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You're familiar with different kinds of pain, inflicted on you or by you. You're familiar with different kinds of joy, too, though they're the same thing half the time. You know that's more than some can say, though. You're familiar with gratitude, aren't you?
But this softness, that's not—new, exactly, but near-forgotten, like when you were five years old, looking at your friend's face through a green shard of a beer bottle, hazy, smiling. Or like when you were twenty-one, and he tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear, heads on the same pillow, his face out of focus. Half a dream.
If fear is second skin, and guilt is pressing on a half-healed bruise, this is a spear through your gut, a sharp, twisting thing. You don't invite it anymore—but then, does anyone ever invite anything? You deal with what you get.
Of course, it could be the shit you've taken, been taking, or the dancing, the race to figure out just how fucked up you can get while remaining conscious. But then, why was it there, already, reflected in the waters of the inlet where the buoy is floating, half your future hidden inside?
It's this city, then. It's the snow, so slow you think maybe gravity does not quite work here. It's when the detective lets you go, his partner's eyes soft and careful. Have you ever looked at someone like that? Was that what earned you the name you think of as yours?
Sure, you'd thought it's a capacity someone is born with, or without, for a long time. You certainly had it, you know that much. But you wondered if it could be unlearned, too; if you're the living proof of that. Every time you feel the spear twist you're selfishly glad the shit you've done (and kept and kept and kept on doing) couldn't erase it.
Everything is loud when you take him up to your room, that first evening. The wind outside, the crash of a glass bottle hurled at the wall by a cop so fucked-up he can't even fall down, the blood rushing in your ears. It's not instant, but the third time you fuck, or the fifth—a more sober one, anyway—you open your eyes and catch it in his. And then he reaches out, the hand that's been gripping your thigh hard going up to tuck your sweat-damp hair behind your ear. A green shard of glass, a flash, a spear. A twist in your throat, knowing: this tenderness is a reflection. That he, too, is capable of it, settles something, like an old bet. Strange, that it should be his way of dealing.
When you snap the armour pieces in place over cold skin, too careful to be clinical, it's all you can think: this, too, is dealing.