Chapter 13 Johnny
JOHNNY
My knuckles have gone stiff, the skin pulling tight where it’s starting to swell.
But right now, walking back toward the beach house with sand grinding under my borrowed flip-flops, all I feel is the hum. That low-frequency buzz in my blood that says you know how to do this and you’ve always known how to do this and stop pretending you don’t like it.
The beach house sits pale against the late afternoon glare, and I slow my pace to buy time. I need to look like a guy who went for a walk, not a guy who left someone choking on his own blood behind a bar.
I flex my right hand and watch the cuts pull apart, fresh red welling along the ridges. I should feel something about that. Disgust, maybe. Shame. Instead there’s just the hum, steady and warm, like a motor idling in my chest.
Not the first time these hands have looked like this. I’ve seen the violence in flashes. Fragments of memory, secondhand glimpses. But today was the first time I felt it move through me like it belonged there.
Another memory hits mid-stride.
I’m younger. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. A ring of bodies pressed tight on a street I don’t recognize, faces lit orange by a single streetlight. Someone shoves me forward and I stumble into the center where another kid is already bouncing on his toes, fists up. He’s bigger. Doesn’t matter.
The crowd noise is muffled, like hearing it through water, but I can feel it vibrating in my ribcage. The energy. The hunger. They want blood, and I’m going to give it to them because when I do, they cheer. When I do, they see me.
When I do, I belong somewhere.
The kid rushes me. I slip left and crack him across the jaw so hard his head snaps sideways. The crowd erupts. Arms around my shoulders. Hands slapping my back. For thirty seconds, I’m not alone. For thirty seconds, I’m somebody worth watching.
I come back to the present with my feet stopped in the sand, twenty yards from the house. My mouth tastes sour and there’s a ringing in my ears. More memories flooding in now. Faster. Louder.
Every one of them shows the same thing: I learned young that violence was the only currency anyone in my life respected. And I got rich.
I should be thrilled that my brain is finally producing useful information. Instead all I can think about is the look on Natalia’s face when she sees my hands.
I wipe them on my pants and walk up the steps to the house.
I stop at the back door. Through the glass, I can see her on the couch. Book open on her lap, eyes fixed somewhere past the far wall. She looks smaller than she did this morning.
I knock. She startles, sets the book aside, and comes to the door. When she slides it open, her eyes do a quick sweep of my face before she steps back to let me in.
“Hey.” She’s quiet. “How was Ronnie’s?”
“Didn’t go. Are you okay? Did your brother—”
“Johnny.” Her gaze has dropped to my hands. “What happened to your knuckles?”
I don’t have an answer ready fast enough. She takes my wrist and turns it toward the light, and I watch her face change as she gets a real look at the damage, brows creasing in concern.
“Sit down.” She’s already moving toward the bathroom as I take a stool at the island. She comes back with a first aid kit and a clean dish towel dampened at the sink, pulling her stool close enough that her knee bumps the outside of my thigh when she sits.
She takes my right hand and starts cleaning the dried blood away with the damp cloth, then flips open the first aid kit and tears open an antiseptic wipe. The sting when she drags it across the torn skin makes me hiss through my teeth. She eases up but doesn’t pull away.
“Some guys at the bar near Ronnie’s,” I say into the silence. “Jumped me out back.”
She turns my hand over, checking the other side, then moves to the left one.
“And?”
“And I handled it.”
“Clearly.” She still hasn’t looked up.
Quiet settles back over the kitchen. Just the cloth on my skin, the muffled wash of waves outside, her breathing steady and close.
“How bad?” she asks.
“How bad what?”
“The other guy.” She lifts her eyes. “How bad does he look?”
She’s not asking to make conversation. She grew up with men who came home bloody and said it was nothing. She wants to know if I’m going to lie to her the way they did.
The way I already did, last night. She asked what I remembered and I fed her nothing. She bought it. She was kind about it. And it’s been sitting wrong in me since.
Every instinct I have says do it again. Keep it close. Tell her something easy and move on.
But last night, the violence was just pictures in my head. Flashes I could tell myself might not mean what I thought they meant. Today I beat a man unconscious behind a bar. I can’t sit across from her and pretend that’s someone else’s life.
She already gave me the truth about her family. Told me things that could get her hurt if the wrong person heard them. I owe her something back. Not all of it. Not the parts that would make her look at me like the enemy. But enough to be honest about what I am, even if I can’t tell her who.
“Bad,” I finally say. “His friends had to carry him inside.”
Her hands stop moving. She holds my gaze for a long second, then sets the towel down and sits back.
I stare at the counter for a second. Then I make myself look back at her.
“I remembered something after the fight. I was a kid. Street fighting. Some kind of ring, other teenagers watching and cheering. The kid I fought was bigger than me, but I put him down in seconds.”
Her expression doesn’t shift.
“It wasn’t adrenaline at that bar today. I knew where to hit, how to move, how to take a man apart efficiently. That doesn’t come from nowhere.”
“No.” She pauses. “It doesn’t.”
The next part is harder. I open my mouth and close it again.
“So whatever I am, whoever I was before that boat.” I pull my hands off the counter and into my lap, tucking them out of sight like hiding the evidence changes what it means. “I’ve hurt people. I’m certain of it.”
She holds my gaze and I let her, even though every instinct says look away.
“I don’t think I was a good man, Natalia. And I think I’ve killed people.”
Killed.
The word hangs in the kitchen air between us, ugly and specific. I watch her throat work. Her fingers curl against her thighs, pressing hard enough that the tips go white.
For a long three seconds, she says nothing, and in those seconds I catch what she’s trained out of her face showing up in her body instead. Her weight shifts toward the back of her stool. Barely a degree, but there.
She’s scared. She’s trying not to show it, but I know what fear looks like when someone’s had practice hiding it.
I put that there. Me.
And it makes me want to be anywhere else on earth but this stool.
“I can go,” I say, already half off my seat. “I’ll figure something out. You don’t need—”
“Sit down.”
I sit.
She picks up a gauze pad from the kit and tears it open. Reaches for my hand again. Her fingers are less steady than they were before, the faintest tremor when she presses the gauze against my knuckles and starts taping it down. But she presses anyway.
“I know violent men, Johnny.” She lifts her eyes to mine, and whatever was uncertain in her face a minute ago has settled. “I was raised by them. Sat across the dinner table from them while they discussed things no kid should hear.”
She finishes taping the right hand and reaches for the left, pressing a fresh gauze pad over the scrape there.
“You want to know what every one of them had in common?” She looks up again, and her eyes are clear.
“I don’t think a single one of them ever asked themselves if they were bad.
Not once. Never lost a minute of sleep over any of it.
The cruelty was the point, and they wore it like a fucking merit badge.
My father, my brother, every soldier who ever tracked blood across our kitchen floor.
I never saw any of them ever look at their own hands the way you’re looking at yours. ”
The back of my throat burns. I open my mouth and she cuts me off.
“I’m not telling you you’re harmless. I’m not naive and I’m not stupid. I’m telling you that every violent man I’ve ever known came home and changed his shirt and poured a drink and moved on with his night. They never sat in a kitchen afterward asking what it means.”
She smooths the last piece of tape down and sets my hand back on the counter. Her fingers stay on my wrist. Not checking anything this time. Just resting there.
“So don’t push me away because you’ve decided I can’t handle what you are. I’ve been handling worse than you since I was old enough to pour my father’s vodka.”
“That’s not exactly a recommendation for keeping me around.”
One corner of her mouth lifts. Just barely, and it doesn’t last. “No. But it means I know what I’m looking at. And you’re not what I grew up with. Not even close.”
She’s still touching my wrist. Her thumb has settled into the groove below my palm, resting against the vein where my pulse is announcing everything my face is trying not to. She has to feel it. The way it jumps when her thumb shifts. The heat climbing up my forearm from the point of contact.
“You should be running from me,” I say on a rasp.
“Probably.” She doesn’t move. “I should be doing a lot of things.”
Neither of us speaks after that. Her thumb traces a slow circle against the inside of my wrist and my lungs forget how to work.
I don’t remember either of us leaning in, but she’s near enough that when her gaze drops to my mouth and stays there, the last functioning corner of my brain sends up a flare that goes completely ignored.
Her hand moves from my wrist to my jaw, slow and deliberate, palm warm against the stubble. My whole body goes still under her touch.
She closes the distance and kisses me.
Hungry and certain. She pulls my mouth to hers with her hand on my jaw and her fingers curling behind my ear, and the contact drops through me like a lit match into kerosene.
Her lips are warm and she tastes like cherry lip balm, and her other hand grabs the front of my shirt and pulls until there’s no space left between the stools. I make a sound I didn’t authorize, something low and rough against her mouth, and she swallows it.
I kiss her back because not kissing her back would require a kind of self-control I don’t think I’ve ever had and don’t want now.
My hand finds her hip and draws her forward.
The stool wobbles under me. Neither of us fixes it.
The damp towel slides off the counter and hits the floor with a soft slap, and neither of us gives a damn about that either.
She pulls back first. Just far enough to breathe. Her forehead rests against mine, her fingers still gripping the back of my neck like she’s not ready to let go of whatever this is.
“I’ve been wanting to do that,” she says, “since we got interrupted yesterday.”
My pulse is hammering. My knuckles are throbbing. I just told this woman I’ve probably killed people, and she kissed me anyway. I don’t know what to do with that.
I should tell her everything. The memories of her family. The photographs. The word enemy still rattling through my skull.
But her hand is warm on my neck, and her breath is close enough to taste, and the truth is a live wire I’m not brave enough to grab.
“Nat.” Her name comes out wrecked.
“Don’t.” She shakes her head, barely. “Don’t ruin it.”
So I don’t. I pull her back to me instead.