She runs the silk between her fingers. "What's the difference?"
I step into the room.
"Will you let me show you?"
twenty-one
Angelina
"Yes."
The word leaves my mouth before I can second-guess it. Steadier than my hands feel, with my fingers curling against my thighs and pressing into fabric like I can anchor myself through cotton.
Cole doesn't move. Doesn't rush toward me or smile like he's won something. He just waits, letting the word settle between us like the evening light filtering through rice paper.
The red silk is still in my hands. I know what it is. What it means. I hold it out to him, and his fingers close around it without breaking eye contact.
The tatami is warm under my bare feet. Rushes and cedar. His practice space, with swords on the wall, a meditation cushion in the corner, the coils of rope I just touched.
"Where did you learn?" The question slices out of me with an edge I didn't plan, something hot and uncomfortable twisting in my chest at the realization that he picked this up in the years after us. "Not YouTube, I'm guessing."
"Japan station. Eighteen months." He turns the rope over in his hands, threading it between his fingers with slow, habitual movements. The way someone else might fidget with a pen.
Eighteen months in Japan. I do the math. He left twelve years ago. Ten years ago he was stationed there while I was…
"You had practice partners."
He doesn't flinch. "Technique requires practice."
"And they got what out of it?"
"What they needed." His voice flattens, like he's describing something tedious rather than intimate. "Release. An escape from their own heads for a few hours. Sometimes the pressure and vulnerability triggers an endorphin rush. Floaty, disconnected. Safe."
"And you?"
"Control." The rope keeps moving through his hands, loop after measured loop. "Making sure I'd never hurt someone who actually—" He stops.
Someone who actually what?
"Someone who mattered."
Part of me wants to push. Demand to know how many, who they were, what they looked like when he tied them. But the answer is already written in the difference between how he's looking at me and how he talked about them. Careful distance for them. Heat for me.
"You requested Japan specifically?"
He nods. "Language skills. Cultural knowledge. Useful for intelligence work."
The answer sounds rehearsed. I wait.
The rope goes still in his hands for the first time since he picked it up. "I thought my parents might... I thought if I was stationed there, maybe I could bridge the gap. Show them I hadn't abandoned everything Japanese to become American."
"Did it work?"
A long breath. "I was there eighteen months. Never called them once. Kept thinking I'd call when I had something to show for it. Some proof I'd made the right choice." He swallows. "The proof never came."
The cross-examiner in me wants to dig. But something in his face, an openness I've rarely seen, makes me hold back. I reach out and touch the rope where it rests in his hands. Not taking it. Just my fingers against the silk, against his knuckles. Grounding us both.
"That sounds lonely," I say instead.