Page 53 of Iridescent
Satisfaction cuts through the rage simmering in my blood.
“How old were you?”
“Eight. My father put me in boxing classes the next week because I came home furious that I hadn’t broken it properly.” She takes a sip from her can, casual as a confession. “And because other boys kept mistaking my patience for permission.”
I watch her throat work around the swallow. Pride commingles with the unfamiliar feeling I am beginning, reluctantly, to acknowledge.
“What did your parents say after the fight?”
“They checked if I was hurt first. Then they told me my anger needed discipline.” A veil of nostalgia settles over her sharp features. “My mother said rage without direction was just a fire looking for curtains. My father said if I was going to hit, I should learn where my feet belonged first.”
I try to imagine a house where anger is corrected without being condemned. Where a child comes home bloody and someone asks what happened before asking who might see.
Clean yourself up before someone sees.
The thought empties something out of me.
Lucian might disagree. He was the golden child. The one my mother touched with gentle hands, the one my father corrected in public and protected in private. I used to think love was a finite resource, and he had been born first enough to inherit most of it.
“So I did exactly that,” Yara continues. “Boxing gave it somewhere to go. A shape. Rules. It taught me anger doesn’t have to make you cruel.”
The realization arrests me.
That is the difference. The thing I couldn’t name while she corrected my stance and told me to hit cleaner, not angrier.
“I was taught the opposite,” I blurt out.
Fuck.
Yara orients herself toward me. “Who taught you that?”
I withdraw a fraction. “No one important.”
She accepts the lie with a small nod, which somehow feels worse than pressing. “Okay. Then we start there.”
“With hitting harder?”
“No.” Her tone gentles, though nothing about her loses its certainty. “With teaching your body it has options. Whatever taught you otherwise is not in this room.”
Surprise reverberates through me, followed by recalcitrant admiration and a strange reprieve I have no idea how to accept. It congeals in my throat, strangling the defensive response already rising there.
She encroaches on my space until the edge of the table bites into my lower back. “Do you understand?”
Yes. No. I don’t know.
Every rational thought vacates my head. The room recedes. The rain, the music, the whole miserable architecture of my life—gone.
Only her remains.
Her gray eyes, silvered by moonlight. The three tiny flecks near the corner of her left eye. The infuriating calm in her face while mine threatens to come apart entirely.
Our breath mingles. Hers carries strawberry and spice, subtle and disarming, drawing me closer rather than warning me away. I inhale despite my better judgment. It feels less like breathing than remembering my lungs were built for more than survival.
Drop. Drop. Drop.
Rain strikes in uneven beats, and my pulse answers every one.
She is smaller than I am by a considerable margin, all compact strength and controlled danger, yet the urge to shield her rises in me with embarrassing ferocity. Irrational, considering who she is.
