So I take the musings, the porch, the old soul, the soul connect, and I put them in a bag with all the other uselessthings I have collected over the years, and I sink the bag in the Marianas where nothing ever comes back up.
Kai pulls the SUV out of the garage and into Halo City. The skyline is a wall of glass and light ahead of us, and the streets are still humming with foot traffic and the slow crawl of cabs.
His energy tonight is off.
There’s a weight in his shoulders that wasn’t there this morning, and I know exactly where it came from.
I let the silence sit for a few blocks. When I look back at him again, I notice his left wrist on the steering wheel.
“Where’s the watch?”
His eyes don’t leave the road. “I’ll wear it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I’ll wear it on a special occasion.”
I laugh. “I want you to wear it every day. I want to see my gift on you.”
He changes lanes. The turn signal ticks in the silence, and he doesn’t say anything more.
“Kai.”
Nothing.
“I’m talking to you.”
Still nothing. His hands are steady on the wheel, ten and two, his face the closed door of a man who has decided the conversation is over.
I watch him, and this time my gaze catches his right hand. The angle makes it difficult to see clearly, but his knuckles, there are thin cuts running across them.
I don’t ask about the watch again. There is a bruise in his composure, I can sense it, and I have been pressing on it without knowing its shape. I don’t know his story. I don’t know what money means to him, or what a gift from a woman who has everything means to a man who has… what? I don’t know what he has. I don’t know where he comes from. I know his militaryrecord and his employee file and the sound he makes when he finishes, but I do not know a single other thing.
I pull my gaze forward, and I leave it there.
“There’s a liquor shop on the right,” I say. My voice is easy, light. “Pull over. I need to grab a few things.”
He nods once and guides the SUV to the curb.
The shop is called Tinder Box. The sign is gold leaf on black, and the windows are tinted.
I step out. The night air is cool, and I can smell the harbor three blocks away. Salt, traffic, the start of a Halo City night that is still deciding what it wants to be.
Kai is already at my door, closing it behind me, his body between mine and the street like always. I reach the entrance. My hand is on the brass handle.
Then a crack.
My body doesn’t get the chance to process the sound. Kai’s arm is around my waist, and I am being hauled forward, through the door, off my feet, and then I’m inside, and he’s inside, and the door is swinging shut behind us.
Two more cracks.
Kai shoves me down behind a display shelf. His body is over mine, and his voice is in my ear, low and hard.
“Stay down.”
The woman behind the counter looks up with a polite, confused smile. The shop is so beautifully insulated, thick glass and soft jazz coming from a speaker hidden somewhere in the ceiling, that the gunshots outside are muffled pops.
Nobody inside heard.
