Chapter 3

Chapter Three

The park was empty by the time we got there, sodium lights throwing pools of amber across cracked asphalt, moths circling like they hadn't gotten the memo that it was nearly midnight.

"You brought me to a playground." I crossed my arms against the chill, not quite managing to fight my smile. "At eleven p.m."

"Best swings in the city." He was already walking toward them, hands in his pockets, like he'd never once in his life been late for anything. "Trust me."

I sat down, the cold chains biting through my jeans. He took the swing beside me, though it was clearly too small for him. His knees were almost pressed to his chest until he stretched his legs out, giving himself room, and let the swing slowly carry him back.

"This is childish," I said.

"But you're smiling, though." He chuckled, turning to look at me.

"I'm just cold."

"You're smiling and cold." He nudged my swing with his foot, sending me into a lazy arc. "Multitasking. Impressive."

We swung in silence for a while, the chains creaking beneath us in an uneven rhythm. Every so often, our breath appeared in little clouds before disappearing into the cold night. We didn't have to look at each other or find the right words. We were just two people sitting side by side, facing the same darkness.

"Can I ask you something?" he said eventually, voice lower than before.

"Depends what it is."

"What were you like? Before all this." He gestured vaguely between us and the city glowing orange behind the treeline. "Before college."

I let my swing slow, dragging my sneakers through the gravel until I stopped. "That's a big question for eleven p.m."

"We've got time."

I stared down at the chain wrapped around my hands instead of looking at him.

“My dad wasn’t a good man,” I said quietly. “He had a temper he never learned how to control, and my mom took the worst of it.”

The words came out steadier than I expected. 

“The last time he hurt her, it was bad. She never really came back from it. She eventually became brain dead.” I swallowed, my fingers tightening around the chain. 

He didn't say anything. Didn't reach for me either, which I was grateful for, because I don't think I could've kept talking if he had.

"I was fourteen. I learned how to do her physio exercises before I learned how to drive. Learned her medication schedule better than I knew my own class schedule." I shrugged, like it hadn't reshaped every year after it. "She died the summer before I started uni. That's when I moved to the city. Needed somewhere that didn't remind me of her."

"Did he..." Root's voice was careful, testing the ground before he put weight on it. "Did he ever face anything for it? Legally?"

"Not really," I said it fast. "It's — I don't really talk about that part."

He let it sit instead of pushing, which was somehow worse and better at once. The swing chains ticked in the quiet.

"So.....what do you want, then?" he asked after a while. "What's the life you're actually building toward?"

I looked up at the sky, what little of it the city let through. "True love. Real love, not the performance of it. I want to be known by someone and have that sacred kind of intimacy." I huffed a laugh at myself. "And I want to be a psychologist. Work with women who've lived through what my mom lived through. Advocate for them, actually fight for them, not just nod along in a support group and call it help."

I turned to him. "Your turn."

He went quiet in a way I'd never seen on him before, the easy confidence draining out of his shoulders. He stared at some point past the swing set, jaw tight.

"To be freed from my misery," he said finally.

I waited for the rest of it. It didn't come.

"That's it?" I asked, gently, not wanting to spook whatever had just crossed his face. "Freed from what, exactly?"

He blinked, and just like that, the wall went back up, a smile sliding into place like he'd never let it slip. "Cold?" he said, already shrugging out of his jacket.

"You're deflecting."

"I'm generous." He draped it over my shoulders anyway, the warmth of him still caught in the fabric, and it smelled like him. "Very different things."

"Root."

"Lavinia." He said my name the same way he had that first night, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth. "Some other time. I promise."

I let it go, mostly because his hands had found my face by then, tilting it up toward his, and whatever question I'd been about to ask dissolved the second his mouth met mine. This kiss was slower than the one at the club, no crowd to hide us, no music to drown out the small sound I made against his lips. His thumb traced my jaw, and I felt it everywhere, that same electric current from before, except now it came with the ache of everything I'd just told him sitting between us too.

When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine the way he had that first night. "Come on," he murmured. "I want to show you something."

The motorcycle was parked at the edge of the lot, and he swung a leg over it like he'd done it a thousand times, which, I was starting to suspect, he had.

"You're kidding," I said.

"Get on."

I climbed on behind him, arms circling his waist, his jacket still warm around my shoulders. The engine woke with a low growl that I felt in my chest more than heard, and then we were moving, and the city went strange and unfamiliar around us.

Everything sounded different at that speed. The wind swallowed most of it, leaving only fragments. The streetlights blurred into long amber ribbons, streaking past instead of standing still, painting his shoulders gold and then dark and then gold again. There was a hush to it I hadn't expected, some quality to midnight air that daylight never had, thinner somehow, colder, like the whole city had exhaled and hadn't breathed back in yet.

We passed through neighborhoods gone soft and yellow under sodium lights, then stretches with no light at all where the sky opened up wide and close, then back into the glow again, the rhythm of it almost hypnotic. I pressed my cheek between his shoulder blades and felt the vibration of the engine move through both of us, felt him lean into every curve like it was a language his whole body already spoke fluently, no hesitation in it anywhere.

If somewhere in the blur of yellow light, cold wind and empty streets, whatever weighed on him during the day simply couldn't keep up. I held on, and let the city disappear behind us in long amber streaks, and let myself, for a little while, disappear with it.