Page 52 of Iridescent
She taps a finger against my chest. My pulse fractures into a frantic staccato. I forget to breathe.
“Here first.”
Goosebumps pebble my skin in the wake of her touch.Christ.I’m acting like a schoolboy with a crush.
“Then the feet,” she adds, ruining whatever strange thing my body is trying to make of the moment. “Mostly the feet, actually. Yours are a tragedy.”
A laugh almost escapes me.
Almost.
She intercepts the attempt all the same. The woman’s perception is damn near uncanny.
“There,” she says, pleased. “Progress.”
“I did not laugh.”
“No, but you considered it. I accept partial payments.”
I shake my head, but the corner of my mouth betrays me again.
“Why do you do it?” I ask.
“Box?”
“Yes.”
For the first time since she sat down, the ease in her expression shifts. Not gone. Recalibrated.
“My father put me in classes when I was young because I kept fighting boys at school.”
“Why?”
“They kept touching my hair.”
I suppress my amusement. The more she speaks, the more impossible she becomes to dismiss. I find myself seized by the ridiculous urge to know what she looked like as a child.
She shrugs, but there is nothing careless in it. “And because I had too much anger for a girl, according to people who felt entitled to measure it. My parents disagreed. My yiayia disagreed louder.”
“Louder?”
Her dimples reappear. “She was the kind of woman who should’ve been a colonel, but was born into a village that thought a woman’s war began and ended in her kitchen. She heard I was fighting boys and said,‘Good. Now teach her how to win properly.’”
A guarded part of me softens with every tick of the clock.
“It started with my sister.” Yara fiddles with the hem of her sweatpants. “Althea. She’s younger than me. Just as hotheaded, but with zero stomach for violence. A bit like you.”
I give her a flat look.
Her mouth tilts. “One day, a boy cornered her behind the schoolyard and tried to make her kiss him. When she refused, he shoved her hard enough that she split her lip against the stone wall. I found her sitting there with blood on her shirt, trying not to cry because his mother had already told her boys only teased girls they liked.”
My teeth lock together, anger moving through me with frightening precision. For one second, I almost make peace with the violence I despise. I have a younger sister too. I would die before letting some worthless bastard put his hands on her.
“I found them because Althea and I have a telepathy no one in my family has managed to disprove. She needed me, and I knew.” Her fingers mimic asmall sprint across the air. “So I went.”
“What did you do?”
“What any devoted sister would do.” Her expression doesn’t waver. “I broke his fucking nose.”
