Page 5 of Mischief

I look at the man in the mirror, and for the first time in years, I can see the resemblance he threw at me.

My mother's mouth over his cold eyes, the jaw that belonged to his father and his father's father before him.

A whole bloodline of men who spilled blood and never once ran from it.

However the next few weeks fall, there's no path through them where I come out still clean.

The wall's already breached.

He's already inside it. He was inside it the second the phone rang.

The only choice left to me is what it costs and who pays, and I already know.

The way you know the floor is there in the dark, that the bill is going to come due in blood, and that I’m going to be the one holding the knife when it does.

"Two days," I say.

My own voice, coming from very far away.

"There's my boy," my father says, warm as a hand on the back of your neck, and the line goes dead.

I stand there.

I stand there with the phone in my hand and the fan roaring, and my whole life splits down the middle.

I turn the fan off, rinse cold water over my hands, and then my wet hands over my face.

I breathe until the shaking stops, until the wild thrash behind my ribs goes back down into the cold flat place I built for it when I was fourteen.

The place I've let go soft for nine months, because a girl with an attitude and her raven hair looked at a prospect nobody trusted and decided he was worth the risk.

I dry my hands on the towel that smells like her and open the door.

The room's dark, warm, and full of the sound of her breathing.

She's on her side, curled around the pillow, and in the almost-light off the window, her face goes the way it only goes when she's all the way under.

Open. None of the sharp edges she wears like a jacket.

Now, the woman underneath the attitude, the manager's keys, the one nobody but me ever gets to see.

I stand at the edge of the bed, look at her, and I make myself a promise I already know I'm going to have to break.

I take the pillow.

She frowns in her sleep and reaches, and I put myself back where the pillow was, and she finds me and climbs onto my chest.

She fits there like she was made for me, her hand fisting loose in the cotton over my heart, her hair in my mouth, her weight holding me down to the one clean life I have ever gotten to touch.

"Where'd you go?" she mumbles, not awake, not really.

"Nowhere," I tell her, into her hair, and it's the first lie.

The first of the ones that are going to end us, or save us, and I don't know yet which.

"Go back to sleep."

She sighs, and sinks, and trusts me all the way down into the dark.