Rogue Oracle by Alayna Williams Page B

humor.
    “He also sent me a banana hammock as a housewarming gift.”
    Tara blinked. “He sent you a what ?” Perhaps Harry had been having more of a wild time in DC than the solitary coffee mug suggested.
    Harry plucked an item off the counter to show her, a sheepish expression on his face. It was a C-shaped device on a wooden base with a hook at the terminus of the C. “You hang a bunch of bananas on it to keep ’em from bruising. Pops calls it a banana hammock.”
    Tara laughed out loud. It felt good to be in the small, warm circle of light in Harry’s modest kitchen, with the cat clicking time over them. It felt almost like the way things had been, months ago. “I can honestly say that I’ve never seen a banana hammock before,” she kidded him, with an arch glance.
    “Pops will be thrilled.”
    Harry brought her suitcase to the only bedroom, set it on the bed. Tara followed with her hands clasped behind her back, but her heart thudded under her tongue. Harry stepped away, hands in his pockets, jingling the change in them nervously.
    “I’ll take the couch. Make yourself comfortable, and uh … let me know if you need anything.”
    Tara nodded, swallowed, smiled. “Thanks.” But she wanted to say: It’s okay. You don’t have to sleep on the couch.
    Harry closed the door behind him, leaving her alone. Again. She sighed, turning back to her suitcase. She unzipped it and began pulling out her clothes. She opened Harry’s closet to hang her suits, and noticed a hole in the wall beside the closet.
    She frowned, running her fingers over the chalky dent. It was at her shoulder level, the perfect crater of a fist. She wondered at it, worried at the kind of stress Harry was under that would drive him to take it out on his walls. She’d never known Harry to be needlessly violent. That … that was out of character for him. Was Special Projects devouring him, causing stress fractures in his personality as it gnawed through him? She would hate to see it chew Harry up and spit him out, as it had done with her.
    She turned her attention back to the closet. Harry’s closet was nearly bare. His suits and shirts hung on the left side, shoes lined up below. Tara hung her clothes beside his, but gave them a respectful distance, so they weren’t touching. She turned on her heel, taking in the sparse room. Some part of her wondered if Harry always slept in his bed alone. The boxes stacked in the corner made her wonder if the memory of her was packed away with the rest of his past, not urgent enough to unpack in the present. If there was someone else, she didn’t really blame him. And she didn’t really want to know.
    She took off her watch and placed it on a dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room. Even the bedside lamp sat on the floor. Aside from the kitchen implements, Harry’s dresser was the only other place in the apartment that showed any evidence of his personality. A glass peanut butter jar held coins, probably dug out of his pockets at the end of the day. A framed picture beside it showed Harry and his adoptive father, Martin, holding fishing poles. On the mirror above the dresser was tacked a scrap of paper. Tara reached for it, and her heart skipped.
    It was a Tarot card, Strength. Ragged and torn, it depicted a woman holding closed the jaws of a lion. It was Tara’s card, from the deck she’d inherited from her mother, long ago. The deck had been destroyed, and this had been the only part of it that remained. Tara fingered the grimy, faded inks. It still smelled like earth, where Harry had found it, months before.
    A smile touched her lips, and some of the tension drained out of her shoulders. She knew that Harry had not forgotten her.
    She undressed quickly, averting her eyes from the mirror. A Jack Frost pattern of white scars crossed down her throat, over her abdomen, ending over her right hip. Stipples of scars puckered over her right arm, under her left breast, and onto one thigh. Gifts