But last night, the violence was just pictures in my head. Flashes I could tell myself might not mean what I thought they meant. Today I beat a man unconscious behind a bar. I can’t sit across from her and pretend that’s someone else’s life.
She already gave me the truth about her family. Told me things that could get her hurt if the wrong person heard them. I owe her something back. Not all of it. Not the parts that would make her look at me like the enemy. But enough to be honest about what I am, even if I can’t tell her who.
“Bad,” I finally say. “His friends had to carry him inside.”
Her hands stop moving. She holds my gaze for a long second, then sets the towel down and sits back.
I stare at the counter for a second. Then I make myself look back at her.
“I remembered something after the fight. I was a kid. Street fighting. Some kind of ring, other teenagers watching and cheering. The kid I fought was bigger than me, but I put him down in seconds.”
Her expression doesn’t shift.
“It wasn’t adrenaline at that bar today. I knew where to hit, how to move, how to take a man apart efficiently. That doesn’t come from nowhere.”
“No.” She pauses. “It doesn’t.”
The next part is harder. I open my mouth and close it again.
“So whatever I am, whoever I was before that boat.” I pull my hands off the counter and into my lap, tucking them out of sight like hiding the evidence changes what it means. “I’ve hurt people. I’m certain of it.”
She holds my gaze and I let her, even though every instinct says look away.
“I don’t think I was a good man, Natalia. And I think I’ve killed people.”
Killed.
The word hangs in the kitchen air between us, ugly and specific. I watch her throat work. Her fingers curl against her thighs, pressing hard enough that the tips go white.
For a long three seconds, she says nothing, and in those seconds I catch what she’s trained out of her face showing up in her body instead. Her weight shifts toward the back of her stool. Barely a degree, but there.
She’s scared. She’s trying not to show it, but I know what fear looks like when someone’s had practice hiding it.
I put that there. Me.
And it makes me want to be anywhere else on earth but this stool.
“I can go,” I say, already half off my seat. “I’ll figure something out. You don’t need?—”
“Sit down.”
I sit.
She picks up a gauze pad from the kit and tears it open. Reaches for my hand again. Her fingers are less steady than they were before, the faintest tremor when she presses the gauze against my knuckles and starts taping it down. But she presses anyway.
“I know violent men, Johnny.” She lifts her eyes to mine, and whatever was uncertain in her face a minute ago has settled. “I was raised by them. Sat across the dinner table from them while they discussed things no kid should hear.”
She finishes taping the right hand and reaches for the left, pressing a fresh gauze pad over the scrape there.
“You want to know what every one of them had in common?” She looks up again, and her eyes are clear. “I don’t think a single one of them ever asked themselves if they were bad. Not once. Never lost a minute of sleep over any of it. The cruelty was thepoint, and they wore it like a fucking merit badge. My father, my brother, every soldier who ever tracked blood across our kitchen floor. I never saw any of them ever look at their own hands the way you’re looking at yours.”
The back of my throat burns. I open my mouth and she cuts me off.
“I’m not telling you you’re harmless. I’m not naive and I’m not stupid. I’m telling you that every violent man I’ve ever known came home and changed his shirt and poured a drink and moved on with his night. They never sat in a kitchen afterward asking what it means.”
She smooths the last piece of tape down and sets my hand back on the counter. Her fingers stay on my wrist. Not checking anything this time. Just resting there.
“So don’t push me away because you’ve decided I can’t handle what you are. I’ve been handling worse than you since I was old enough to pour my father’s vodka.”
