044— "SHE..."

"You're really leaving your girl down there with him?"

I was already moving toward the stairs.

Niko's laugh followed me through the door.

                   …

The bonfire was large and loud and the whole team was arranged around it in various states of relaxation. 

Someone had found speakers. Someone else had found additional drinks. The coordinator — a third-year called Jae who apparently ran every social event the team had ever attended, was moving around the circle with the energy of someone who had been born for exactly this.

I stood at the edge of it and looked for her.

Found her in four seconds.

She was sitting across the fire with Daniel beside her, close enough that the firelight caught both their faces at once. He said something near her ear and she laughed, the unguarded one that came out before she decided whether to let it, and my hand closed into a fist at my side.

I looked away.

Found a space at the outer edge of the circle and stood in it and looked at the fire and told myself I was here for security purposes. Professional assessment. The property. The team's safety. 

Legitimate reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that Daniel's shoulder was approximately three centimetres from Sloane's and I could see it from here and my jaw had been tight since I sat down.

Niko materialized beside me with two drinks and handed me one without being asked.

I didn't take it.

He left it on the log beside me anyway.

"—Kai. Kai. KAI."

I looked up.

Jae was pointing at me from across the circle. Every face in the ring had turned. Sloane's among them.

"What," I said.

"Called you five times man," Jae said, with the tone of someone who found this significantly funnier than it warranted. "Are you with us or not?"

"I'm here."

"Debatable." He grinned. 

"Okay. Spin the bottle, truth edition. Your question." He looked at his card. "Have you ever made out with someone you swore you hated?"

The fire crackled.

I didn't move for a moment.

My eyes went across the circle on their own, the way they always went across any room she was in, and found her immediately. 

She was looking at me. Her face was doing something I hadn't seen before — not the guarded neutral, not the fury, something cracked open underneath both of those.

The terrace.

The painting room.

Her room, twenty minutes ago, her hands in my hair before she pushed.

I reached forward and picked up the drink Niko had left and took it in one go.

The circle erupted.

Booing. Cheering. Someone threw a balled-up napkin. Jae pointed at me with theatrical disappointment. 

I looked at the fire and let it happen and didn't look at her again for thirty seconds because thirty seconds felt like the minimum required distance from what my face had almost done.

"Okay, okay." Jae spun the bottle again. It landed on Sloane.

She looked up.

"Easy one," Jae said. "Guess Kai's favourite colour. Get it right and you're safe. Get it wrong—" he held up a cup.

She looked at the cup.

Looked across the fire.

At me.

‘Don't,’ I thought. ‘You cannot drink that cup and Daniel is sitting right beside you and you cannot—’

She was thinking. I could see it. The slight furrow, the way her eyes moved like she was going through options.

She looked at me one more time.

"Black," she said.

Every head turned to me.

I nodded.

The relief on her face lasted half a second before she put it away. But I saw it. I saw it land and I saw her breathe and I saw her look back at the fire quickly like she was hoping nobody had noticed.

I noticed.

I looked at the flames.

I didn’t have a favourite colour. 

The corner of my mouth moved.

I looked at the fire before anyone saw it.

                    …

The rest of the bonfire passed and I was physically present and mentally somewhere else entirely. Jae kept the game moving. 

People answered or drank. Niko answered everything with shameless honesty and made the whole circle laugh three times. 

Across the fire, every time I let myself look — which I did approximately every four minutes and found deeply irritating about myself. She was there. Laughing at something. Looking at the flames. Tucking her knees up. Her face in the firelight doing things that had no right to be that distracting.

Daniel said something to her near the end and she smiled and I looked away and turned the ring on my finger three times in a row.

When the fire started dying Jae called it and the circle broke apart and I stood up and Niko was suddenly beside me with his hands in his pockets.

"You stared at her forty-seven times," he said.

"I wasn't counting."

"I was." He sounded pleased with himself. "She stared back thirty-nine times."

I walked back inside.

              …

I didn't sleep.

This was not new. Sleep had been largely theoretical for two weeks. 

I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and my brain produced a highlight reel of the evening that I had not requested — her laughing. The relief on her face when I nodded. The way the firelight had sat in her hair. The thirty-nine times according to Niko.

‘Molest,’ she'd said.

I pressed my hand flat on my chest.

The ache was still there. Had been there since I walked out of her room. 

Sitting right behind my ribs in a place I couldn't reach, running on a low constant frequency that didn't stop when I closed my eyes or turned over or told it firmly that it was a biological response and nothing more.

Niko's voice in my head. ‘She's running out of time.’

I looked at the ceiling until the room went grey with early light and then I got up.

                  …

My phone rang at 6:47am.

Unknown number.

I knew before I answered.

"I hear there's a distraction," said the voice on the other end.

Not old. Never old. The voice that had shaped everything I was before I was old enough to choose what I wanted to be shaped into.

"A project," I said. "Nothing significant."

"Projects have completion dates." A pause. "Don't forget the big picture, son. We have come too far."

"I know."

"The operation. What we've built."

"I know."

"Good." Another pause. Shorter. "Don't let sentiment compromise the mission."

"Yes Father," I said.

The call ended.

I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the floor and sat with the weight of being reminded who I was before she complicated it.

A knock at the door.

Hard. Fast. Not Niko's knock.

I crossed the room and opened it.

Niko stood there.

Something was wrong with his face. The ease was gone completely.

All of it, every bit of the warmth he carried like a default setting, and what was underneath it was something I hadn't seen often.

Fear.

"What happened," I said. Already stepping forward. Already reading the situation from his face and his breathing.

"Blood," he said.

I grabbed his arm. "What. What happened? Where?"

"She—" He stopped. His jaw moved. "She—"