Page 18 of Mischief

He closes his one good eye.

And I watch him decide something, watch it move across the part of his face that still works, and when he opens his eye again there's a tiredness in it that goes down further than the beating.

"My father called me," he says.

The words come slow, like each one has to be pulled up from somewhere deep.

"That's where I went. Home. Back to where I'm from." He wets the split lip and winces. "I've got family up there. Family I cut off a long time ago, for good reasons, and my father, he—there was a situation, and I had to go back and deal with it,and it went bad." His hand drops from my face to his own thigh. "My family aren't good people, Tindra. That's the truth. That's everything I’m going to tell you. It’s why I never talk about them. Because there's nothing good to say."

I sit back on my heels.

Of everything I braced for, this wasn't it.

Over the last few months he's told me plenty about who he is now and nothing about who he was before, and I leave it alone.

Everyone in my world has a past they don't want to remember, and you learn not to pick at other people's locked doors.

But I never once pictured a father. A home. A whole life he rode away from.

"You have a family," I say, and it comes out stupid, small.

"I have a sister." Something in his face cracks when he says it, a hairline fracture in all that flat control, there and gone. "Marit. She's sixteen. And things with our father are—complicated doesn't cover it. She's the reason I went back. She's the only reason I'd ever go back."

A sixteen-year-old girl.

A little sister, up north somewhere, in a house with people Bodul calls not good and won't describe.

The way his voice bent around her name tells me more than the name did.

"Is she okay?" I ask. "Your sister. Is she?—"

"I don't want to talk about it anymore." It's not sharp, but it's final, a door easing shut. "Please. I've been on that bike for days building up to walking through your door, and I—I can't go back into it right now. Any of it. I just needed to get here."

I open my mouth to push.

It's right there, all of it, the questions stacking up behind my teeth, who hit you, how bad is she, and what does a bad family do to a man to make him grip his ribs like that.

And I look at him, gray and broken and here, and I close my damn mouth.

Because I know locked doors. I grew up in a house full of them.

I know the difference between a man hiding something from you and a man who simply can't walk back into a room that hurts him.

Everything in Bodul's ruined face is the second one.

He didn't lie to me. He handed me the truth in pieces and stopped at the wall he can't climb.

Pushing him over that wall tonight, while he's bleeding on my couch, would make me someone I don't want to be.

"Okay," I say softly. "Okay. We don't talk about it."

The breath he lets out is so relieved it nearly undoes me.

"But you're going to let me take care of you," I tell him, standing, already moving toward the bathroom and the first aid kit. "That part's not up for negotiation."

I clean him up on the bathroom floor.

He sits on the closed lid of the toilet and I stand between his knees with a bowl of warm water going pink.