Page 6 of Protected By Razor

“Can you just... I don’t know. Check on her? Or tell me what to do? You’re the only person I know who??—”

“I’ll be over tomorrow. Seven.”

“Thank you.”

“Kate.”

“Yeah?”

“Anyone else calls her about this, you tell me. She goes anywhere, you tell me. Anything changes in the next twelve hours, you call me. I don’t care what time.”

“Okay. Okay. I will.”

I hang up. I put the phone down on the bench. I stand there for a long minute with my hands flat on the wood, staring at an engine I’m suddenly not interested in anymore.

Darcie.

Her name hits the same way it always has. Like someone dropped something heavy on my chest and I forgot how to move for a second.

I don’t sleep much that night.

I lie on my back in bed and I think about a girl who stopped being a girl a long time ago.

Almost seventeen years old. That’s how old she was the first time I saw her. Kate brought her home from school and I walked into the kitchen and there she was, sitting at the counter with a glass of orange juice, shoes kicked off under the stool, laughing at something Kate had said.

She looked up at me.

And something in my chest went wrong.

I was twenty-four. I’d been patched for two years. I’d had women — plenty of them, most of them forgettable — and I’d never in my life looked at a girl and felt my whole body stop working.

She was a teenager still. She was my little sister’s best friend. She was sixteen years old and I was a grown man with a patch on my back and I had absolutely no business feeling anything about her.

I shut it down.

I shut it down so hard and so fast and so completely that I think it scared her. I stopped talking to her. I stopped looking at her. I’d walk into a room she was in and walk right back out. Kate noticed. Kate teased me about it — why are you being weird about my friend — and I denied that I was.

There was one time, later — she was maybe eighteen, coming out of Kate’s bedroom in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, hair wet from the shower — and she looked at me across the hall and I looked back and for about two seconds I let myself. Two seconds. Then I turned away so fast I heard something pop in my neck.

I think she saw it. I think she’s been wondering ever since if she imagined it.

She didn’t imagine it.

Years passed. She grew up. I got better at pretending I didn’t notice when she was in the room. I told myself it was a teenage thing, a weird reaction I’d shake off, and then eighteen came andwent and nineteen came and went and she was at Kate’s twenty-first birthday in a dress that nearly killed me and I spent the whole night with my back to the room because if I turned around I was going to do something stupid.

Twenty-two. Twenty-four. Twenty-six.

Ten years.

I’ve watched her through the narrow crack of my own peripheral vision for a decade, and in that decade I have not had a single conversation with her that lasted more than about thirty seconds.

She’s always been careful around me. Polite. A little cool. Like she’s keeping a respectful distance from something she’s not sure about. And I’ve let her. It was better that way.

Now someone’s threatening her. Now I have to walk into her apartment tomorrow and sit across from her and ask her questions and look at her and not look at her, and keep my hands to myself and my face flat, and be the man she needs me to be.

Her building is one of those older blocks on a quiet street near the clinic, two storeys, buzzer out front that half works. I hit her number at five to seven. She lets me in without asking who it is, which means Kate told her exactly when I’d arrive and she’s been listening for the buzzer.

I take the stairs. Apartment 2C. I knock once.