2. Tristan
TRISTAN
I don’t know who she is. I don’t know who the guy with the mullet is. I only know it’s a good thing he ran.
I watch him clear the corner, and I keep watching the empty space where he was, because that’s the job.
You don’t relax when the threat leaves. You only relax when you’ve confirmed it isn’t coming back with three friends and a tire iron.
I give it a five-count. Nothing. His footsteps fade and then they’re gone, swallowed up by the traffic on the street.
He’s not the type to circle back. He’s the type to shake for an hour in his car and tell himself he almost did something.
In a way, it’s a shame. There’s a part of me that’s genuinely disappointed.
That part wanted him to try. It wanted a reason.
I know exactly what I would’ve done. I’ve built a life out of knowing exactly how much force a body will take before it stops arguing.
It’s the first language I ever really spoke fluently.
Some men pray in the language they grew up in. I do this.
But I didn’t do it. That’s not the most interesting part of the sudden turn my day has taken, though.
It’s that I don’t want this girl to know I was thinking about it in the first place.
She’s still tucked under my arm. She’s small like a bird, all tiny bones and quick pulse. I feel her heart going through her whole body. Hammering, that terrified-animal rhythm I know from experience, though I’m usually the reason for the terror. Not this time.
That’s not the only difference here. She’s not pulling away.
Everybody pulls away. I’ve made peace with it.
It’s useful, mostly, having a face and a body that can clear a room or end a conversation.
People take one look at the head, the ink, my size, and they remember they have somewhere else to be.
But not her.
“Who are you?” she whispers.
She doesn’t really want to know the answer.
Her eyes are a pale, clear shade of blue, and they’re pointed straight at my face like there’s nothing in it to be afraid of. I don’t know what to do with that. I genuinely don’t. It’s not in my training.
“He’s gone now,” I tell her. My voice comes out rougher than I meant it, because I don’t have much practice with being gentle. I try to be with Lillie, my boss’s daughter, but even then, I usually have to remind myself to be.
I ease my arm off her shoulders slowly, giving her the room I figure she wants. She doesn’t take it, though. She sort of sways for a second before catching herself. Then she goes red all the way up to her ears, almost the same shade as her hair.
“Okay,” she whispers shakily. “Wow. Thank you. You were very convincing. As a boyfriend, I mean. Ten out of ten. Frighteningly good, actually.”
She’s spiraling, talking faster and faster. “Are you hurt?” I cut in.
She stops. Blinks. “No. No, I’m fine. He never got close. Because of you.”
She hefts a plastic grocery bag that’s cutting deep red lines into her fingers. “You saved my groceries. I really thought I was going to have to drop them so I could run faster. Successful trip, all things considered.”
There’s a laugh sitting somewhere in my chest that I haven’t used in a while. It doesn’t come out, but it moves.
I look past her, down the alley, up to the mouth of it, and out at the street.
Wrong place. Bad sightlines, one way in, dumpsters a man could sit behind.
She shouldn’t be back here, and she definitely shouldn’t be back here alone, and the guy with the mullet knows what she looks like now and what neighborhood she shops in. “I’ll walk you home,” I decide.
Her eyes fly open wide. “Oh, no. You don’t have to do that. I’ve taken up enough of your—”
“I’ll walk you home,” I tell her again. I find repeating a thing works better than arguing it. She looks at me, and whatever she sees tells her it’s not worth fighting.
“It’s five blocks,” she says.
“It’s a short walk.”
A short walk during which she talks the entire way.
Not that I mind. I spend most of my life in cars where nobody says anything for an hour because there’s nothing worth saying.
This—her filling the air, unprompted, about nothing—is almost novel.
She talks about the grocery store and the color of green she can’t get quite right.
I make a note of that, the way I make note of other things. The way she flinches when a pigeon lifts off a ledge. The way she shudders when a gust of breeze blows over us. “The weather app said eight,” she mutters, shaking her head. “It didn’t say anything about gusts.”
“What?” I have to ask.
“Eight is a good number,” she explains patiently. “I can handle eight.”
“Eight what?”
“Eight miles per hour. The wind.” The way she says it; it’s clear she expects me to understand.
Around three blocks in, she asks, “So what do you do? I mean, no offense, but you don’t strike me as an accountant.”
“I am not an accountant,” I confirm.
“And the way you threatened to remove that guy’s eyes tells me you might have done it before.” The way she says it; she’s not afraid. She’s afraid of a gust of wind and a pigeon, but she isn’t afraid of me.
“I’m in personal security,” I tell her. It’s not a lie.
More like a clean version of the truth, glossing over the ugly parts.
I keep a man and the things that belong to him from being taken.
That’s the whole job when you strip the ugliness away.
She doesn’t need the rest because the rest would end this walk, and I’ve decided somewhere between the dumpster and here that I don’t want this walk to end.
“That makes sense,” she says, nodding. “You have a very bodyguard energy about you. That’s a compliment, I think. It’s meant as one.”
“I’ll take it.”
Her building is a four-story walkup with a lock on the front door I could open with a hairpin.
I don’t love the thought of her living somewhere so easily broken into.
I don’t say a word, though, following her up two flights of stairs.
She gets her keys out and holds them in her fist, and I know what’s coming next.
This is the part where she thanks me again, and I tell her it’s nothing, then I go outside and never see her again.
My heart sinks. It actually sinks. I am not a man whose heart sinks. If I was, it wouldn’t sink over the prospect of escaping a stairwell that reeks of rodent piss. I should be glad for the opportunity to get out of here.
“Do you... want to come in?” she asks instead of saying goodbye.
Everything inside me goes still. People don’t invite me in. They invite me out—of buildings, of their business, of their lives. I’ve stood in a lot of doorways. I’ve never once been asked to cross one like this, by a girl who looks at me like I’m a person and not a problem she’s trying to survive.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “You don’t know me.”
“You could’ve let that guy have me, and you didn’t.” She shrugs one shoulder and pushes the door open. “That’s more of a reference than most people come with. Also, I have to feed my rabbit. I feel weird just leaving you in the hall. Come in. Just don’t touch the wet paintings.”
Small. That’s the first word that comes to mind. Her apartment is small, but it’s full of color—canvases stacked against every wall, most of them covered in oceans and waves in dozens of shades of blue and green. There’s one on an easel by the window that isn’t finished.
There’s also a rabbit. It’s gray with enormous ears and is sitting in a corner on a cushion like it pays the rent. It looks up at me with an expression of profound, personal disappointment. I’ve been looked at by made men who wanted me dead, but somehow, the rabbit’s contempt is worse.
“This is Socks,” she says, crouching by it and pouring a scoop of pellets into a small bowl. “He’s my emotional support animal.”
“Your what?”
“Emotional support animal. He’s... okay, so.
” She sets the food down, and the rabbit deigns to eat it.
“I have some anxiety. Okay, a lot of anxiety. It’s a whole ecosystem.
Socks helps with that. When it gets bad, and I hold him, it kind of resets my whole system. He’s saved my life a bunch of times.”
“He’s... a rabbit, though.” As if she needs to be reminded.
“He’s my lifeline,” she informs me, completely serious.
I look at the rabbit. The rabbit looks at me. Neither of us gives ground.
“Anxiety about what?” I ask. I want to know what a girl like this is anxious about.
She sits cross-legged by the cushion and ticks items off on her fingers like she’s done it a hundred times. She probably has. “Wind. I don’t leave the apartment if the wind is over fifteen miles an hour. Birds, all of them, but especially the ones that get too close. Straws.”
“Straws? Drinking straws?”
She nods. “You suck just a little too hard and they collapse and then they jab you. Turtles. Don’t even get me started about turtles.
Scissors, which is why I have so much of this.
” She points to the enormous knot of hair on top of her head.
“Mullets. Escalators sometimes, depending on the day. Balloons, because of the—” She mimes a pop, then actually winces at it.
I’m waiting for the part where she laughs.
Where she tells me she’s messing with me.
This is a bit; it has to be. No one is afraid of straws, for fuck’s sake.
This is a woman who stood next to me in an alley after I just promised to blind someone, and she looked relaxed and invited me into her apartment minutes later.
Only she’s not laughing. She means every word of it.
She’s giving me the honest, embarrassing inventory of a brain that fires an alarm at the existence of a straw.
Meanwhile, here I am, the only genuinely dangerous thing in her apartment.
She’s told the most terrifying man she’s ever met that she’s afraid of balloons.
I’ve spent my entire life around fear. I read it, I use it. I cause it. I know every shape it comes in.
I have never once found it sweet, but that’s the only word to describe her. There’s something so open about her. Undefended. This small, bright person handing me the map of everything that scares her while leaving out the one thing that should.
“You’re not scared of me,” I point out.
“No.” She tilts her head, almost like it’s news to her, too.
“I know I should be. On paper, you’re…” She gestures up and down with her hand at all of me—the head, the ink, the size of me.
“You’re a lot. But no. I don’t feel any fear around you at all.
Honestly, I think it’s kind of rude of my nervous system. ”
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” I tell her.
I mean it in a way I don’t usually mean things.
I’ve met thousands of people. I remember most of them, because remembering people is how you stay alive.
I’ve never once wanted to keep someone. That’s the difference I’m wrestling with while I stand here, and she sits there and our eyes meet across a very tiny living space.
Her cheeks turn red, and her mouth opens, but whatever she was about to say is stalled by my phone buzzing against my chest.
I know better than to ignore it. The message on the screen tells me I was right. It’s from Dorian. Need you. Now.
Dorian doesn’t say now unless it’s now. He doesn’t say need you unless the thing he needs is the specific set of things I’m good at. The entire world I’ve spent the past half hour pretending I don’t live in is back, and it’s demanding my attention.
“I have to go,” I tell her. I hate the words. I don’t think I’ve ever dreaded leaving an apartment before.
“Oh.” Disappointment flickers across her face, but she does her best to hide it. “Right. Of course. You have a life to live.”
She scrambles to her feet as if she needs to walk me to the door, when it will take me all of three paces to get there. She’s too close, her chin tipped up, and I should go. I know I should go. I should leave before I do anything I can’t take back.
Instead, I take her jaw in my hand—careful, so careful—and I kiss her.
She makes a small sound against my mouth, surprise maybe.
She doesn’t pull back. Instead, she grabs a fistful of my shirt like she did in the alley, and she holds on, and for a moment, there’s only this.
Her sweet, plump mouth and her hand fisted in my shirt while a rabbit watches us from the corner.
The text from Dorian fades away. Everything ceases to matter.
I have to make myself stop. It costs me more than I would ever admit to anyone, but I pull back, breathing surprisingly hard considering it was just a simple kiss. But there is nothing simple about her or about any of this. I understand that now.
A sense of possessiveness comes over me before I murmur, “Lock the door. The one on the street is garbage, but make sure you lock yours.”
“I... yeah. Okay.” Her cheeks are pink and her eyes are shining, and I already know I want to see this expression on her face again. I want to be responsible for it.
“I’ll see you.” It’s not a hope. It’s a fact. I will see her again. There’s no way in this world I’ll be able to stop myself.
I’m halfway down the stairs, already sliding back into my familiar role as Dorian’s right hand, before I realize I never got her name.
It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to know her name to know I’m not going to let anything happen to her.