Sacha fished in his pocket for his keys. Jonah propped his shoulder on the wall, watching him.
“Can I ask you something?” he said suddenly.
Sacha nodded. “Of course.”
“How did your mum die?”
“That is what you want to ask me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Sacha let go of his keys and moved away from the door. Jonah followed, until they were in the alleyway beside his building that led to the bin yard.
He’d had worse conversations in far nicer places. “My mother died in a car accident. It was icy. She came off the road on a Saturday afternoon and hit a tree.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine.”
“So you remember her, then?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t like your dad?”
“No.”
Jonah nodded slowly, like a man connecting dots Sacha couldn’t see.
Stop.Please.But the words didn’t solidify. They stayed inside, unsaid, like everything else.
Jonah straightened and moved his shopping bags from one hand to the other. He rummaged in one, and came up with a tiny, Christmas-patterned gift bag. “I got this for you. I don’t know why, unless you want to call it a non-friendship bracelet. Or you can re-gift it to someone you actually like—”
“I do like you. That is—”
“Shh.” Jonah silenced Sacha with a soft finger to his lips. “I saw it and thought of you. I don’t care what you do with it or why. I’ll see you tomorrow, atwork, okay?”
Sacha opened his mouth, but Jonah left without waiting for an answer, ducking out of the alley and striding away, his auburn hair a beacon among the city crowds. Sacha drifted a few steps behind him, watching him disappear until he remembered the bag in his hand.
He took it inside and left his shoes and coat on the floor of the hallway, trashing the efforts he’d made to tidy the place up. On the couch, he set the bag on the coffee table and stared at it. Jonah had called it a non-friendship bracelet, but to Sacha, though he hadn’t even set eyes on it yet, it seemed like a live landmine. As if the moment he saw it, everything would irrevocably change.
“I don’t care what you do with it or why.”
Jonah was no liar, but Sacha didn’t believe him.
He didn’t even want to.
With a shaky hand, he reached for the bag and opened it. Inside, he found a leather bracelet. It was charcoal grey, and a tiny silver charm in the shape of ayolkawas woven into the simple braid.
Sacha held it up to the light, twisting it this way and that. The silver charm caught the light of the midday sun, like everything else he’d come across today had seemed to do. It was no match for Jonah’s copper hair, but it enchanted Sacha all the same.
He’d never worn a bracelet. He stretched out his right arm and tied the leather around his wrist with his left hand and his teeth. The dark leather looked good against his skin.
It felt even better.