Her eyes search my face, and I know she sees more than I meant to show. The anger. The exhaustion. The crack in the armor I usually keep welded shut.
I should step away. Instead, I keep one hand at her waist and say, “He was there.”
Her brows draw together. “Your father.”
I nod once. She doesn’t ask what he said. She’s smarter than that. Smarter than most people who claim to care.
“What did he want?” she asks instead.
Everything, I almost say.
My mother’s dignity. My inheritance. My obedience. My weaknesses, named and measured and dragged into daylight.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “No matter what.”
She’s in my world now, standing in a private hospital wing after my father looked at her once and understood exactly where the damage could be done. Nothing about that is okay.
Still, the fact that she says it to comfort me and not herself does something dangerous to my chest.
I look at her for too long. And there it is again, that impossible question I keep circling and refusing to answer.
What is this?
What is she to me, that I can walk out of a conversation with the man I hate most in the world and end up here, in her arms, with no instinct stronger than hold on?
I know I feel something. That much is clear now.
It is not just want. Not just possession. Not just the chemical disaster of sex and adrenaline and proximity.
It’s worse than that.
Because I can’t name it, and unnamed things are harder to control.
And how is it even possible? We’ve known each other such a short time. Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is a negotiation, a business deal, a passing appetite.
It is not enough time for this.
But then, I was taught early that time means less than intensity. Some people can know each other for years and never leave a mark. Others arrive like a match in a dry room and suddenly everything is altered.
Zatanna, apparently, is fire.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” I say, the words leaving before I can stop them.
She blinks. “With what?”
I look at her. At the woman holding me together in a hallway full of fluorescent light and old rage.
“With you.”
The honesty of it seems to surprise us both. Her face softens.
And because she is who she is, because she never lets a moment stay entirely tragic if she can help it, she says quietly, “That makes two of us.”
A laugh escapes me. I lean down and press my forehead to hers, just for a second. Her eyes close. Mine do, too.
If anyone sees, I don’t care.
That may be the most dangerous part of all.
