Free Robin and Ruby by K. M. Soehnlein

capable of, the harm he could cause. This knowledge of his capacity for violence is old and powerful; it runs through him in a line straighter than a sword. But he stops himself, because he sees the look on Peter’s face: mortified, disappointed, maybe even disgusted.
    “Why were you kissing him?” Robin asks.
    “Why are you even here?” Peter snarls.
    “He’s obviously stalking you,” Douglas says.
    Douglas, you’re scrawny and annoying, you have empty eyes and a weak chin. Peter will use you for as long as he wants, he’ll fuck you without a condom and blame you for it, then he’ll leave you for someone younger who looks just like you. He doesn’t say any of this. The words stay trapped in his throat.
    “George, do me a favor, talk some sense into him,” Peter says.
    “No one’s doing you any favors,” George says. Firmly, he takes Robin by the arm and says, “I don’t want to be here if the cops show up.”
    Robin nods. He understands.
     
    Driving away, Robin feels like they’re escaping the scene of a crime, like he’s in some movie where you yell to the taxi driver, “Just go!” without any sense of where to. They pass through a neighborhood Robin doesn’t know: unpopulated, vaguely industrial, marked by chain-link fences, heavy machinery, rubbish at the side of the road. He stares out the window into a desolate, inert night marked by the eerie glow of a rising full moon.
    “Did I just make an ass of myself?” Robin asks.
    “Now you know what kind of person Peter really is.”
    “But what if he wasn’t cheating on me, what if he just ran into this kid at the club and the kiss was some spontaneous—”
    “They were in his car,” George says. “They were at it. ”
    “So you don’t think I overreacted?”
    “You were in shock. That can make it difficult to control your impulses.”
    “Maybe.” But it doesn’t feel like shock as much as its opposite: not something unexpected, but something long dreaded, coming to pass. Earlier, at the Greek restaurant, Peter made it sound like he wanted to be with someone his own age. Robin knows why Peter lied, and this knowledge is the tip of something sharp poking his skin, jabbing and jabbing, drawing pinpricks of blood that Robin licks away but can not stanch. The rage that surfaced was bigger than simple anger at Peter and his boy toy. It was the fury Robin holds in check all the time, and has for years and years. He lets some out every now and then, throws something across the room, slams a door hard enough to jiggle the hinges. But not in public, not with his fists.
    George says, “The only other time I saw you lose it like that was a long time ago. After your brother died, after the funeral.”
    Robin looks at him. “Jackson’s funeral? You were there?”
    “Yeah, I was there!”
    “I don’t remember that day too well.”
    “I was hanging out with Ruby and some kids from school. We all saw it: You got in a fight with your cousin. You looked like you were gonna asphyxiate him.”
    Memories of Jackson’s funeral exist in fragments: a Catholic mass, a limousine ride to the cemetery, their house full of people, all those neighborhood women carrying covered dishes, his mother in an expensive black dress. And then, yes, fighting with obnoxious Cousin Larry on the roof outside Robin’s bedroom window. How did they wind up on the roof? How did Robin’s fingers wind up squeezing Larry’s neck? Or was it the other way around? Had it been Larry who was choking him? Robin holds some sensation in his body: his own breathing is too short, too shallow, his head is burning up…. For days after the funeral, Robin lay in bed with a fever that spiked so high it nearly put him in the hospital. The illness had the effect of erasing what happened, so that images of that day now rise up and veer off without warning, like bits of a dream, impossible to grasp. He can’t at all picture George there, though of course he would have been. A lot of kids from