#javen

Jasper's car has a wide dent in the side and seems well-suited to its precarious parking space, tilted sideways on uneven ground. The land rises up past the train station in a steep incline, stacked with weary houses, tall and ornate but crumbling, one of them straight cracked down along its spine, threatening to spill back down toward the valley where the train tracks wind. The train itself is moving on now, horn blaring. Raven slips safely into the passenger seat and closes the door after her with a satisfying thud.

"It's not much," Jasper says, as they start to drive. He might be talking about the car or about the apartment she hasn't seen, but most likely he means the city itself. Seen better days, as he puts it. Too many buildings a paled stone-brown, too many uneven hills, too many one way-streets. They sit in traffic a long time at a broken red light.

"It's fine," Raven answers, because it is: all fine. Somehow, it is what she's been looking for.

At the party when they first met, Jasper was doing shots at the bar. Raven remembers this as a sudden out-of-body moment, while standing on his doorstep, waiting for him to fish out his keys. She remembers him slamming the shot glass down and his eyes widening and how he'd shook his head back and forth, hard, and pretended to breathe fire; she remembers the exact moment when his gaze dipped down again and he ran his hand over the back of his neck, his fingers through his hair. The same gesture now, as he unlocks the door. His apartment is at the back of a subdivided former single-family home. Behind them, a restless garden grows, creeping up, vines and rampant summer grass, toward the porch.

"Do you want anything?" he asks. He throws his keys in a bowl by the door, then heads across the main room to the kitchen. Aside from the bowl by the door and the little table it sits on, a low couch, a bookshelf, a standing fan, and a tv, the apartment is unfurnished. Through a curtain, only mostly closed, she can see the space he's turned into his bedroom: a bit of shelving, a mattress on the floor.

In the kitchen, sticky linoleum bulges and warps. Jasper's standing at his fridge, pale face ghostly lit by fluorescent light. "I'll go shopping," he's saying. "For dinner. Or we could just go out. The only thing I have to drink is water—you want some?"

She is coated with drying, aged sweat, throat parched and desert-dry. "Sure," she answers, and catches the chilled bottle he tosses her.

Later, after dinner, at a little Chinese place they walked to in the drifting, soft-warm twilight, they sit on his mattress and drink sweet iced tea, and he tells her what she already guessed. That he's been sober now eighteen months, that this is his life, slowly rebuilt up from the ground. Raven knows something of how that is, partially from experience, partially from want.

"So you don't drink either," he says, almost a question, the lilt at the end too tentative.

She shakes her head.

This is who her mother could have been. She has never felt this soft of a feeling before, for her, warmer than sorrow, without the hint of anger that, even unnourished, continued to burn like an unending flame, a boundary between them, for years.

"Never have," she adds. "My mother drank. So."

"Smart of you," Jasper says, and twirls the plastic bottle around, and around, the liquid splashing up along the sides. He watches it. The window's open behind him, loud crickets from the garden and the occasional rush of cars, night traffic on the street. "It's a bad road to go down. What I like now, what I try to do, even though it's the hardest thing, is to get out of my own self. To try to remember—what other people feel."

"Hard enough on a good day."