
She shrugs. “Some catastrophes require ceremony.”
I look at her—at this woman, flushed with exertion and pride in her own destructive prowess—and I’m pretty sure my heart is going to tear itself in half with how much I want her.
I drop the bat.
It hits the floor with a metallic clatter, and before logic can stage a comeback, I reach for her. Her own bat is still raised in both hands, but the second I make contact, her fingers go loose and it rolls to the ground.
She’s breathing as hard as I am, eyes wide behind the safety shields, mouth parted like she’s about to say something. I slide a hand behind her neck and curl my palm against the sweat-damp nape.
“You can’t take it back this time,” she says.
“I won’t.”
I lift the goggles from my face and pull her to me.
The kiss is a collision. Heat and teeth, the taste of adrenaline and Nora’s own wild, angry hope. She opens for me with a desperation that makes every worst impulse in me want to worship her.
There are a thousand reasons to stop, but I’m done with them all. Instead, we back up into the wall of the wreck room, both of us clumsy, foolish, and greedy in the confined space. I want to touch every place I’ve denied myself for weeks and ask forgiveness with my mouth.
My hand slides from the back of her neck to her jaw, tipping her face where I want it. She makes a sound—small, wrecked, infuriatingly perfect—and fists both hands in the front of my coveralls like she isn’t sure whether to pull me closer or hold me back.
I make the decision for her.
I crowd in until there’s no room left between us except the hard lines of protective gear and the frantic rise and fall of our chests. My mouth moves over hers again—slower this time, deeper—because now that I have her I want to taste every second of what I almost threw away.
A harsh electronic buzz splits the room open.
Nora jerks back against the wall, breathless, her goggles skewed, her mouth swollen from mine. For one disorienting second I have no idea where I am—only that my hands are on her, my body is locked against hers, and some external force is apparently objecting.
She blinks, dazed, then lets out a shaky laugh. “That,” she says, pulling her goggles up onto her head, “means our time’s up.”
I stare at her. At the flush high in her cheeks. At the strand of auburn hair stuck to the corner of her mouth. “That’s a deeply unfortunate sound.”
“It really is.” She searches my face, and something gentler comes into her expression now that the impact has passed. “Do you feel any better?”
My lungs are still working too hard. My pulse is still trying to break a land-speed record. My entire body is a live wire, and my judgment has apparently been beaten to death alongside a coffee maker.
“Yes,” I say, because it’s true in at least twelve different ways.
Her smile turns slow and wicked. “They also have a bar.”
I laugh. “Of course they do.” Because people routinely spend forty-five minutes pulverizing obsolete electronics before making out against a brick wall and following it up with cocktails.
She moves toward the door. “Are you coming?”
I look at the wreckage behind us. Shattered glass. Demolished electronics. The remains of every careful thing I built to keep myself from exactly this.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m coming.”