Chapter 5 #4
I step out from behind the rack. The floor is cold through my socks; the skin at the back of my neck tightens where the night air kisses it. A bead of sweat slips from his temple and travels down the hard plane of his cheek; I track it because looking at anything else is more dangerous.
“Do you really hate him?” I ask. My voice sounds scraped—too much neon, too much shouting, not enough sleep, not enough lies.
A beat. The holo rig hums softly; a distant duct ticks. Rayek’s mouth is a straight line; his shoulders square—one of those microscopic recalibrations that means he’s choosing. Then he nods. Tight, economical. A soldier signing a receipt for something he didn’t buy.
The nod hits like a thrown stone: simple, blunt, true enough. I swallow against acid and move closer because I am not smart, because restraint is a language I never learned to conjugate, because the air between us has always felt like a dare.
He doesn’t back away. He doesn’t welcome me either. He holds his ground, and it’s somehow worse than either.
“Do you hate me too?” I ask, and the question falls out naked. No lace. No court sugar. The sound of it startles me—the tiny catch on the last word, the way I put the stress on me like I could move it with tone.
Silence.
Not empty. Full. Packed with everything he would say if he were a different species or I were a different girl or the room had a different ceiling. He keeps his eyes on mine, and his face stays carved, but a pulse climbs in his throat and I watch it because I don’t know what else to do.
“Because,” I add, softer, “if you do, I’d rather you just say it.”
The rig waits for input, its ghost enemy a blue man frozen in a half-step.
The fans breathe around us. I can hear the damp slide of his breath through his nose—slow, controlled, pinched at the edges like every inhale nicks something on the way in.
His silence stretches, becomes a tightrope strung between two roofs in a stiff wind.
You could cross it if you didn’t look down. I’m looking down.
I step again, closing the distance to a span my father would call improper and Sneed would call grounds for a sermon.
The heat coming off his skin brushes mine; my own body answers, traitor-bright, a flush rising under the glitter dust that refuses to let go of my collarbone.
Up close, the scar is a thinner line than I remember, the edges softened by time and by the number of times I’ve traced it in my head.
His hands hang open at his sides, claws not extended, every muscle in a state I know by heart: ready, and refused.
“If you hate me,” I say, and my throat burns like I swallowed the neon, “at least I’ll know I’m not imagining the part where—”
I stop. The part where what. The part where you walked past me in a hallway like I was a lit match and you were kerosene.
The part where you listened to my footsteps before I learned how to be quiet.
The part where you always take the outside of the path so I won’t have to.
The part where my name sounds different from your mouth and you pretend it doesn’t.
My hand moves before my senses does. I reach. Not for his face, not yet, not for anything the world would shout about. Just his arm. The near one. The forearm, where the muscles twist like braids and the veins draw faint maps and the heat lives.
My fingertips graze scale and skin.
He steps back.
Instinct, like a flinch from a blade you can’t see.
It’s not a dramatic leap; it’s worse: a clean, trained shift that erases the chance of touch with no waste, no noise, that puts two body lengths between us and slots him in the angle where he can watch the door, the rig, the window, me.
He is suddenly a soldier in a diagram. He is suddenly no one’s.
I stand there with my hand still up like I forgot to tell it the plan changed.
The air where he was is cooler; the fan breath catches the sweat on my palm and chills it until it stings.
Something inside me shrinks hard, earthquake-fast, shelves toppling, glassware breaking in an elegant, invisible cascade.
“Right,” I say. The word is a laugh that couldn’t find its feet. “Okay.”
He says nothing. His jaw works once. The scar doesn’t move.
I lower my hand. My eyes burn. Not tearful-pretty.
Abrasive, like grit got under the lids, like the hoverlounge glitter decided to exact a price.
I think of all the things I could say that would ignite the room and calcify the rest of my life—the cruel ones, the desperate ones—and I am not brave enough to say any of them.
Or maybe I am exactly brave enough to say none.
“I won’t bother you,” I add, which is ridiculous because he is paid to be bothered by me, because my existence is his itinerary. I hear Sneed in that sentence and hate it.
I take a step back, then another, then turn before my face finishes losing the fight.
The door recognizes me and obliges, opening on a breath of cooler air that smells like stone and empty halls and my mother’s preferred floral blend diluted to almost nothing.
Behind me, the room hums, the rig waits, Rayek doesn’t speak.
I leave, eyes burning.