Page 51 of Iridescent
I find myself wondering how long she has been away from home, but I don’t press.
She comes from people who clearly loved without rationing it. I can hear it in the way she speaks of them, in the easy generosity of her laughter, in the casual way she offers pieces of herself without seeming afraid someone will use them badly.
I listen with excessive concentration, despite the fact that my focus has never required supervision.
Everything she loves seems to exist in direct opposition to the career she has chosen. It makes me wonder if her head is just as loud as mine, and the punching bag is simply where she puts the noise.
Over the next hour, my silence suffers a slow death.
Somewhere between the empty bowls, the music trickling from the speaker, and the two of us turning our chairs toward the rain-streaked glass, I start answering questions I never intended to answer.
Favorite color? Easy. One look at her eyes, and I knew. Likes and dislikes.How much sleep I get. Whether I learn faster through demonstration or repetition, until the movement finally submits to muscle memory. Which environments make me sharper. Which ones make me shut down.
I spare her the architecture of my childhood, though. All it would invite is pity, and I have no appetite for it. Besides, the way she studies me suggests she already knows there is more I am not saying.
I realize too late that she has been quiet for several minutes, and I am the one blabbering.
It must be the coziness of it all that dismantles my defenses. The ramen. The rain. Her bare foot tucked beneath her on the chair. The gratified softness in her expression every time I give her something honest.
The regret should come immediately.
It doesn’t.
Not when she looks at me that way—pleased, attentive, and entirely devoid of pity.
Perhaps this was temporary. Her curiosity would burn bright for a while, then gutter out the moment I became more trouble than novelty. It had happened before. Yet some treacherous instinct in me believed Yara wouldn’t leave easily, and the possibility frightened me far more than abandonment ever had.
“You hate it,” she observes, inclining her head toward me.
We sit side by side now, so close I’m compelled to maintain a careful distance from her bare shoulder—a ludicrous precaution after almost an hour of her hands correcting my body.
“Ramen?”
“Boxing.”
The answer should be easy.Yes. Obviously.I hate the way my body knew fear before it knew anything else, and I hate that she saw it within an hour of meeting me.
Instead, I say, “I dislike inefficient violence.”
Her mouth curves. “That is such an expensive way to avoid saying yes.”
“I’m not avoiding anything.”
“You are. Badly.” She absorbs the glare I level at her without so much as ablink. “You think boxing is about hurting someone.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.” A rush of air exhales from the vents, snuffing the candles one by one until moonlight becomes the only source of light, rendering Yara almost mythic. “Hurting someone is easy. Any idiot with a fist can manage that. Boxing is about not panicking when someone tries to hurt you back.”
I look down at my hands.How can I not panic?
Yara keeps going, answering the question I can’t force past my teeth. “It is breath. Balance. Timing. Knowing where your body is when fear tells it to disappear. Knowing how to stay inside yourself when every instinct says leave.”
My throat tightens around nothing. “That sounds rehearsed.”
“It is.” Her smile turns crooked. “I tell it to every man who walks in here thinking power lives in his shoulders.”
“And where does it live?”
