Page 96 of Joker
“Hey,” she says, loosening her grip at once. “You okay?”
I nod too fast. “Yeah.”
Lie.
My pulse is suddenly too fast, too loud.
The room tilts a fraction. I need air.
I need—
Someone behind me laughs. Loud. Sharp. A man’s voice with a rough, amused edge that sounds just enough like Cal on the wrong night to send the next wave of panic straight through my chest.
My vision narrows. Not a full blackout. Not fainting. Just that awful tunnel where the world pulls too tight around the edges and all your senses start grabbing at the wrong things. Too much sound. Too much movement.
The song is still playing. The room is too warm. Somebody brushes too close at my back and my whole body locks.
Mac is saying something.
I can’t make out the words.
Emma turns toward me from across the room, her face sharpening.
I try to breathe and get half a breath before a drunk man stumbles sideways near the bar and ends up too close, one arm braced on the edge of the wall beside me as he catches himself.
He’s not touching me. Not really. But he corners the space for one second too long, his body angled wrong, his breath thick with beer, his grin vague and unfocused.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” he says.
Sweetheart.
The word alone is enough to turn my blood to ice.
I go still. Completely still. I know what this is now.
The spiral. The storm.
One trigger after another until your body stops recognizing what’s actually in front of it and starts reacting to every ghost at once.
The song.
The wrist.
The laugh.
The cornered space.
My heart is pounding so hard it hurts. I can’t feel my fingers. The room goes too bright and too far away at the same time.
And then Joker is there.
I don’t see him cross the room. I just know one second the drunk man is in front of me and the next he isn’t.
Joker steps between us with a speed so controlled it’s almost more frightening than violence would’ve been. One hand lands flat on the other man’s chest and shoves him back hard enough to make the barstool behind him scrape.
Not wild. Not messy.
Lethal.
