Page 23 of Bounced!

I’d been in that building for two years, and suddenly wondered, standing there, what it’d be like to let a man like Mark put a hand on me every morning until I knew it, too.

“Okay,” Rod said, rising finally and wiping his palms on his apron, transformed, a man who’d made his introductions and could proceed with whatever the day had planned. “I name her now.”

“Of course, you do,” Finn said, rolling his eyes so hard I thought they might pop out.

Rod ignored him. He laid one hand flat on the machine’s gleaming flank, closed his eyes, and thought with the seriousness of a sailor christening a ship. The whole kitchen waited. Benji sucked in a breath and held it. Then Rod opened his eyes, his tone reverent, “Reina.”

“Reina?” Mark repeated.

“Means queen,” Rod said, and his voice cracked clean down the middle on the word he cared about most. “She is queen. Look at her.” He patted her flank once, gently. “My Reina.”

I stood there in the corner of that kitchen, the way I stood in the corner of most rooms, watching a man name an ice machine “queen” in a language his grandmother taught him, watching Benji quietly wipe his eyes with the corner of his beer-case sign, watching Finn pretend the whole thing was ridiculous while not leaving, and watching Jacks release balloons to the ceiling because nobody had told him not to. The balloons drifted up to gather against the kitchen tiles like it was the most natural thing in the world to release balloons for an appliance.

In the middle of it all, something happened in my chest that I wasn’t built to narrate. The kitchen was suddenly loud and ridiculous and full of warmth. It was a room that had, without my noticing exactly when, started keeping a spot for me at the edge of it, not asking me in, just leaving the spot, in case.

Mark had said it in the truck, plain as a receipt, “You’re one of mine.”

Standing in that kitchen, I retrieved that memory and looked at it. It was still true—and it was still terrifying, because the thing about being claimed by people is that then you have something to lose. I knew exactly what losing felt like.

Reina hummed to life.

Her first cubes dropped into the bin with a sound like applause.

“She’s working,” Rod breathed.

“’Course she is,” Mark said. “Dante saw to her.”

He said it easily, offhandedly, giving me the credit without making a thing of it. Every head turned my way for a second, friendly and grateful. I gave them the nod, same as always, but inside, where the wall didn’t reach, I let myself stand in the spot they’d been keeping, just for a second, just to see if it held my weight.

It did.

“All right,” Finn announced, clapping his hands. “The child is home, the child is well, everyone back to work before I start weeping too and ruin my whole reputation.”

“And my mascara,” Benji added.

“You wear mascara?” Jacks asked, brow scrunched.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Finn muttered.

The family broke apart, drifting to their stations. Benji lifted his sign over his head like a banner and promised Reina a full write-up in the group chat. Jacks reached after his escaped balloons. Rod was already pulling up the IceMaster 2000 companion app on his phone, a man learning his beloved’s every preference.

Mark caught my eye across the kitchen. He didn’t say anything. He just tipped his head a fraction, the smallest possible thanks, and also, “That was a good afternoon, wasn’t it?” I gave him back the smallest possible, “It was,” and a nod, and neither of us said a word, because we were a matched set of men who didn’t examine things, and the not-examining had, somewhere on the far side of the fairgrounds, become its own kind of language.

I went to the front door. It was almost time to guard it.

Behind me, in the warm and ridiculous kitchen, a queen made ice, and a family I’d been quietly telling myself I only worked for went about the business of being a family, with, I was no longer able to pretend otherwise, a place in it shaped like me.

Chapter 8

Mark

“So walk me through the asshole again,” Benji said, pulling up a stool like a detective settling in with a cold case.

“There’s nothing to walk through.”

“Mark, there is a man attached to that asshole, a whole human being, with a childhood, a favorite season, and a mother who has no idea what her son is doing with his evenings. Are you seriously telling me there’s nothing to walk through?” He planted both elbows on the bar and rested his chin in his hands, radiant, a man arriving at the theater as the lights went down. “Start at the beginning. Where were you when you received the asshole?”

“I’m not doing this.”