Chapter 2
Kieran
I know I'm playing with fire. The problem is that I've been cold my whole life, and the fire is the first warm thing I've found.
It's the third lesson — or maybe the fourth, I've stopped counting the way I stopped counting the days since I last saw her — and I'm sitting at the small drawing table Freya keeps in the back of Black Tide Ink, the one she uses for stencils, and she's standing behind my right shoulder telling me everything I'm doing wrong.
"You're choking it," she says. "The charcoal. You're holding it like you're afraid it'll run away. Loosen your grip."
"If I loosen my grip I'll smudge it."
"Then smudge it. You can't make a good mark scared of a bad one.
" She reaches over my shoulder and her fingers close around mine, repositioning them on the stick of vine charcoal, and I stop breathing in a way I'm getting dangerously used to.
"There. Hold it back here, near the end.
Let your whole arm move, not just your wrist. Draw from the shoulder. "
Her hand is warm over mine. She smells like ink and the green-tea soap she keeps by the back sink and underneath that something that's just her, and her breath stirs the hair by my ear when she leans in to see the page, and I am twenty-four years old and I have been shot at and arrested and beaten with a tire iron behind a bar on Vane Street, and none of it ever made my heart slam the way her hand on my hand makes it slam.
"Now the gesture," she says, oblivious — or pretending to be, I can never tell. "Don't draw the bottle. Draw the energy of the bottle. Three lines. Go."
She's set up a still life that's the least romantic thing imaginable: a green glass bottle, a crumpled rag, a coffee mug with her own dried paint crusted on the rim. I draw three lines. They're wrong. I draw three more. They're less wrong.
"Better," she says, and steps back, and the air she leaves behind feels ten degrees colder. "See? You were trying to copy it. Copying is a coward's move. I want you to tell me what it feels like to be that bottle sitting there in that light."
"It feels like it wishes someone would pick it up," I say, and I don't know where it comes from, and I hear it land in the quiet of the shop like a stone dropped down a well.
Freya doesn't answer right away. When I glance back she's looking at me with an expression I can't read — the assessing one, the one from the compound, the one that takes inventory. "Yeah," she says finally. "Draw that, then."
So I do. And for an hour I forget to be careful, and I forget she's Theo's sister, and I forget the patch and the past and the whole architecture of want and prohibition that my life has become, and I just draw the green bottle wishing someone would pick it up, and when I'm done it's the best thing I've ever made, and she looks at it for a long time and says, "Okay.
Now you're dangerous," and I don't think either of us is talking about the drawing.
What I don't tell her — what I can't find the words for — is what the drawing does to the rest of me.
Because for seven years I built myself a kind of waterproof life.
You learn it inside: feel nothing you don't have to feel, want nothing you can't get, keep the soft parts so far down that nobody, including you, can find them and use them.
I got good at it. I got so good at it that by the time Theo pulled me out of that cell, the soft parts weren't even hidden anymore, they were just gone, paved over, a parking lot where a kid used to be.
And then this woman puts a stick of charcoal in my hand and tells me to draw what it feels like to be a bottle nobody picks up, and the parking lot cracks.
Grass comes up through it. I draw the bottle and I'm drawing myself and I know it and she knows it and neither of us says it, and when I leave the shop that first night I sit on my bike in the dark for twenty minutes before I can trust myself to ride, because something's running in me that I shut off at seventeen and I'd forgotten it had a sound.
The next morning I see the world the way I used to see it before I taught myself not to.
The light on the fuel cans in the yard. The particular gray of Theo's eyes when he's deciding something.
The way Rourke's hands shake before his first coffee and steady after.
I see all of it, all at once, the way I did when I was a kid with a pencil and no reason yet to stop, and it's overwhelming and it's the most alive I've felt in years and I understand, with a sinking certainty, that she's given me back something I can't give back.
You can't un-see. You can't re-pave the lot once the grass is through.
She's reopened the one door I sealed on purpose, and there's no closing it now, and the worst part is I don't even want to.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about doing something you love: it costs you.
The lessons are an hour of joy and twenty-three hours of consequence.
Because now I have somewhere to put all the years of looking, and the looking pours out of me, and I can't turn it off when I leave her shop.
I see the harbor differently. I see the club differently.
I see the patched members in the mornings, hungover and human, and my hand itches for charcoal.
I've started carrying the sketchbook everywhere, and the guys have noticed, and Briggs, who I literally watched cry over a tattoo, has decided this makes me soft and tells me so daily, and I let him, because he's not wrong about the part that matters.
I've gone soft. Over her.
Briggs is the one who keeps saying it, and the worst part is he's not even wrong, he just thinks it's an insult.
"You've gone soft, prospect," he tells me, watching me sketch the rigging on a sailboat in the marina lot during a smoke break.
"Look at you. Drawing little pictures. Next you'll be writing poetry and crying at sunsets.
" But he says it while leaning over my shoulder to see the drawing, and when I'm done he goes quiet, and then he says, gruff, "That's the boat my old man taught me on.
The Mary Two. You got the — you got the way she sits in the water exactly right.
" And he asks if he can have it, and I tear the page out and give it to him, and he folds it careful into his cut like it's worth something, and that's the thing about going soft that Briggs doesn't understand even as he's doing it: it's not weakness.
It's just the parking lot cracking. It's grass coming up through concrete.
It's the thing she gave back to me when she put a stick of charcoal in my hand, and it's spreading, and I can't stop it, and I've stopped wanting to.
I lie on my bunk at the compound at night and I run the math, the way I used to run the math on a job — exits, risks, payoffs.
The payoff column has one entry and it's her name.
The risk column has everything. My patch.
My future. The first family I've ever had that didn't bleed me out the door.
And Theo. God, Theo. The man who reached into a holding cell and pulled me out by the collar of a life I was about to throw away, who vouched for me with his own name in front of men who don't forgive being wrong about people.
My sister is not part of the package. He said it once, on day one, and he never had to say it again, because it was a load-bearing wall in the whole structure of my second chance.
The math never comes out right. That's the part that should scare me more than it does.
On a job, the math is the whole point — you don't move until the payoff beats the risk, you walk away from anything where the numbers don't clear, that discipline is the only reason I'm not dead or doing fifteen years.
And every single night the numbers don't clear.
One name in the payoff column against everything I've got in the risk column.
Any sane operator folds. I taught myself to be a sane operator. It kept me alive.
And every night I do the math, and every night it says fold, and every day I drive to her shop anyway, and I lie on my bunk trying to understand the man who keeps overriding the math, because I don't recognize him.
He's not the cautious kid who counts exits.
He's somebody older and somebody younger at the same time — somebody from before the parking lot got paved, somebody who hasn't learned yet that wanting things is how they take them from you.
She woke him up with a stick of charcoal and now he won't go back to sleep, and he doesn't care about the math, and he's going to get us both wrecked, and I lie there in the dark and I can't make myself stop him.
The shop bunk creaks across the room. Rourke, half-awake, mutters, "You're thinking loud again, kid.
Whatever she is, marry her or forget her, just do it quieter.
" He rolls over. Rourke thinks everyone's love life can be solved by either marriage or silence; it's the only advice he's got and he gives it to everyone.
I lie there and almost laugh, because the two things I can't do are the only two he's offering.
And I keep going back to her shop anyway.
"You're an idiot," I tell my reflection in the compound bathroom one morning, and my reflection, hollow-eyed from another sleepless night, agrees with me, and then I drive to Black Tide Ink on my lunch hour with a fresh stick of charcoal in my jacket pocket like that's a normal thing a sane man does.