Chapter 4 #2
He's been getting louder for twenty minutes — that escalating drunk loudness I know in my bones, the sound of a man working himself up to being a problem — and when Freya finishes the outline and tilts his arm to show him, he yanks it back and says it's crooked, it's nothing like the picture, she screwed it up, and Freya, calm, professional, ice all the way through, says it's exactly the reference he gave her and she's happy to discuss it but he needs to lower his voice.
I've stopped drawing. I clocked him the second he sat down — you don't grow up where I grew up without developing an alarm for a certain kind of man, the kind whose good mood is just bad mood holding its breath.
I've been half-watching him the whole session, the way you keep one eye on a dog that hasn't decided about you yet.
The sketchbook's still open on my knee but my pencil hasn't moved in ten minutes, and the muscles across my shoulders have gone tight and ready in a way they haven't since Vane Street, the old wiring lighting up, the body remembering things the mind tried to retire.
I tell myself I'm overreacting. I tell myself this is a sunburned tourist with buyer's remorse, not a threat.
I tell myself to stay in my chair and let Freya handle her own shop, because she can, because she's handled worse than this drunk fool a hundred times.
I've spent four months learning to override the old wiring — to be the prospect at the window and not the kid from Vane Street, to keep my hands on a pencil instead of curled into the thing they used to be.
So I sit. I make myself sit. I keep one eye on the dog that hasn't decided about me yet, and I keep my body in the chair by an act of will, and I wait, and I pray I'm wrong about him, and somewhere underneath the praying the old wiring is already running its own quiet countdown that has nothing to do with what I decide.
He doesn't lower his voice.
He stands up. The chair scrapes. He's bigger than her by a foot and a hundred pounds, and he's drunk and embarrassed and looking for somewhere to put it, and he grabs her arm — grabs her working arm, the wrist, the hand, the hands I've drawn a hundred times — and he says something I don't fully hear because by the time the words reach me I'm already moving.
I don't remember crossing the shop. That's the truth.
There's the window and there's the sketchbook in my hand and then there's no sketchbook and no window and I'm between them, and I've got his wrist — the one that's holding her — in a grip he can't break, and I'm saying, very quietly, in the voice from Vane Street that I thought I'd left in a holding cell, "Let go of her right now, or I break it in three places and we both watch you try to drink left-handed for the next six months. "
He lets go.
I don't. Not yet. I walk him backward, slow, controlled, all the way to the door, and I open it with my free hand, and I put him out onto the boardwalk, and I say, "You don't come back.
You don't call. You eat the deposit and you thank God that's all it cost you," and I shut the door, and I lock it, and I stand there for one second with my heart going like the sledge driving pilings, and then I turn around.
Freya's standing by her chair. She's not crying.
She's not even shaken, not visibly — she's too proud for that, too built-by-bikers, she's got the same flat enforcer calm her brother has.
But her hand is shaking. Her right hand, the working hand, the one he grabbed.
It's trembling like a leaf, and she's looking at it like it belongs to someone else, like she's furious it's betraying her.
I cross the room. Slower this time. I don't touch her until she sees me coming and doesn't move away.
Then I take her hand. Both of mine around her one.
I don't say it's okay, because she'd hate that, and it isn't, not yet.
I just hold it. I hold it the way you hold something that's shaking until it stops, and I feel the tremor work its way out of her, slow, the way the light dies in a good gradient, pass after pass, until her hand goes still inside mine.