Page 92 of Knight
She holds me. Her arms around my waist, her body pressed against mine with the full weight of a woman who plants her feet and refuses to be moved.
Reassurance comes from the woman I believed would abandon me, abandon us if I unfolded my deepest regret, my deepest shame. Somehow, she poured truth and love overshadowing any fear and shame I held.
We sit on the coach as the hours pass still absorbing the renewal of our connection, breaking down the wall that existed between us. Nova's head is on my chest. Her fingers trace the line of my collarbone.
The noise is gone.
The engine that has been running inside my skull since I was seventeen — the constant, grinding, relentless machinery of guilt and performance and the desperate calculation of how long I can keep the worst of me hidden from the people closest to me — is silent. For the first time in five years the inside of my head sounds like this bedroom. Quiet. Still. A space where a man can exist without running.
She stayed.
She heard every word. She sat in my kitchen with fractions worksheets on the counter and her brother's toothbrush running in the bathroom and she listened to me confess to the thing that has defined every choice I have made since I was seventeen years old.
And she is still here. Her heartbeat against my ribs. Her hair across my shoulder. Her hand on my skin tracing a pattern that might be a word or might be nothing at all.
I do not say I love you.
The word is there. I can feel it sitting in the open air between us — no longer locked behind a wall, no longer sealed in the vault where I kept it alongside the guilt and the Macallan and the Patek Philippe ticking Giovanni's dead rhythm against my wrist.
It is right there. Waiting for me to be brave enough to pick it up.
Tonight I am not brave enough. Tonight I am emptied. Hollowed out and held together by the arms of a woman who stayed.
Tomorrow I will be braver.
Tomorrow.
18
nova
Choosing
The Morning After the Truth
He is sleeping.
Actually sleeping. I have shared a bed with this man for weeks and I know the difference — the way his breathing usually catches every few minutes, the way his arm twitches against my waist as though his body is rehearsing escape routes even whilethe rest of him pretends to be still. Romeo sleeps the way he lives. Half-lit. One eye on the exit. His pulse running a low hum of readiness beneath skin that never fully surrenders to the dark.
This morning is different.
His face is pressed into the pillow and his breathing is deep and slow and even. His mouth is slightly open. His hair is falling across his forehead and his hand is resting on the sheet between us, palm up, fingers loose. The Patek Philippe is still on his wrist — he never takes it off, sleeps with his dead father's rhythm strapped to his skin — but even the watch looks quieter against the stillness of him.
I lie on my side and I watch him and I do not move.
The light through the curtains is thin. Grey. Early enough that the city is still making up its mind between night and morning. The security system hums its low constant note behind the walls. Somewhere down the hallway, the refrigerator clicks through its cycle and Tomás's drawings rustle against the fridge from the draft Romeo has never fixed.
I should be tired. We were up until three. The confession and then what came after — his hands on me like he was trying to prove something with his body that his mouth had finally stopped lying about. The way he held my face between his palms and pressed his forehead against mine and kept his eyes open because closing them would have been another kind of hiding and he was done hiding. I should be exhausted.
I am wide awake.
My mind has been running since before my eyes opened. The way it runs when something has shifted beneath the floor of my life and I need to map the new ground before I can stand on it. I have done this before. The morning after my mother left — lying in my bed at eighteen, staring at the ceiling, running the math on rent and groceries and school pickup times while Marisol slept on the couch in her hoodie and Tomás'snightlight glowed blue through the crack under his door. The world rearranges itself and your body keeps breathing and your brain starts building the new architecture before the old one has finished falling.
Romeo told me the truth last night.
The facts are simple. I absorbed them in the kitchen between sugar packets and a paring knife with apple juice drying on the blade. He was seventeen. His father was hurting his brothers — the kind of hurting that leaves bruises beneath long sleeves and silence beneath smiles. Romeo called the enemy. He gave them information. The information opened a gap in Giovanni's security on the night a cobra arrived in a gift box and decided everything his sons would become.
He did not send the snake. He did not plan the death. He was a boy who loved his brothers and reached for the only tool he could find and the tool cut deeper than he knew it could.
