Chapter 7 #2
Our fingers brush. His are warm—always warm, a biological furnace that operates at a temperature my perpetually cold body registers as miraculous.
The contact is brief, routine, unremarkable by any objective standard and yet catalogued by my nervous system with the precision of a seismograph recording tremors.
Then he moves to the window.
He pushes it open just slightly—an inch, maybe two—and the night air enters in a thin stream that carries the scent of the forest: wet earth, pine resin, the particular ozone-tinged coolness that precedes late-evening condensation.
The cold hits my bare arms immediately, and I pull the sleeves of his sweater further over my hands, the wool bunching around my knuckles as I wrap my fingers around the wine glass and draw the warmth of the liquid through the crystal.
He opened the window.
Which means—
He’s going to the drawer next.
I perk up.
The reaction is shameless in its transparency—my posture straightening, my eyes tracking his movement across the room with the undisguised interest of someone who has just been told their favorite thing is about to happen.
The void doesn’t even attempt to suppress it.
Some pleasures have earned exemption from the emotional embargo, and this is one of them.
Hawk opens the bedside drawer and pulls out the rolls.
The pre-rolled blunts are wrapped in the dark, fragrant tobacco leaf that I’ve come to associate with the specific variety of peace that exists in this room and nowhere else in Savage Knot.
He handles them with the same care he applied to the vinyl—respect for objects that serve a purpose beyond their material composition.
I wasn’t always a smoker.
Before the cliff, before the fall, before the entire tectonic restructuring of my existence, I didn’t smoke anything.
Not cigarettes, not weed, not the expensive cigars that the Sinclair social circle passed around at galas like currency.
I thought it was cool because everyone around me deemed it that way—a performance of sophistication that I adopted the way I adopted everything in those early years, by observation and imitation rather than genuine desire.
Then the stress came.
Not the manageable kind—not deadlines or social obligations or the garden-variety anxiety of being young and privileged in a world that demands you perform gratitude for your privilege.
The real kind.
The kind that settles onto your shoulders like a physical weight and compresses your spine vertebra by vertebra until you understand, viscerally, why the word “crushing” is used to describe it.
The weed helped.
Not fixed. Not healed. Not addressed the underlying structural damage that no amount of THC could reach.
But it tamed the demons. Invited a calm that the void couldn’t provide and the medication couldn’t replicate—a softer, warmer version of silence that didn’t feel like emptiness but like rest. A genuine, temporary tranquility that lowered the volume on the constant, grinding broadcast of threat assessment and survival calculation that occupied my conscious mind from waking to unconsciousness.
The cigars served a different function. They tasted like wealth—like the empire I was born to inherit and chose to abandon, like the boardrooms and the penthouses and the particular brand of power that operates through mahogany desks and leather chairs and the slow, deliberate consumption of things that cost more than most people earn in a month.
Smoking a cigar was a way of touching that world without re-entering it.
A sensory postcard from a life I chose not to live.
Designated portions.
The weed for peace.
The cigars for remembrance.
Each one filling a compartment in a system that my body and mind required to function.
I’m not an addict. Not in the clinical sense—not dependent, not compulsive, not organized around the procurement and consumption of substances in a way that disrupts my capacity to function.
I can go days, weeks, without either and suffer nothing beyond a vague, unfocused irritability that might be withdrawal or might just be my default personality.
Probably the latter.
But these quiet moments—
These are different.
These moments, when it’s just Hawk and me in this room with the vinyl playing low and the window cracked and a blunt passing between us in a rhythm that requires no coordination because we’ve done it enough times that the exchange is second nature—these moments are the closest thing to peace I have access to.
Not happiness. Not contentment. Something less ambitious than either.
Just the temporary absence of war. The brief ceasefire between my nervous system and the world it’s perpetually defending against.
Significance.
This is what significance feels like.
Not the grand, cinematic kind.
The quiet kind.
The kind that happens when you stop fighting long enough to sit next to someone and not say anything and have that be enough.
He lights the blunt. The flame from his Zippo—battered, silver, engraved with something in a language I’ve never been able to identify—catches the tip and produces a thin curl of smoke that rises toward the cracked window and slips through the gap into the night air.
The first drag is his, the way it always is—a deep, slow inhale that engages his entire respiratory system, his scarred chest expanding as the smoke fills his lungs.
He holds it for a count of four, then releases in a measured exhale that turns the thin stream into a diffuse cloud that the evening light transforms into something almost beautiful.
He passes it to me.
Our fingers overlap on the wrap, his calloused tips warm against my cold knuckles, and the transfer is seamless—no fumbling, no adjustment, just the practiced geometry of two hands that have been exchanging objects in the dark for three years.
We settle.
Him on the bed beside me, his back against the headboard, his long legs stretched out across the dark gray sheets.
Me tucked against his side, my head finding the hollow of his shoulder where the muscle meets the collarbone—a space that my skull fits into with an anatomical precision that I refuse to interpret as meaningful but that my body interprets as home.
His skin is warm against my temple. The scent of pine and smoke and iron fills my nostrils with each breath, layered now with the sweeter, herbier fragrance of the weed that softens its edges into something less predatory.
The red envelope sits between us on the bed like a third party to a conversation that hasn’t started yet.
We share the blunt in silence.
Back and forth, the rhythm unconscious, the exchanges occurring at intervals that neither of us counts but both of us feel.
Inhale. Hold. Release. Pass. The smoke accumulates in the room despite the cracked window, creating a thin haze that softens the edges of the furniture and the shadows and the thin seam of evening light until the entire bedroom looks like a photograph taken through a filter designed to make real life appear more dreamlike than it actually is.
The weed kicks in around the halfway point.
I feel it arrive—not suddenly, not with the sharp onset of medication or the clinical efficiency of Hawk’s injections, but gradually, like warm water filling a vessel from the bottom up.
My muscles soften. The persistent, low-grade tension that lives in my shoulders and my jaw and the spaces between my ribs unclenches by degrees, each increment producing a corresponding decrease in the volume of the internal broadcast that normally runs at full capacity from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I close them.
Quiet.
Genuine quiet.
Not the void’s silence—not the echoing, empty nothing that passes for my emotional baseline.
Something warmer.
Something that almost resembles rest.
I relax further into him, my weight shifting to lean more heavily against his shoulder, my body surrendering to the dual influence of the THC and the proximity and the low vinyl music that wraps the room in a sonic blanket of analog warmth.
His arm adjusts automatically, his hand coming to rest on my knee—not possessively, not suggestively, just present.
A point of contact that says I’m here without requiring a response.
“You going to open that?”
His voice is softer now—the edges rounded by the weed, the natural roughness of his Alpha register mellowed into something that vibrates through his chest and into my skull through the point of contact at his shoulder. The question is casual in delivery and seismic in implication.
I take an inhale from the blunt.
Long. Slow. Deliberate. The smoke fills my lungs with a warmth that expands outward through my ribcage, pressing gently against the bandaged wound, and I hold it there for a count that extends well past the recommended duration because the delay gives me time to formulate a response that isn’t a confession.
I let it out slowly.
The exhale is measured, controlled, the smoke emerging in a thin, steady stream that rises toward the cracked window and dissipates into the night air. I watch it go—gray tendrils against the dark ceiling, twisting and dissolving, temporary by design.
I relax further into him, my body sinking against his warmth with the boneless compliance of someone who has been granted a chemical reprieve from the exhausting work of holding themselves together.
“It’s going to probably be a golden ticket to change,” I mutter.
The words come out with the particular flatness that characterizes my verbal output when the void and the weed are operating simultaneously—too honest for the walls to intercept, too blunted for the emotions to weaponize.
Just truth, delivered without the packaging that usually makes it presentable.