We went again and something shifted on the third lap. I stopped trying to control every micro-movement and started trusting the momentum. My legs found something resembling a pattern—not graceful, not smooth, but functional. Quest let go of my hand at one point and I didn’t fall. I skated on my own for about twenty feet and the feeling that went through me was so unexpected that I almost stopped to examine it.
It was joy. Simple, stupid, uncomplicated joy. The kind I hadn’t felt since I was too young to know what the world was going to do to me. The purple, blue, green, gold rink lights were cycling through one another. And the music was some old nineties R&B. KP and Envy’s Swing My Way blared through the speakers. I was moving on wheels and not falling and nobody was hurting me and nobody wanted anything from me and for thirty seconds I forgot to be afraid.
Quest circled back to me skating backward, watching my face with an expression I couldn’t read. “There she is,” he said quietly, almost to himself.
“There who is?”
“The version of you that’s not trying to stab somebody.”
I laughed. A real laugh, from my stomach, loud enough that the woman skating past me looked over and smiled. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed like that—full and involuntary and born from something that wasn’t dark humor or sarcasm. It felt foreign in my body, like a muscle I hadn’t used in years was remembering how to flex.
We skated for another hour. I fell three more times and each time he picked me up without comment. By the end, I could make it around the rink without holding the wall or his hand, and I was sweating through my hoodie and my hip was definitely going to bruise and I didn’t care about any of it.
We turned in our skates and walked back to the car and the night air hit my damp skin and everything felt different. Lighter. Like somebody had removed a few bricks from the wall I carried around my chest and hadn’t told me about it.
The drive to my apartment was quiet, but it was a different kind of quiet than before. The first silence in his car had been tense and loaded. This one was comfortable. I was tired in a good way, the way you’re tired after doing something physical that wasn’t violence. My legs ached. My cheeks ached from smiling. I leaned my head against the window and watched the streetlights pass and didn’t reach for my gun once.
He pulled up to my building and parked. Before I could open the door, he was already out of the car and walking around to my side.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he opened my door.
“Walking you to your door.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Maybe not. But I’m too protective to let you walk to your door alone at this hour. Sue me.”
“It’s my building. I live here. I walk to this door by myself every single night.”
“Well tonight you don’t have to.”
I didn’t argue. I was too tired to argue and too honest with myself to pretend I didn’t want him walking next to me. We took the stairs because I lived on the third floor and the elevator in my building had been broken for two weeks and management kept saying they were “working on it” which in DC meant they’d get to it sometime between now and never.
We reached my door and I turned to face him. The hallway was dim—one of the overhead lights was flickering—and he was standing about two feet away with his hands in his pockets and that charcoal suit still looking pressed even after an hour in a roller rink. I probably looked like a mess. Sweaty hoodie, box braids half falling out of my ponytail, tired eyes. But he was looking at me the same way he’d looked at me on the rink when he said “there she is”—like he was seeing something he’d been looking for.
“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it. I meant it in a way that covered more than just the tire and the ride and the skating. I meant it for the parking lot when he held me without hurting me. I meant it for Ray’s when he let me talk about my childhood without flinching. I meant it for tonight when he took me somewhere silly and safe and let me fall without making me feel weak for it.
“You’re welcome,” he said. Simple. No jokes, no cockiness, no follow-up.
We stood there for a second too long. The flickering light. His cologne. The warmth still in my muscles from the rink. Something was pulling between us—a gravity I could feel in my sternum, this slow magnetic drag that was closing the two feet between us one centimeter at a time. I looked at his mouth and then looked away and then looked back at his mouth and I hated myself for it but I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted it so badly that my body was actually leaning forward without my brain’s permission the same way it had relaxed in his arms in that parking lot.
He didn’t kiss me.
He looked at my mouth too—I saw him do it—and something moved behind his eyes, a war between want and restraint that lasted about two seconds before restraint won. He stepped back. Put his hands back in his pockets.
“Goodnight, Mean-har,” he said with that half-smile.
“Goodnight, Quest.”
He turned and walked down the hallway toward the stairs. I watched him go, and when he disappeared around the corner, I unlocked my door and stepped inside and locked it behind me.
I didn’t check the windows. I didn’t check the closets. I didn’t walk through every room with my hand on my blade making sure nobody was hiding behind the shower curtain or underneath the bed.
I just stood there in my dark apartment with my back against the door and my eyes closed and my heart doing something it hadn’t done in a very long time.
Beating without fear.
16
