what the blood remember

Chapter Five: The Lime

It happened on a Friday, close to closing, the bar down to its last stubborn stragglers and Dev packing up his trumpet in its battered case by the door. Elijah was cutting limes for the well, a job he could do half-asleep after four years behind that particular bar, and he was not asleep, not even close — he was talking to Marcus, who'd taken his usual stool, about nothing important, about the trumpet and the heat and whether the Saints had any business hoping this season — when the knife skipped sideways off the lime's slick rind and opened a shallow line across the pad of his palm.

It wasn't much. A kitchen-cut, the kind he'd given himself a hundred times, more startling than dangerous, blood welling up quick and bright under the bar lights, bright enough against his skin that for a half-second he just stared at it with the mild, removed annoyance of a man who knew he'd have to finish his shift one-handed.

The air changed.

That was the only way Elijah could describe it after, to himself, lying awake trying to make sense of it — the air in that bar changed, went taut and electric, the way the air goes still and wrong right before a summer storm breaks, that particular held-breath quality that animals seem to feel before people do. The music from Dev's trumpet, still hanging in the room from the last set, seemed to Elijah's ringing ears to simply stop mattering. When he looked up from his hand, Marcus was not looking at him. Marcus was looking at the cut, and something had come into his face that Elijah had no name for and hoped, fervently, never to see again.

His eyes had gone darker, the brown swallowed by something wider and blacker, pupil bleeding out into iris until there was almost no brown left at all, and his hands, always so still, had gripped the edge of the bar hard enough that Elijah heard, actually heard, the wood groan in protest, a low complaining creak that no ordinary grip should have been able to produce. His jaw had tightened into something with more edges in it than a jaw should have. He did not look, in that moment, like a man Elijah knew. He looked like something wearing that man's face very carefully, and finding the fit, for the first time since Elijah had met him, difficult to maintain.

"Marcus?" Elijah's voice came out smaller than he wanted it to.

Marcus stood up so fast the stool rocked hard enough to nearly go over, caught himself against the bar rail with a hand that left a faint indentation in the old wood, four small dents where his fingers had been. "I have to go," he said, voice tight, strange, pitched somewhere Elijah hadn't heard it reach before, layered underneath with something that didn't sound entirely like a single voice at all. "I'm sorry. I have to go."

He was gone before Elijah could wrap a bar rag around his hand, gone so fast the door swung twice on its hinge before it settled, gone into the Frenchmen Street night without another word, without so much as a backward glance, and the sudden absence of him left the bar feeling larger and colder than it had any right to, given how little space one man's stillness had actually occupied.

Dev, watching from the doorway with his trumpet case in hand, lowered it slowly to the floor. "You alright?" he asked, quiet, careful, in a tone that had more real weight behind it than the question usually carried — not the automatic *you good?* of a coworker clocking a spill, but something closer to a man checking on someone who'd just had a near miss he didn't fully understand himself.

"Yeah," Elijah said, wrapping the cut in a bar rag with hands that weren't quite steady, though he wasn't sure that was true. "Yeah, I'm fine."

Dev hesitated at the door, trumpet case dangling from one hand, like there was something he wanted to say and had decided, at the last second, wasn't his to say. "He's a good man," he offered instead, which struck Elijah, turning it over later, as an odd thing to say in that particular moment — not *are you hurt* or *what just happened*, but a character reference, offered unprompted, from a twenty-two-year-old who called a virtual stranger "sir" and apparently knew things about him Elijah didn't.

Marcus did not call. Did not text. Did not appear the following Thursday, or the Thursday after that, and Elijah — who had spent three months filing wrongnesses away under *later* — found that *later* had arrived, uninvited, and brought with it four days of silence that felt less like absence and more like being underwater, everything muffled and slow and heavier than it should have been.

He went through the motions of those four days the way a person goes through motions when the real weight of their attention has moved somewhere else entirely. He taught his class — graded the last of the year's spelling tests, listened to Denise Arceneaux argue him into extra recess on a technicality, smiled at all the right places without quite feeling any of it land. He called his mother on Sunday and told her everything was fine when she asked, twice, whether something was wrong, because she could always hear it in his voice before he said a word. He worked his shift at the bar on Thursday with the empty stool at the far end sitting in the corner of his vision the entire night, and caught himself, more than once, glancing toward the door every time it opened, and feeling something in his chest drop a half-inch lower each time it wasn't Marcus walking through it.

He thought about the mirror. He thought about the untouched drinks, the cold hands, the boy who called a stranger "sir" like it was owed rather than offered. He thought about a decade-old suit and a comment about 1953 delivered flat as arithmetic. He thought, mostly, endlessly, about the look on Marcus's face when he'd seen the blood — not desire exactly, or not only desire, but a kind of desperate, starving reverence, the look of a man staring at the one thing in the world he wanted more than his own survival and hating himself, visibly, completely, for wanting it that badly.

He lay awake on the fourth night turning over every possible explanation his mind could produce, each one more strained than the last, and arrived finally at the one conclusion his grandmother's blood in him had been quietly building toward for months: that whatever Marcus was, it was not something easily explained away, and that the not-knowing had become, somewhere in the last four days, worse than whatever the knowing might turn out to cost him.

On the fifth day, there was a knock at his door.