“Justice is only respected in law books. Reality is…no one gives a damn about justice.” Her voice cracks on the last word—not dramatically, not with the theatrical fragility of someone performing vulnerability, but with the quiet structural failure of someone whose defenses have been so thoroughly exhausted by fever and fear and years of fighting alone that the truth leaks through the gaps. “And that’s exactly what’s wrong in this world.”
I reach out.
My hand moves before my brain authorizes it—the same involuntary response that caught a pill bottle mid-air, that puts glasses on a stranger’s face, that stays beside a bed when leaving would be easier and less complicated. My palm finds her cheek, cupping the curve of it, my thumb resting against the warm skin just below the dark shadow of her lower lashes.
Her eyes open.
Just slightly. Barely. The lids lifting just enough to reveal the hazel-brown beneath the rectangular frames, and what I see there—behind the fever, behind the exhaustion, behind every wall she’s built and reinforced and electrified—is a question she doesn’t have the energy to ask.
Why are you touching me?
Why is this gentle?
Why doesn’t it feel like a trap?
“I don’t hate you, Hazel,” I say, and my voice carries the kind of quiet conviction that doesn’t need volume or repetition orevidence. It justis. “And those who fear justice are simply afraid of acknowledging the lack of courage they carry to do good in the world.”
She doesn’t respond.
But she doesn’t pull away from my hand.
And from Hazel Martinez, that’s practically an embrace.
I rise from the chair.
Slowly. Carefully. The motion deliberate enough that it doesn’t startle, doesn’t disrupt the fragile equilibrium we’ve built in this dim room between a woman who trusts nothing and a man who is asking for nothing except the chance to be trusted.
I take the glasses off her face.
Folding them with the same care I’d used to put them on, sliding them back into the case, placing the case on the nightstand where she can reach it. The drawer stays closed.
Then I lean down.
And press a kiss to her cheek.
Light. Brief. The barest contact of lips against skin that’s still running warm from the fever, placed at the soft juncture where her cheekbone meets the hollow beneath her eye. It’s not a romantic gesture. Not exactly. It’s…
Something she needed.
Something I think she’s never received.
A touch that asks for nothing. That takes nothing. That exists solely to communicate, in the language that words can’t quite reach: you are not alone in this room, and the person beside you chose to be here.
She looks confused.
The expression is small, hazy, filtered through fever and frames she’s no longer wearing. And deep down, buried beneath the charm and the winks and the carefully maintained performance of easy confidence that I deploy like camouflage over the serious man beneath—I’m confused too.
Because I’ve known this woman for forty-eight hours and I just kissed her cheek like it was the most natural thing I’ve ever done.
Maybe it was.
Maybe some things don’t need time to be right. Maybe they just need the moment to be honest.
“Rest, Chief.” I reach for the nightstand lamp—the apartment’s only remaining light source—and dim it until the room softens into something close to darkness, the October night reclaiming the space through the thin blinds. “We got you.”
Her eyes want to defy.
I can see it—the flicker of resistance, the reflex to push back, to insist she doesn’t need anyone to “get” her because she’s been getting herself for thirty-two years and the system works fine, thank you very much, even when it doesn’t, even when she’s bleeding and burning and held together by nothing but stubbornness and icy blue hair dye.
