Page 52 of Knight
Nova slides down the wall and sits beside me.
Her shoulder touches mine. The gas station dress is wrinkled at the hem and her hair falls across her collarbone and she smells like cocoa butter and the lavender soap she used to wash Marisol's face before the bedtime story.
She is my wife.
The word detonates inside me every time I think it. Wife. I have signed contracts that rearranged territories. I have signed documents that moved money across borders. I signed my name six hours ago next to hers and the ink on that certificate has rearranged something that borders and territories and money never touched.
The thought of many women passing through repeats in my head. I have had women want me. The charm, the name, the danger from a distance that looked like excitement until it looked like a funeral. I have had women perform for me — the right laugh, the right dress, the right version of themselves designed to fit whatever shape they thought I wanted. I have had women leave me. Walk out of my bed and my life with the efficient detachment of someone closing an account that no longer served their interests.
I have never had someone sign their name next to mine and then sit on my hallway floor reading a thirteen-year-old to sleep through a closed door.
She leans her head against my shoulder.
I open my mouth.
The word is right there — lodged behind my teeth, pressing against the back of my lips, a grenade with the pin already pulled. It is the word I swore I would never give anyone because Giovanni gave it to Bella and then gave it to Zina and it killed him. Because love in this family is the match that lights the fuse that levels everything.
I close my mouth.
I don't say it.
But it sits in my chest like a second heartbeat — heavy, steady, impossible to ignore — and when Nova lifts her head to look at me, her brown eyes searching my face in the dark, I know she can hear it.
She knows.
She leans up and presses her lips against my cheek. Soft. Warm. The kiss of a woman who is willing to wait for a word a man is terrified to speak.
"Goodnight, husband," she whispers.
She stands. Walks toward our bedroom. The gas station dress disappears around the corner and I sit on the floor ofmy own home listening to the sound of two children breathing through walls that finally have something worth holding.
The word beats inside me.
I let it.
10
nova
New Skin
The Wrong Kind of Quiet
Iwake up and something is missing.
It takes me three seconds to identify it — three seconds of lying still with my eyes closed while my body runs the morning diagnostic it's been running since I was eighteen. Listen for Marisol. Listen for Tomás. Listen for the building.
The building is gone.
No pipes groaning behind the walls. No couple on the second floor screaming about whose turn it is to buy milk. No bass leaking through the ceiling from the guy upstairs who plays reggaeton at six AM because his shift starts at seven and music is his alarm clock. No stairwell echo. No broken elevator humming its useless hum behind the shaft door.
The penthouse is silent the way expensive things are silent. Sealed. Layered. The kind of quiet that costs money because it takes money to insulate a life from the sounds of other lives. On Delancey I could hear my neighbor's television through the drywall. Here I can hear my own heartbeat and the soft mechanical breath of an air filtration system that probably costs more per month than my old electric bill.
I swing my legs out of bed. Romeo's side is cold — he's been up for hours, I can tell by the indent in the pillow and the faint smell of coffee drifting from a kitchen I still don't fully trust.
In the kitchen I open the refrigerator and stare.
Full. Every shelf. Milk, eggs, fresh fruit, vegetables, three kinds of cheese, deli turkey — the good kind, sliced thin, the kind I used to stand in front of at the grocery store calculating the price per ounce before putting it back and reaching for the store brand that tasted like salted cardboard.
