Especially at Halcyore’s. She’d been telling the truth about all of it, and I threw it back in her face.
“Why’d you yell at her?” Ryan knocked me from my thoughts.
Another cigarette. This was definitely a multiple cigarette conversation. “I wouldn’t be good in a relationship. Too much like my dad.”
Ryan left me hanging. Again. More, he basically dropped me entirely, and I had to fall into that awkward embarrassment panic spiral in silence.
“How are you like your dad?”
Ryan didn’t usually ask such dumb questions. “I drink too much.”
He shrugged. “So does everybody in the Back 40. What else?”
“I’m mad all the time. And I yell. And I can’t guarantee that I won’t do more than yelling if I had a partner.”
He was thinking through an engineering question again, as if what I’d said was so difficult to understand. He, more than anyone, knew what I was like.
“You don’t yell at me.”
“Sure I do.”
“When?”
Right fucking now I was yelling in my head. All the rage and embarrassment and the need to grasp onto some ounce of self-respect by taking it away from somebody else. This was real, and it was in my head all the time.
But did I actually do it? Yelling in my head, sure, but I wasn’t actually yelling. Had I ever yell at Ryan? Surely I had. He’d made me incredibly angry. That one time—the only time—he’d come home drunk and staggered into a customer’s Wheeler 409x, ruining the job. I was pissed then. Or that time he kept grabbing the clothes I threw on the floor and piling them on top of my work bench. That was infuriating.
But I hadn’t yelled at him.
Had I ever yelled at Ryan?
“I think you see yourself as worse than you are.” Ryan fidgeted with the foil on the cigarette pack. “You know I’d leave if you were a shit to me.”
He would. I’d said as much, myself. He wasn’t my son. He could leave anytime he wanted. But he didn’t want to.
“I stay because you’re good to me.”
Something in me shattered, and I couldn’t look at him during it. Or no, nothing shattered. I’d thought I was broken, but maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was a person who came from a bad home and learned how to be better. Maybe my father hadn’t fucked me up. Maybe I wasn’t like him at all.
Except for the drinking. I did too much of that.
I swallowed the ache in my throat. “Doesn’t matter anyway.” I watched the flame on the cigarette burn down to the filter. No more cigarettes. “Myka’s a contract worker for Cadinoff. Even if I wanted, things could never go anywhere.” She was loyal to her company. That’s why I’d yelled at her.
“Yeah, that’s hard to get around, isn’t it?”
It was.
* * * *
I didn’t drink for the next week. I didn’t do much of anything except slouch on the sofa watching whatever was on the vidstream. Hour-long product sponsorships? Sure. How to bathe your dog? Please. Guy Who Eats Everything Part 2? Absolutely.
“Watching” was too strong a word for it. The vids played in the background while my brain worked in overdrive. Freeforming thoughts and feelings like I was doodling loopy circles on a blank art canvas. I turned over all the facts, considered hypotheticals, and played out so many scenarios. This process usually marked the start of a design, but there wasn’t an engine this time.
Well, I guess an engine was involved.
Ryan took over all the work in the garage. And though he kicked the sofa every time he walked by in protest, he still brought me food and water and took over the secretarial service. Basically, the kid was great. Full marks. Best apprentice ever.
I needed all my brainpower to figure out the key questions: How did I feel about Myka? What did I want to do about her?
These would have been easier to answer before that expo.
It was just one night of fun handcuff hijinks, and I knew very little about her besides that she can sing and she likes puppies. That all being said, I had felt comfortable with her once we both let down our guard. When we worked together to make an impossible jump or to scale yet another flight of stairs, I felt like I had a full partner and it felt good. She was fun to be with, and her voice when she sang nuzzled in my head like a warm blanket. The way she swapped out impractical heels for athletic shoes but still wore a short skirt, the way she eagerly asked for puppies at the photo studio, the way she rescued us from the Cadinoff mercs outside of Halcyore’s. Oh, and I could never forget her three-word humiliation of Benjamin Brassard.
Fine. I liked her.
I had no clue what to do with that. Relationships were foreign territory. A relationship with a person beholden to a corporation that had fucked me over? That was a non-starter, right? Besides, even if Myka wanted to leave Cadinoff, she’d need a modest gold mine to pay off her debt. It wasn’t like I had any gold mines.
Maybe this couldn’t go anywhere. It was just a thing that happened that was over before it started. Maybe I should be okay with it and move on with my consolation prize: the engine design I’d spent my entire life working on.
It was around this “let it go” point when Jagcoop arrived at the door. The vidstream played an episode of Earth or What? where a woman argued with the appraiser about the giant poodle statue sitting in one of her living rooms.
I hadn’t even heard him come in, but he approached while running a hand through his peach
