Page 35 of Redline Baby

Not enough hours to justify keeping me on past the season, he says. Nothing personal. Just numbers. Here's your last check, and good luck out there.

He says good luck out there like I'm setting off on some kind of adventure and not standing in a stockroom being told I no longer have a job.

I don't argue.

There's nothing to argue with.

He's not wrong, and he's not being cruel about it, and somehow that's worse. There's no target for the anger, nowhere to point it except at myself, at the last six months of thinning hours I'd been pretending not to notice, at a life that keeps quietly shrinking without asking my permission first.

I don't tell anyone.

I go home, and I sit on the edge of my bed for a while, not doing anything at all, and by the time evening rolls around, I've decided the only thing to do with the feeling is bury it under enough noise that I can't hear it anymore.

I don't know how I'm going to make rent.

My parents certainly won't help.

But I'll think about that later.

I'm still carrying it when I walk into Redline that night, and it takes about four minutes for my eyes to do the automatic sweep toward the back corner.

There they are.

Charles and John.

Except tonight, John's got a small, plain engagement ring on his left hand, holding it up for Anya and Dee to coo over, and Charles is sitting there with his arm around John's shoulders, looking like a man whose whole life is exactly where it's supposed to be.

I don't say anything. I just feel the floor tilt a little further than it already had all day.

I order a drink. And somewhere in the next hour, I've climbed all the way back up onto the loud, bright, performing version of myself I thought I'd mostly put down these last six weeks.

"—and I told him, if you're gonna low-side in front of God and everybody, at least do it with some style," I say, too loud, gesturing wide enough that my glass sloshes over Dex's knuckles. "Man went down like a sack of wet cement. Zero flair. I was embarrassed for him."

Dex laughs. Ni doesn't. Not really.

He's watching me.

I feel Soren settling in the air beside me, and he doesn't say anything at first. He just takes the stool next to mine and lets me keep talking.

Keep performing. Keep pouring my voice into every open space in the room like it's the only thing holding the walls up.

It's another ten minutes before he says anything at all.

"Kit."

Just my name, quiet, under the noise.

I don't stop talking right away. I'm mid-story, something about a track day, something that isn't even funny, but he waits, patient the way he always is, until I run out of momentum and have to actually look at him.

"What?"

I know I sound harsher than I intend.

"I know this isn't you," he says. "I've known the actual you for six weeks now. I know what it sounds like when you're not doing this. Your friends know it too."

His eyes stay on mine.

"Stop."