Chapter 8. Kit #2
"Don't, Kit." His voice is gentle. His eyes are wrecked. "Please don't make me stay for the wrong reasons again."
"Kit."
Soren's voice.
Close.
Present.
His hand is still loose around my wrist, but he's gone completely still behind me, and I realize I'm holding a bowling ball I haven't thrown, standing frozen on the approach while, somewhere behind us, the teenagers three lanes down keep shrieking about something that doesn't matter to anyone.
"Sorry," I say.
My voice comes out scraped thin.
"Got... distracted."
"You're shaking."
I look down at my own hand.
I am.
A fine, involuntary tremor runs the length of my arm, right where his fingers are still curled loosely around my wrist, like the shaking is trying to answer some question his hand asked without meaning to.
"I'm fine," I say.
And I hear it the second it leaves my mouth.
Hear the exact words.
The exact flat, bright, brittle tone.
And something about hearing my own voice say the sentence that ended everything makes my throat close so hard and so fast I have to turn my face away from him.
He doesn't ask what happened.
He doesn't do the thing where he says you sure? in the voice people use when they already know you're lying and want you to say so out loud.
He slides his hand slowly off my wrist until it isn't holding anything anymore, then leaves it open against my palm.
An offer instead of a grip.
Waiting to see what I do with it.
I don't know what I do with it.
I think I just stand there, surrounded by ugly carpet and the smell of shoe spray, an unthrown bowling ball a dead weight in my other hand.
"You don't have to tell me anything," Soren says, quiet, even, close but not crowding me.
"There's nothing to say," I say, and it comes out wet, and I hate it.
I hate every second of the last minute.
Hate that a bowling ball and somebody's hand around my wrist managed to do what nothing else has done in eight months: crack me open in the middle of a Wednesday night, in public, without my permission.
"Okay," he says.
Just that.
He just stands there, solid, patient, like he's got nowhere else in the world he'd rather be standing than three feet behind me at lane six, watching me almost come apart over nothing.
I don't cry. Not really.
My eyes go hot, my throat stays tight, one single tear gets as far as my jaw before I scrub it off with the heel of my hand, furious at it.
"I think I'm done bowling," I say.
"Okay."
He doesn't push for more.
He steps back, giving me room, and when I finally turn around, his face isn't doing pity, isn't doing concern-as-performance. It's just open, steady, waiting to take whatever I decide to hand him and nothing more than that.
"Can we just... sit for a minute," I say. "Before we go."
"Of course."
We sit in the plastic scoring booth seats, not talking, the teenagers' noise washing over us from three lanes down.
Soren doesn't touch me again.
He doesn't reach for my hand.
He just sits close enough that I can lean into the warm line of his shoulder if I want to and far enough away that I can ignore it if I don't.
"Thank you," I say eventually, not looking at him.
"For what?"
"Not asking."
"I don't need the whole story to know you're carrying something heavy," he says. "You don't owe me the excavation. Not tonight. Not ever, if you don't want to."
I don't answer that.
I don't trust my voice with it.
But something in my chest, some small, tight fist that's been clenched for eight months straight, loosens by a fraction.
Just enough.
"You want to get something to eat before we go?" he asks after a while, casual, like it's not a lifeline he's throwing me, though it obviously is. "There's a snack bar. I know it's not exactly the sushi place."
"God, yes."
I'm grateful for it in a way that's embarrassing all on its own, grateful to have somewhere to look other than at him.
"Please. Anything. I don't care what it is."
The snack bar turns out to have exactly one thing worth ordering, according to Soren: fries smothered in cheddar and bacon bits, served in a red plastic basket lined with wax paper.
"This is a crime against the sushi we had last week," I say when he sets the basket down between us back at the booth.
"Different night, different crime." He hands me a little plastic fork I don't intend to use. "Eat."
I eat with my fingers, obviously, dragging a fry through the pool of orange cheese.
For a minute, neither of us says anything.
It's a good quiet, the kind that doesn't need filling, and I let myself just chew and not perform anything for a second.
"I'm sorry about before," I say eventually, staring at the basket instead of at him. "The... thing. At the lane."
"You don't need to apologize for that."
"I kind of froze up. In public. Over a bowling ball." I laugh, but it comes out thin, more embarrassed than amused. "That's... I don't know. That's a lot for a Wednesday."
"I've had worse reactions to bowling balls," Soren says, entirely deadpan.
It takes me a second to realize he's joking, that he's actually trying to make me laugh instead of making me explain myself, and something in my chest unknots half an inch. I laugh.
"Have you?"
"There was an incident in my league days. I won't elaborate. A grown man cried over a 7-10 split. It wasn't me, but I was present, and it left a mark on all of us."
He steals a fry off my side of the basket, unbothered, like it's the most natural thing in the world for his hand to be that close to mine.
"Compared to that, you get a pass."
I laugh. Surprised out of me.
"You're ridiculous," I say.
"I've been told." He nudges the basket an inch closer to me. "Eat more fries. You get twitchy when you haven't eaten enough. I've noticed."
"You've noticed a lot of things about me in three weeks."
"I pay attention."
He says it simply, without putting any extra weight behind it, like it's just a fact about how he moves through the world and not a whole confession.
"It's not hard. You're worth paying attention to."
I feel my face go hot, and I duck my head over the fries so he won't see it, which of course means he sees it anyway.
Instead of teasing me about it—which is what Dex would do, what anyone else would do, what I'd brace myself for out of habit—he just lets it sit there, warm and unremarked-on.
He steals another fry and starts telling me some completely unrelated story about Rue trying to convince a customer that a Harley was "too loud to be a good bike," with the full, solemn authority of a six-year-old who has never once doubted herself.
By the time the basket's empty, I've laughed a lot more, and my face has gone back to a normal temperature.
The whole thing—the flashback, the shaking, the humiliating half-second where I thought I might actually fall apart in a bowling alley—feels smaller than it did twenty minutes ago. Manageable.
He drives me home.
Outside my building, he doesn't linger or push for anything more than what already happened.
"Text me when you're inside," he says. "Just the word home is fine. Nothing else."
I nod, because I can't manage more than that yet.
I let myself in, and a few minutes later, sitting on the edge of my bed with Pretty already pulled down off the shelf and held against my chest without my having decided to reach for him, I send one word from my phone.
Inside
He answers in a minute, like he'd been sitting there with the phone in his hand waiting for exactly that and nothing else.
Good. Sleep well, Kit.
I stare at those four words longer than is reasonable.
Then I curl around Pretty in the dark, and for the first time in eight months, the ache doesn't feel quite as much like drowning.