The Darkest Joy by Marata Eros

in brusque dismissal. I’ve not had much fear in my life. I’ll take the swell, the weather . . . beating a two-hundred-pound halibut that wanted to break my leg with its tail.
    I’d never felt anxiety of this variety.
    The woman variety. It’s a singular flavor of oh shit that I don’t want to taste.
    Brooke stands and puts her hand out and I break into a cold sweat. I want to touch her again .
    Haul her against me and never let go.
    The watery memory of her floating below me in the sea rises to the surface of my mind. I blink the visual away, trying to grip the reality before me.
    What scares me the most is I want to wipe away that despondent edge she wears like clothes in the wrong size. I want it gone.
    Instead I take her hand in mine, and that zing like a conduit buzz of electricity goes off between us.
    I shift subtly. My body’s such a traitor.
    She keeps it together, but I can’t. Won’t.
    “Feel that?” I say, calling it out, the zing.
    “Yeah,” she admits in a tentative whisper.
    “What do you think it means?” I ask, wanting to kick my own ass for posing the question.
    Brooke gives a sad little lift of her lips and answers as she turns for the door, “Something I don’t deserve.”
    Well fuck me if that’s not a sucker punch. I feel it like she just struck me in the bread basket. Her words are the weapon.
    I feel like a dick as Brooke makes her way to the door, herfingers trembling slightly as she twists the knob and closes the solid spruce behind her.
    I want to kick the thing. I want to go after her.
    Tell her how I feel.
    Trouble is, I don’t fucking know myself.
Brooke
    I practically run to escape that office . . . my embarrassment.
    I veer, taking a sharp right and racing across the busy road, dodging tourists, fishermen. My bright bus stands in the empty lot of the Salty Dawg.
    I tear the door open and slide inside, taking great swooping breaths of old car mixed with the sea. The side window, like a pie wedge of glass, was left open and the misty filter of sea air drifts through. The salt of my tears is masked by the thickness of the air, the two mingle like coconspirators.
    I can’t do it.
    You will do it , my mind whispers. That tenacious form of self-preservation will stubbornly not be put to rest.
    I place my forehead on the steering column. My mind turns over the last twenty-four hours. I need to come to some kind of decision. I can’t continue inside this excruciating limbo. Either I choose life and live as my family would want or I throw in the towel.
    I need to learn to love another human being again, though the threat of their death hangs over me like a noxious cloud, smothering my intent.
    I have to make the decision to move on.
    My tears fall to my jeans, forming dark splotches, speckling the denim with my indecision.
    My phone buzzes in my pocket and I lift my head off the wheel, digging in my jeans to retrieve it.
    Decatur Clearwater .
    A little icon flashes with the ringing—FBI logo. I exhale somewhere between a huff and a rush.
    My finger hovers, then I lightly brush over the icon.
    “Hello,” I say.
    “Miss Starr.”
    Oh my God , that voice. The memories threaten, triggered. They push to get in, demanding to be seen. I shove them away. A light sweat coats my body instantly.
    Panic attack .
    “Miss Starr?” Concern radiates from his voice, that light accent he has threading through the vowels in my name, and I swallow.
    I can do this . I breathe in deeply and exhale slowly.
    “Hi.” Start simply, work from there.
    “Thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you for almost a week . . .”
    I don’t respond. There’s no lie that will sound like the truth.
    He ignores my silence, moving forward. “There’s been . . . another murder.”
    “I know.”
    A pause. “Okay. I’m certain this is difficult to hear about and I’m not calling to hash through it and drag you through things that are painful.”
    Then why are you calling? “Okay,” I reply