Page 24 of Redline Baby

My voice comes out scraped thin.

"Got... distracted."

"You're shaking."

I look down at my own hand.

I am.

A fine, involuntary tremor runs the length of my arm, right where his fingers are still curled loosely around my wrist, like the shaking is trying to answer some question his hand asked without meaning to.

"I'm fine," I say.

And I hear it the second it leaves my mouth.

Hear the exact words.

The exact flat, bright, brittle tone.

And something about hearing my own voice say the sentence that ended everything makes my throat close so hard and so fast I have to turn my face away from him.

He doesn't ask what happened.

He doesn't do the thing where he says you sure? in the voice people use when they already know you're lying and want you to say so out loud.

He slides his hand slowly off my wrist until it isn't holding anything anymore, then leaves it open against my palm.

An offer instead of a grip.

Waiting to see what I do with it.

I don't know what I do with it.

I think I just stand there, surrounded by ugly carpet and the smell of shoe spray, an unthrown bowling ball a dead weight in my other hand.

"You don't have to tell me anything," Soren says, quiet, even, close but not crowding me.

"There's nothing to say," I say, and it comes out wet, and I hate it.

I hate every second of the last minute.

Hate that a bowling ball and somebody's hand around my wrist managed to do what nothing else has done in eight months: crack me open in the middle of a Wednesday night, in public, without my permission.

"Okay," he says.

Just that.

He just stands there, solid, patient, like he's got nowhere else in the world he'd rather be standing than three feet behind me at lane six, watching me almost come apart over nothing.

I don't cry. Not really.

My eyes go hot, my throat stays tight, one single tear gets as far as my jaw before I scrub it off with the heel of my hand, furious at it.

"I think I'm done bowling," I say.

"Okay."

He doesn't push for more.