Page 22 of Knight
Romeo Rivas is standing in my hallway.
He is wearing a black jacket that costs more than my security deposit and he is too tall for the doorframe and the fluorescent light above him — the one the super has never replaced, the one that flickers and buzzes like a dying insect — is casting shadows across his cheekbones that make him look like a painting hung in the wrong gallery.
He does not belong here. Every line of him screams it. The watch. The shoes. The way he holds himself in this narrow hallway with its peeling wallpaper and stained carpet like he is standing in a boardroom and the building just has not caught up.
My blood goes hot.
"I told you—"
"I know what you told me."
"Then what the hell are you doing at my door?"
He opens his mouth. I watch him reach for the charm — the grin, the deflection, the smooth line that gets him out of everycorner he backs himself into. I watch him find it, hold it, and then something behind me makes him lose it entirely.
"Hey."
Tomás. Standing three feet behind me in his sock feet and his pajama pants with the rocketships on them, holding a half-eaten granola bar, looking up at the man filling our doorway with the wide-open curiosity of a kid who has never learned to be afraid of strangers because he has never had enough of them in his life to build the reflex.
"Who are you?" Tomás asks.
Romeo's face does something I have never seen it do. The charm dissolves. The armor drops. For one unguarded second he is looking at my little brother the way you look at something that hurts to see — tender and startled and completely unprepared. He came here braced for my anger. He built his defense on the walk up four flights. He had the words ready, the excuses sharpened, the smile loaded.
He did not prepare for a ten-year-old boy in rocketship pajamas asking his name.
"Romeo," he says. His voice is quieter than I have ever heard it. "I'm — a friend of your sister's."
Tomás looks at me. Looks at Romeo. Takes a bite of his granola bar.
"Cool," he says. "Do you want to play Mario Kart?"
Romeo looks at me. I see the question in his eyes —do I stay or do I go— and I hate him for putting it there, because now the choice is mine and both answers cost something.
Tomás is already walking back to the living room.
I step aside.
The Kitchen That Unmakes Him
He steps inside and immediately everything is off scale.
Romeo Rivas in my apartment is like a wolf in a shoebox. His shoulders nearly brush the hallway walls. His shoes — Italian, leather, worth more than my refrigerator — look absurd on my linoleum. The ceiling feels lower with him under it. The couch looks smaller. The whole apartment, which has always been tight but mine, suddenly feels like a doll's house with a real person shoved inside.
I close the door behind him and lean against the kitchen counter and cross my arms and wait for whatever excuse he has rehearsed.
He does not give me one. He is too busy watching Tomás dig through the basket of tangled cords beside the television.
"Okay so this one is yours." Tomás holds up the second controller — the one with the cracked left joystick that sticks if you push it too hard. "Have you played before?"
"I have not," Romeo says.
"Seriously?" Tomás stares at him like he just admitted to never eating pizza. "It's easy. I'll show you. Sit down."
Romeo looks at the carpet. Looks at his jacket. Looks at me — one quick glance, searching for a signal, a read, anything to tell him how to behave in a room that has no rules he recognizes. I give him nothing. This is my house. He broke in uninvited. He can figure it out himself.
He takes off his jacket. Folds it over the back of my kitchen chair — the one with the wobbly leg — and sits on the floor. Cross-legged. Controller in both hands like he is holding a grenade with the pin pulled.
Tomás drops beside him and starts explaining the controls with the intensity of a surgeon briefing an intern. Romeo listens. Actually listens — leaning in, frowning at the screen, asking which button does what with a seriousness that would be funny if it were not so disarming.
