Page 10 of Subduing the Shark

He stood up. Harold motioned for someone to clean up the mess then led him away from the main floor, down the hallway toward the private rooms. He opened the door to a small room with a couch and a table. Jack had delivered drinks to people in rooms like these but he'd never been inside one when it was empty. It was quiet with the door shut. Not pool-quiet, but close.

"Sit down if you want," Harold said.

Jack stayed standing. His arms were crossed tight against his chest, his fingers pressed into his own ribs hard enough that the bruise sang. Harold stayed by the door, giving him room. Not blocking the exit. Jack noticed that and put it away alongside the other things he'd noticed about Harold that didn't fit any pattern he recognized. The way Harold leaned rather than stood, like he was offering himself to the doorframe instead of guarding it. The brown eyes that watched Jack with focus but not hunger. Thehands that stayed visible, open, resting at his sides. In the shiver, a man Harold's size in a closed room with him meant one thing: pain. Harold was that size and in that room it meant something else entirely, and Jack's body didn't know what to do with the discrepancy.

"Talk to me about what happens when you go home at night," Harold said.

"No."

"The bruises are getting worse. You flinch when anyone touches your right side. You came in three nights ago with marks on your wrists that you tried to hide with your watch. And your fear scent when you leave this club at midnight is stronger than when you walk in at nine, which means whatever's here isn't what you're afraid of."

Jack's jaw clenched. "You don't know anything about my life."

"I know you're being hurt. Regularly. By people in your own house."

"It's not what you think it is."

Harold crossed his arms, mirroring Jack's posture. "Then tell me what it is."

The silence stretched between them. The muffled bass of the music rumbled through the walls, the distant clink of glasses. In there it was just the two of them and the thing Jack didn't want to explain to anyone who wasn't a shark.

"We fight," Jack eventually said, because talking about it would at least get him out of this room. "Every night. Someone picks you or you pick someone. You fight. If you lose, the winner does what they want to you. If you win, then you decide to do what you want to the person you beat. That's it. Can I go now?"

Harold was very still. "Does that include sex?"

Jack glared at him, not answering that question. Let Harold figure it out for himself if he thought he was so smart. "Can I go?" he asked again.

Harold pursed his lips. "What if you don't want to have sex with whoever you fought?"

Jack rolled his eyes. He was done with the conversation, with Harold, with the room. "You fight harder."

"What if you can't win?"

Jack shrugged. "Then you can't win. But you still fight. Not fighting is shameful. It means you've given up, and a shark who gives up gets thrown out of the shiver. Being alone is worse."

"Worse than being raped?"

The word landed in the room like a dropped blade. Jack's whole body flinched. No one had ever said it to him before. Not the shiver, not anyone, in his entire life. Hearing it out loud in Harold's flat, steady voice made it real in a way Jack had spent years refusing to let it be. Harold didn't rush past it. He stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, the word hanging between them, and he clearly meant to leave it there until Jack did something with it.

"It's not that," Jack said.

"A person fights you. You lose. That person has sex with you regardless of whether you want to. What word would you use?"

"It's our way. It's how sharks work."

"I didn't ask how sharks work. I asked what you'd call it if a stranger did the same thing to you on the street."

Jack started to push past him. He needed out of the room. He needed the club noise, the cleaning supplies, and the mindless rhythm of wiping tables. Harold caught his arm.

Jack reacted on instinct. He swung. Harold blocked the punch with his forearm and grabbed Jack's wrist, and Jack was fighting before his brain caught up to his body. Punching, kicking, trying to wrench free. He was fast but Harold wastrained. Years of police work, takedowns, suspects who fought harder than a malnourished shark in work shorts.

Harold got him on the ground face-first. One arm pinned behind his back, Harold's knee between his shoulder blades, the concrete cool against Jack's cheek. The position was textbook restraint. Clean, controlled, professional.

Jack went limp.

It happened the way it always happened. The switch flipped and his body surrendered. His breathing slowed. His muscles went soft. The trembling stopped. To anyone watching, it would have looked like calm. Harold's weight on his back, the arm locked behind him, the complete loss of control. Jack's body knew this drill. It had performed it hundreds of times. He lost the fight, he went still, he waited for what comes next.

Harold held the position for three seconds, then got off him. Fast, like he'd touched something hot. He backed up to the wall, his breathing, ragged and unsteady in a way that Jack's wasn't.