Page 24 of Subduing the Shark

He sat there for a long time. Long enough that the refrigerator cycled on and off twice. Long enough that the dark outside the kitchen window started to thin toward gray. He didn't pick the pen up again until his hands were steady, and when he did he wrote the remaining names fast, one after another, because if he stopped again he wasn't going to finish.

He wrote fifty-seven names.

When he finished, the pen was dead. The notepad had four pages filled, front and back, in Jack's large, messy handwriting. Fifty-seven names. Some of them were people he'd hurt. Some of them were people who'd hurt him. Most of them were both.

He stared at the pages. Four pieces of hotel paper covered in the inventory of a system that Harold had named with one word and that Jack had spent his entire life inside without ever counting the cost. Fifty-seven people. Fifty-seven bodies that the shiver had used and traded and broken, and Jack had been part of the machinery that did it even while the machinery was grinding him down too.

He thought about Amani jumping on the bar. About Harold saying there is no debt. About Reza putting a Coke at the edge of the bar with a lime wedge Jack never used. About Nero changingfrom between them to beside Amani, a two-foot movement that meant Amani trusted the room enough to not need a wall.

He thought about the cuff on his wrist and Harold's face when he shut down. The horror on it. The recognition. A man who pinned people to the ground for a living, looking at his stillness and knowing, instantly, that what he was seeing wasn't compliance. It was damage.

Fifty-seven names. And his own name should have been on the list too, but he hadn't written it, because he still didn't know if he was a victim or a perpetrator or both, and the answer to that question was the thing that kept him awake at three in the morning in a kitchen that smelled like old takeout and cheap soap.

He folded the pages carefully. Once, twice, until they were small enough to fit in his pocket. He put the notepad back in the junk drawer. He put the dead pen in the trash.

Then he went back to his room, lay down on the bed, put his hand over the healing rib and closed his eyes.

He didn't sleep. But he lay still, and for the first time in weeks the stillness wasn't the blankness. It was him, awake, present, holding a list of names against his body like a wound he'd finally found the edges of.

Chapter Fourteen

It wasn't planned for Harold to ask Jack to come with him later that week. Jack's shift had ended and Harold was off the clock and the two of them were standing in the KK parking lot at midnight with the desert air still warm and neither of them moving toward their respective destinations. Jack's destination was the shiver house. Harold's was his empty apartment and another night of staring at his ceiling. Neither option held much appeal.

"Have you eaten?" Harold asked.

Jack looked at him. "Today?"

"Ever."

Jack smirked. "Hilarious." But there was something underneath the flatness, the ghost of the dry humor that came out when Jack was too tired to maintain the walls. "I had a granola bar around four."

"That's not food. Come on." Harold nodded toward his truck. "There's a place on Spring Mountain that's open late."

Jack didn't move. Harold watched him think it over, the shark's gray eyes running the data on what it meant to get into a car with someone voluntarily, at night, going somewhere that wasn't the shiver house, the club, or the pool. This was new territory. Harold let him take his time with it.

"Is this a date?" Jack asked.

"It's sushi. Whether it's a date depends on whether you let me pay."

Jack got in the truck.

The restaurant was a narrow space between a nail salon and a laundromat, the kind of place that looked like nothing from the outside and served fish that could make its customers rethinktheir entire life. Harold had found it two months after moving to Vegas, following his nose down Spring Mountain until the clean salt-and-rice smell pulled him through a door he'd have walked past otherwise. He'd been coming back ever since.

They sat at the bar and Jack looked at the menu for a long time.

"Order whatever you want," Harold said. "I've never seen anyone go wrong here."

"I don't know what half of this is."

"What do you usually eat?"

Jack set the menu down. "Whatever's in the fridge at the house. Frozen pizza. Leftover Chinese. Whatever Rashe brings home." He said it without self-pity, just stating facts, and the facts were that Jack had been eating like someone for whom food was fuel rather than pleasure for his entire adult life.

Harold ordered for both of them. Salmon nigiri, yellowtail sashimi, a spicy tuna roll, edamame, miso soup. He watched Jack watch the chef work behind the counter, the precision of the knife, the economy of motion, the way each piece was assembled with the same focused attention that Jack brought to wiping down tables.

"You're staring," Harold said.

"He's good." Jack's eyes followed the chef's hands. "Reminds me of Amani. The way he moves behind the bar. Every motion does something. Nothing wasted."