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He felt out of alignment, a snow-globe storm of instincts and impressions flurrying inside him, refusing to settle. Every time he reached for a thought, it twirled away, lost to the squall.
If this was a gambit, it was a superb one, playing all the right notes on the bars of his ribs, coaxing an emotional response into resonance.
It hadn’t occurred to him to want to be wanted.
If she weren’t a district attorney sworn to uphold the law and he hadn’t been raised an assassin sworn to break it, perhaps the road ahead might have felt like a solid possibility rather than a tiptoe across land mines.
Evan said, ‘This isn’t a good idea.’ The second man chuckled, leaned back on his heels. They each had at least four inches and fifty pounds on Evan. ‘You don’t look like much.’ Evan said, ‘That’s why this isn’t a good idea.’
‘Let me be clear. I’m a nice guy by choice.’
She was beaming, and he realized that this was a story she’d carried with her like a precious stone, that she’d polished in her mind’s eye until it gleamed with potential. The promise of her lost boy having turned out to be something so much better than what he was.
How novel to consider that parts of him had been inherited in the twisted ladders of his DNA. The thought undressed him, peeling away a lifetime’s worth of armor he hadn’t known he’d been wearing.
‘Of course.’ She blinked once, indulgently. ‘No one wants to have polite sex, darling.’
How unmoored they all were, how helpless, how courageous.
It’s like the sun. Can’t look straight at it. Probably the same for you. Where you came from. What you left behind. Look too hard and you’ll go blind.’
‘I don’t know. It’s one of the awful secrets to getting older. You don’t ever get the answers. Every time I consider myself an adult, I think back five years to when I also thought of myself as an adult. And I’m aghast at how staggeringly blind I was. Maybe what I hold to be true right now will seem just as ignorant when I reflect back on it years from now.’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘If I’m around.’ She examined the flute once more. ‘Maybe that’s all growing up is. Knowing in real time that you don’t know anything.’
‘Maybe happiness is overrated,’ Evan said. ‘Freedom, too. Maybe the only way to get anywhere worth being is to pick up the heaviest thing you can carry. And carry it.’
Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction – it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving. What if that was the point? To expend ourselves in the care of people who mattered? Without that, what was there to preserve?
Peter was watching Evan. ‘What are you thinking about?’ Evan cleared his throat, which he was surprised to find needed clearing. ‘How much wiser you are than me.’ ‘When you were my age?’ ‘Maybe now, too,’ Evan said.
She considered. ‘He seemed simultaneously attracted to and terrified of me.’ ‘That’s a good description of how most guys feel around an impressive young woman.’
You barely cried. The doctor thought something was wrong with you. But I knew there wasn’t. I could see how sensitive you were, how much you were taking in, that you were overcome by it. And to survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to.
He felt suddenly hyperaware of the bones of his feet and how imperfectly they balanced him. His breath moving through the channel of his throat. His heartbeat up from its resting rate, body temperature also on the rise. Emotion. And then it struck him.
Evan’s training had taught him to cover every operational contingency, but the feat of laying bare one’s heart seemed rife with greater dangers yet. There was nothing more wild and unpredictable than a human being.
‘You were cursed with being pretty, which means the world told you what you were supposed to be before you could figure it out for yourself,’
He knew what he was good for. He just wanted to be good for something else.
There was enough iron in a human body to make a three-inch nail. That’s all anyone was. Parts and particles. Raw matter that could be rearranged. You could dress it up with gym muscle or bespoke clothes or plastic surgery, but at the end of the tunnel people were just pain receptors and nerves, ligament and marrow.
‘This isn’t you,’ she insisted, her voice little-girl brave. ‘Maybe you don’t know me,’ Evan said.
‘The hardest part of trying to become an adult is realizing that your suffering doesn’t entitle you to anything.’
He had never been called a pet name. Not one single time. It felt awful and beautiful and terribly confusing.
That’s what people did for you, they held you to a standard you had to live up to.
Could Evan trust her with this? Could he trust himself to speak the words to someone else? That would make it real, would put it into the world where he’d have to stare it in the face.
‘Shame. At how afraid I was. How powerless. I had to prove I wasn’t a coward. So I did. I faked it again and again. Until at some point I believed myself.’ Andre made a thoughtful voice deep in his throat. ‘Maybe that’s all bravery is.’
‘I’ve managed worse. This is just pain. What he’s feeling is something deeper.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Because,’ he said, his voice threatening to crack, ‘I’ve felt it.’
‘Are you as terrible as you say you are?’ ‘I can be,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
It struck him that the same law of physics applied to any injury, physical or emotional. If you babied it, it stiffened even more, spreading the pain through you. But if you yielded, if you were willing to endure the white-hot agony of making vulnerable what you sought to protect, you had a shot at releasing it.
‘I was a small kid. Powerless. So I made a vow to do so well, to be so tough, so perfect, that I would be invulnerable. That I would no longer have to feel human. I put my mind to it second after second, year after year. And the most awful thing happened.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I succeeded.’
He cleared his throat. ‘They teach you the love you deserve.’ Her voice was open and curious now, like that of a girl or a young woman – none of the usual teenage testiness. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘So maybe you can learn how to give that love back,’ Evan said. ‘I’d like you to learn that. I never did. Not the right way.’ Joey leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘You do okay,’ she said.
‘You spend your whole damn life proving that you’re different from everyone else. What a great relief at the end to find out that you aren’t.’
