Page 162 of Slashed Bonds

I keep hugging her.

She stays stiff for a second. Then another. Then she relaxes, all of her, the way she relaxed in the lobby, in stages, deciding I’m not going to let go.

I’m not.

“You’re going to skate onto that ice tonight,” I say into her wet hair, “looking badass. And knowing that anyone who threatens to ruin whatever this is, this thing brewing between all of us, is going to find out why rejects enjoy staying hidden.”

I pull back. Enough that she does too. Our faces close, foreheads nearly touching, her breath still coming hard from five rounds.

Her scent’s changed in the hug. I’ve got a catalog of it now, nine days of entries, and the one coming off her neck right now isn’t in it. Not the frost. Not the ozone that comes up when she’s angry, the one Cash says smells like a drawing before the pencil breaks. Something warmer than either. Something that might be what she smelled like before, on a bench, with a braid.

I’m going to find out. That’s a promise I’m making to myself before I make the other one.

“Our Monarch. Our Malice.” I hold her eyes. “Ours. From now on. Okay?”

I watch her swallow.

The lump. I’ve seen her swallow it a dozen times in nine days. And then she whispers a word I haven’t heard out loud in years, a word I didn’t know anyone still used.

“Promise?”

Something ignites in me.

Not the Switch. Not the thing that puts fists through trophy cases. The opposite. Something that softens the whole face I’m wearing, that I can feel soften, because the last person who asked me that word was a woman in a hospital bed with tubes in her arm and I was eleven.

She had my eyes. The two shades. People think the vitiligo’s the strange thing about my face and it isn’t, it’s the eyes, which don’t match in some light, and I got that from her, and the first time a boy at a rink called me a freak for it she told me it meant I’d been made twice and the second time they’d been careful.

I believed her for years.

She was small by the end. The bed made her smaller. There was a window behind her that looked at a parking lot, and I’d sit with my skates in a bag at my feet because I’d come straight from the ice, because she’d made me go to the ice, every day, even then. Especially then.

Promise me you’ll keep going, she said. Promise me the ice. Not for me. For you. It’s the one place you’re still.

I didn’t know what she meant. I was eleven. I thought she meant quiet, and I was never quiet on the ice, I was the loudest thing in any building. It took me ten years and a crease and two regrets to understand she meant still the way a lake is still. The way a thing can be in one place and stay there.

She held up her pinky. The hand with the tube in it.

And I wrapped mine around it, and I promised, and I kept it. Through the father who left and the aunt who didn’t want me and the four years of nobody in the house but Cash’s bottle and Killian’s blindfold and a wall of photographs. I kept the ice. The one place I’m still.

I’ve never offered that hand to anyone since. Not to the man I’ve shared a bed with for four years. Not to the captain who sedates me when I go. It’s hers. It’s been hers since the parking lot.

And this woman on my lap has asked me the question in the same word, with the same lump behind it, and I’m not eleven anymore and I know exactly what I’m doing.

And I did the thing then that I’ve never done since. Not for Killian. Not for Cash. Not for anyone.

I lift my left hand.

Pinky out.

“Promise, Mori. Pinky swear.”

I watch her guard go.

Not all of it. A sliver. The smallest give in the whole fortress, like a window opening an inch in a house that’s been shuttered for five years.

She lifts her right hand. The glove’s still on it, so she tugs it off with her teeth, one finger at a time, and drops it on the mat, and her bare hand comes up, and her pinky wraps around mine.

“Pinky swear.”