Not the buzz. Not the thunk.
Nothing—until a voice cuts through the dark velvet of the song and lands in the room like a dropped key.
“She’s clearly breaking the pole in. Climbing it would be impossible from a standing mount; I already checked the cameras.”
That voice.
I’d know it now in a crowd, in a coma, at the bottom of a well.
Low, unhurried, and certain of its welcome.
I pout before I even open my eyes, because the intrusion means the freedom is over, and because some childish corner of me wants him to know I’m put out.
When I do crack my lids, the world is upside down and turning, and it takes a beat to assemble the facts: I’m at the very top of the pole, ankles crossed and locked around the steel, body hanging inverted, arms dangling toward a floor that is presently above my head. I’ve been spinning a great deal longer than I realized.
The room swims when I try to hold it still.
I peer down—or up, the geometry’s a negotiation right now—through the curtain of my own hanging hair, and I take inventory of my audience.
Doc.
Three guards arranged in their nervous little crescent.
And—I tilt my head, still rotating in slow lazy circles—some random woman.
I keep spinning, and I let my gaze snag on her each time she swings back into view, and I notice, with a flicker of something I refuse to name out loud, a small ungovernable pinch low in my chest.
Jealousy.
Sourceless, baseless, sprung from absolutely nowhere, and pointed—if I’m honest, which I try not to be—somewhere in the vicinity of the woman standing too close to the man who gave me my gift.
I file it under things to interrogate later, in a quieter hour, when I can take it out and examine it without an audience. Obviously not now.
My eyes find Doc again, on and off, snatches of him stitched together between rotations—arms crossed, glasses catching the light, that enormous stillness of his anchoring the whole nervous room.
And he doesn’t rush me.
That’s the thing that knocks me sideways, gentler and harder than any drop ever could. He doesn’t bark at me to come down, doesn’t order me clocked out of my euphoria and folded back into compliance the way every other set of eyes in this building would. He simply waits. Watches. Lets me have the last of it. And it’s so unpredictable of him, so contrary to every instinct this place runs on, that I almost miss the rest of what’s written on him.
He’s admiring me.
Not leering. Not assessing.
Admiring—the way a man admires a thing he finds beautiful and dangerous in equal measure and has decided he wants to keep looking at for a good long while—and that does something perilous to the shattered, taped-together ruin I keep where a heart is supposed to live.
I feel a piece of it shift. A fragment I’d long ago swept into a corner lift, turn, and settle back almost into place, and I want to scream at it to stay broken, because broken things can’t be used as a leash.
So I do what I always do with a feeling I can’t afford.
I throw my body at gravity to outrun it.
I let myself drop—a clean unspooling plummet down the length of the steel—and the three guards flinch as one, a synchronized little jerk of useless hands toward weapons that couldn’t catch a falling woman if they tried.
Doc doesn’t flinch.
Doc stays carved from stone.
Except…
