Leverage

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  It’s likely true. At least the man is learning.

  Winn continues, “And how long before someone else tries to use me as leverage against you two? Given the rate at which you two make friends, I’m going to guess on the order of days.”

  Puo and I don’t say anything to that. There may be the smallest mustard seed of truth there.

  Winn picks grapes off the vine and tosses them down onto his plate with small little thunks. He says quietly, “I have to leave.”

  Is that how he felt when he left the Seattle Isles?

  Winn stops picking grapes, wipes his hands off, and then turns around leaves without saying another word.

  Puo and I watch him go upstairs to brood in his room alone.

  Once Winn’s out of earshot I mutter, “McGuffin.”

  Puo says more seriously, staring at the stairs up to the bedrooms. “If ever there was a right time to talk to him. Now would be it.”

  * * *

  I hate it when Puo’s right.

  I woodenly finish my turkey and mustard sandwich, which tastes dry, and then head upstairs at Puo’s prodding.

  The stairs are flat and push up against the bottoms of my feet in a comforting way. Like they’re inviting me to stay and enjoy the entirely mundane sensation rather than go talk to Winn.

  I’m not sure what to expect. Now that the moment is almost here, the rage has fled and in its place is a stomach-curdling uncertainty. And we’re in the middle of pulling a heist on the Mounties.

  Is this really the time to do this? I need my head and psyche focused for what’s ahead. I slow on the stairs.

  “Go,” Puo says, still seated at the kitchen countertop below, watching me.

  I stare at Puo. Then I glance back at the bedrooms upstairs.

  I turn around and head back down into the kitchen. “We’re in the middle of something big,” I explain to Puo. “I don’t think this is the right time.”

  “No,” Puo says, “the right time was three days ago. Now it’s the only time.”

  I lean my head back at that revelation.

  “You’re right,” Puo continues. “We’re in the middle of something big. And it’s only going to move faster and get bigger before it’s over.” He pauses, looking like he’s searching for the right words. After a second he says, “Now is the time. If you’re going to do it, it has to be now.”

  What Puo didn’t say, but what he was likely thinking when he paused, was success is not guaranteed here. There might not be a chance to talk afterward depending on what happens.

  Damn. I exhale and nod at Puo. I turn around and stare at the stairs. Do I really want to know? Do I have to have this conversation?

  “Oh, for the love of Neptune, Isa,” Puo says exasperatedly. “Just go. For a woman who doesn’t take crap from anyone and leaps out of hovercars with thrusters attached to her legs to blast toward the ocean surface at inhuman speeds or onto other hovercars in midair, a conversation should not be that scary.”

  But you’ve never been in love, Puo. I give Puo a small smile and start moving, feeling like a ghost drifting up the stairs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I KNOCK ON Winn’s fogged-glass bedroom door with trepidation. The glass is cold, hard against my rapping knuckle. I shove my hands into my zippered sweater as I wait, my heart beating against my chest.

  A dark shadow looms and shifts on the other side of the door, coming closer until the door opens inward.

  Winn just stares at me, his hand still on the door handle. He’s removed his makeup; dark purple bruises cover his face. His black curly hair hangs down sulkily over his forehead and ears. He doesn’t say anything or move to let me in.

  “Puo thinks we should talk,” I say and instantly regret it.

  A dark annoyance flashes over Winn’s face.

  This was one of Winn’s complaints before he left: that Puo and I formed a singular unit that kept him on the outside. That I routinely sought Puo out first and made decisions based on that without bringing Winn in on the conversation.

  “Some things never change,” Winn says quietly and starts to close the door.

  I shove my foot in the crack and insist, “We need to talk.”

  “Why?” Winn asks venomously. “Why now? Everything always has to be on your terms. I wanted to talk back in the stairwell—”

  “You left, asshole!” I push myself into the room. “So you’re damn right it’s on my terms. I wasn’t ready to talk back in the stairwell, and I’m not ready to talk now. But this is it, Winn. If we don’t hash this out now, we might not get the chance again.”

  Winn backs away from the door and stares at me. His blue eyes are tight, luminous in the noontime sun filtering in through the wall of windows behind me.

  The door hits up against the doorstop and stays open as we stare at each other.

  Winn glances at the time and then crosses his arms across his chest. “So talk,” he says.

  Argh! I cast around and grab a pillow off his bed and chuck it at him as hard as I can. “You talk! You’re the one that left!”

  Winn deflects the pillow and shifts his body away from me, dropping his arms into a more defensive posture. He watches me like I’m a wild animal. “Take it easy!”

  “You take it easy! Why’d you leave?” I stand there, at the end of his bed, my chest rising and falling.

  “I—” Winn starts and then stops. He takes a deep breath and then walks over to the door. “Is it okay if I shut this?”

  “Yeah,” I say, like why the fuck are you asking me?

  “Well, you were just—” Winn motions to the pillow. He then shakes his head and says, “Never mind.”

  He shuts the door and then stays where he is, staring at the floor. He tries to start talking, pantomiming several times but never getting started. Eventually he rubs his hand through his hair and sighs heavily.

  “Why’d you leave?” I ask more calmly than I feel.

  He looks up at me, locks his gaze onto mine. He swallows, and then his face softens and he launches into it. “Isa, I never stopped ... caring about you—”

  My heart lurches in my chest. A buzz fills my ears. It’s like my body isn’t real all of a sudden.

  Winn continues, “—But it was too much for me. I’ve never felt this strongly ... and you were wrong—”

  I shift my stance and quirk my eyebrow at him calling me wrong. The feeling of déjà vu breaks the spell his words had begun casting over me—he had tried to say the same thing earlier down in the kitchen when we first rented the house.

  “—Back in the car after Puo and I picked you up from the hospital you said that being a part of the team didn’t mean anything to me. You were wrong. It meant too much to me. You mean too much to me ....” Winn trails off here, searching for more words.

  The silence presses down on me. I can hear my heartbeat pulsing against my eardrums.

  Winn continues, “Look, Puo’s face is burned into my memory after Colvin’s goon shot the wall four inches to the left of his head. Your face from that moment is scorched in my memory—”

  “And then I chose you to stay behind,” I say. And Winn’s face from when I made that choice is burned into my memory. Colvin forced me to choose between Winn and Puo on who would remain behind, their life as collateral, and I chose Winn. Winn looked resigned when I made that choice, distant as if he knew I would choose him to stay behind. He wouldn’t even look at me as I left with Puo.

  Winn stops and then nods slowly. “Yeah. You did. But that’s when I realized how it’s always going to be.”

  “I had to choose Puo,” I say quietly. “He was our best chance of surviving.”

  “Exactly,” Winn says. “It’s not that you chose him that affected me. It was that these dangerous situations happen and will continue to happen all too frequently.” Winn stops again. He breaks his gaze, studying the bedspread to the left of me. “I just—”

  Winn cuts off and swallows. He pushes at the corners of his eyes, then continues
not looking at me, “I love you too much to watch you get killed, Isa. I can’t do it. And then in Colvin’s library watching Hayes and Squeeze—”

  “I know,” I say, and take an instinctual step toward him.

  Winn takes a shuddering breath and presses more vigorously at his eyes.

  Oh, hell. His stupid weepiness is starting to affect me.

  We both collect ourselves while not staring at each other. Then Winn asks, “You said you loved me that night. Did you mean it?”

  “What do you think?” I ask breathlessly.

  Winn considers the question and then answers, “I think you did. But just as you need closure, so do I. It’d be nice to know—”

  “I meant it,” I cut in. Then more softly I add, “It’s the only time I’ve ever meant it.”

  Winn breathes, and then says shaking his head, “I can’t give you a rational explanation. That night, as we lay in bed together after you told me you loved me, I just couldn’t stop thinking about Hayes and Squeeze. And about the bullet hole four inches to the left of Puo’s head. I just couldn’t stop following things through to their natural conclusions: being killed or ending up in jail.” Winn stops again before picking it back up and saying softly, “I didn’t think I could emotionally survive that. That’s why I left.”

  I don’t respond right away. Instead I stare at him, study him. It makes a twisted kind of sense. It’s at least consistent with his personality type.

  Winn never could shut off his brain and enjoy the moment, always thinking about the future, where things were going. It’s not a problem I particularly share. When you’ve already outlived your life expectancy, worrying about a future decades later seems pointless.

  But the more I think about his explanation, the more that rage from before comes slinking back in. “So,” I say, “to recap, you left because you loved me too much.”

  Winn finally looks up at me. “Yeah.”

  “Lame,” I pronounce judgment.

  “I didn’t say it was rational—”

  “So you left without telling me?” I ask, anger creeping into my voice. “Did you ever realize how much that would hurt me? How I would be left to wonder—?”

  “But it would be survivable,” Winn says.

  “Survivable!” I shout at him. “And telling me all this before you left wouldn’t have been?”

  Winn moves and sits down on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, resting his head in his hands. “I’m sorry.”

  I grab another pillow and whack him on the back of the head. “You’re sorry?”

  Winn nods and doesn’t take any steps to protect himself as I continue to beat him with the pillow. Winn says something that I can’t hear over the sound of the pillow smacking against him.

  “What?” I ask.

  “How do you deal with it?” Winn asks. “Not getting sick to your stomach about us getting killed or arrested?”

  I stop hitting him with the pillow and think about it. “I don’t know. I just don’t think about it. What other options are there? Go straight? That was never even an option until we got these stupid modified citizen chips, and even then our debt was so big from buying them that going straight would’ve meant never paying them off and having a loan shark coming after us.”

  Winn leans back on the bed propping himself up and watches me.

  “We are what we are, Winn,” I finish with. Even if I could go straight, I’m not sure I would survive that.

  Winn appears to consider my statement, still propping himself up.

  I’m suddenly aware of how close he is. I could reach out and touch him, push back his hair away from his cuts and bruises, feel his short curly black hair ruffling between my fingers. His thick shoulders push up from the charcoal sweater he’s wearing, looking just as lean and muscled as I remembered them.

  I shake off the uncomfortable feeling—it’d be a stupid thing to do right now, to reach out and touch him. I know this. I feel this. But I’m annoyed with myself that I’m tempted anyway.

  I drop the pillow I’m holding and tuck my hands under my arms. “Puo says you want to come back. Is that true?”

  Winn exhales out his nose and then says softly, not looking at me, “I don’t know.” He shifts to sitting forward, the sheets on the bed rustling from his movement. “I don’t know what I want anymore. I do know—” He twists to look at me. “—That being with you is infinitely better than being without you.”

  My stomach churns at his blue eyes looking at me like that. I break his gaze and look away, thinking about what I want, whether I want him back on the team or in my bed, which are mutually exclusive roles—or, at least, they should be.

  “You left, Winn,” I say, starting to think out loud. “You left. I’m not sure you can begin to understand how big a deal that is. At the end of the day, I know no matter what happens Puo will be there. Puo will come for me. It doesn’t matter how bad it is, how impossible the situation, how fucked we are. Puo will come, and I will come for Puo. Absolute trust allows us to act with impunity knowing the safety net is there. You destroyed that between us.”

  “I made a mistake—” Winn starts to say.

  “A big fucking mistake,” I say, getting angry again. “Hard to imagine a worse one to make.”

  Winn sits there, staring at the floor, his face, his body still. The silence in the room is loud, the scraping of Puo pushing his chair back in the kitchen echoes into the room.

  The long seconds stretch on, but still Winn doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything.

  I want to scream say something! at him, but I don’t. The urge to scream at him makes me wonder, what do I want him to say anyway? What could he say?

  Nothing.

  I take a deep breath and move toward the door. “I have to get ready. Stay here, keep an eye on Puo, and make your own preparations.”

  Winn continues to sit there. He nods without looking at me and shifts back to holding his head in his hands.

  I leave without him saying anything to me—a silent, heavy exit.

  There may be nothing he could say to me right now to make me feel better. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t want him to try.

  * * *

  I run into Puo on the stairs on my way down to the kitchen. He turns wordlessly around when he sees me to head downstairs for us to talk.

  I glance back at Winn’s closed fogged-glass door. The looming shadow beyond still sits on the edge of the bed. I see the crack underneath the door that would betray me calling out to Puo.

  I skip forward and tap Puo on the shoulder and raise my finger to my lips to be quiet. Then I motion for Puo to follow me and we head back up the stairs toward my bedroom. There’s less of a chance of Winn disturbing us there.

  Puo’s bedroom is between Winn’s and mine, and I ease Puo’s bedroom door shut as we pass. The rational part of my brain is wondering why I’m going through all this trouble to try to hide my talking with Puo, while the rest of my brain is too busy trying to process everything that just happened with Winn.

  My bedroom is at the front of the floating house and faces over the water. The outside walls of the bedroom are all glass, letting in the natural noontime light. The bay water is moderately rough, scattering the sun’s cold reflection of the water into a diffuse light show, tracing its way across the minimalist ceiling.

  Puo closes the bedroom door behind him as I duck into the bathroom and grab a soft taupe towel. I come back to the door and throw the towel under the crack to try to muffle our conversation. Then I pull Puo deeper into the bedroom near the front windows looking down on the water in front of the house.

  Puo asks in a low voice, “Did you talk to him?”

  I nod my head yes, still trying to process everything.

  “How’d it go?” Puo asks.

  I rack my brain for something to say, but just end up exhaling in exasperation instead. But before Puo can ask me something else, I cut in and ask him, “Do you really think he wants to come back?” I unintentionally glanc
e at the drawer that holds the caduceus-pendant digi-scrambler.

  “Yeah,” Puo says simply. “I’m not sure he knows it yet. But, yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he can’t keep his eyes off of me.”

  I snort weakly. “You should ask for him for a medical sponge bath.”

  “Mmmm.” Puo leans his head back in thought.

  The water isn’t as rough immediately in front of the house; the surface is calm enough to see down to the bottom where an old, silt-covered road cut through before the mega-quake reshaped everything.

  “Winn doesn’t know either,” I say. “He admitted as much when I asked him.”

  “Do you want him to come back?” Puo asks me.

  That gets my attention. It’s what I’ve been thinking about this whole time without knowing that’s what I was thinking about. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I could ever truly trust him again.”

  Puo’s quiet as he considers this and then says, “Do you remember the story about the horn-spotted cotton-tailed cat?”

  “Yes,” I say, a smile ghosting my face at the memory. It was one of Puo’s absurd stories he told me after Winn and I first started fighting about his existentialist crisis back in the Seattle Isles.

  “Oh,” Puo looks a little disappointed at not having to tell it to me again. “Well the point still stands here.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “What’s that?”

  “Winn’s a different breed of human than we are,” Puo explains. “In the Laci world, they don’t have the same dynamics of stick-together-or-perish that we do. For all the virtues of the Laci world, they’re not as close as we are. They don’t have to be.”

  There’s truth in what Puo says. But that doesn’t make Winn’s leaving any less painful. “He still shouldn’t have left.”

  “No, he shouldn’t have,” Puo agrees. “But I think he realizes his mistake—”

  “He said he left because he loved me too much. Was that his mistake?”