He laughed, but it didn’t have any bite. “Not really. Just different.”
I wanted him to say it was a miracle. I wanted him to tell me the future was gold and silk and safety. Instead, he let the silence creep in, the way he always did. I scooted closer and wrapped my arms around my knees. “Tell me something only you would know,” I said. “Something that proves it.”
He turned, finally, and looked at me. Not the way men usually looked at me—none of that weighing, none of that hunger. Sully looked at me like he was trying to memorize my face, like the shape of my mouth and the set of my jaw was a riddle he could solve if he stared long enough.
“In my time,” he said, “they have boxes that fit in your pocket. You can talk to anyone in the world with it. Take pictures. Send words, songs, whole stories, and they travel through the air.”
I tried to imagine it. A magic box that talked and listened. “That’s just witchery,” I said, smiling.
“Witchery or not, it’s real.” He grinned, a crooked thing. “You’d have loved it. You could tell everyone exactly what you thought, all the time.”
I snorted. “And you’d have hated it. No more hiding behind the plow.”
He didn’t argue.
He ran his thumb along the edge of the poker, then set it down, careful this time. “In my time, there are these bikes. Not like your Da’s cart. Machines, with engines, wheels thicker than your wrist. They go so fast the wind peels your skin back, and the noise makes your bones shake. You ride with your friends, side by side, and it’s like you own the whole world, just for a little while.”
He said it like a prayer, the way some men talk about the first pint after Mass.
I tried to picture it. “Did you do that? Ride the machines?”
He nodded, then flexed his left hand. “That’s where I got this,” he said, pointing at the shamrock tattoo. The skin around it was swollen, the green lines jagged. “It’s a mark, for the club. For family.”
I reached out, almost without thinking, and ran my finger along the tattoo. The skin was warm, the hair rough. “It suits you,” I said.
He didn’t pull away. For a second, we just sat there, my hand on his wrist, his eyes searching mine.
“I missed you,” he said. Not a question, not a plea.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
He let out a breath, shaky. “You don’t have to come,” he said, voice soft. “When I go. You could stay. Your family—”
I cut him off with a look. “Don’t be stupid. I buried you once already, Sully. I’m not doing it again.”
He looked at me, really looked. The pain was there, old and clean. I knew it as well as he did. We’d grown up on it, fed on it.
I let go of his wrist, but the skin remembered. “What’s it like, where you’re from?” I asked, softer. “Is it lonely?”
He shrugged. “Not when I’m with you.”
That did it. The tears came, sudden and stupid. I wiped at them with the back of my hand, but he caught my wrist, pulled me close, and tucked me into his chest. The blood smell was strong, but I didn’t care. I breathed him in. He held me for a long time, rocking a little, like he was trying to fix us both.
“Does it scare you?” I asked, voice muffled against his neck.
He thought about it. “It does,” he said. “But not as much as the idea of losing you again.”
I pulled back and met his eyes. “You promise you’ll protect me?”
He nodded, slow. “I’ll die trying.”
I laughed, a wet, ugly sound. “We’ve already tried that.”
He grinned, then winced when his left arm twinged.
I wiped my nose. “Show me something from your world.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a coin. It was heavy, round, stamped with a skull and a wheel. He handed it to me.
