As You Awaken

3. Rebel Without A Cause

"Kenza, that was phenomenal. My phone hasn't stopped buzzing since you stepped off the platform." Ari's voice sliced through the fog of her confusion. Noa touched Kenza's elbow, and subtly stepped in front of her to brace against Ari's march towards them. 

"Agent Blain," Ari acknowledged him with a nod, his discomfort only showing in a barely perceptible twitch of his brow before he turned back to Kenza. "MSNBC wants to do a sitdown. I just need to see some polls before we take off with this. Are you okay? You look like you have seen a ghost."

Kenza's ears were ringing. She was still where they had been a few steps before, trying to blink away the image of the words on Noa's screen. Not an accident. Not an accident.
She blinked, and Ari's brows furrowed together to feign concern, finally picking up on the tension. "Oh. That was insensitive. It has been a difficult night - "
"I have to escort Miss Saliba to her vehicle," Noa interrupted, and began forging forward, making way for Kenza to bypass Ari.

She took a deep inhale of the cool air outside the hospital, and stopped before climbing into the backseat of the black SUV. Noa held the door open, and she searched his eyes for a glimmer of anything. Apprehension. Fear. The certainty that things were beyond his control. She found none of that, only a resolve to keep her safe. 

She shot her arm out to stop the door before it swung shut. "Noa, what the fuck is going on?"
"Not here," he responded calmly, but the warning left a chill under her skin.

She watched his eyes in the rearview mirror as he took a less familiar route, making more turns to weed out anyone on their tail. As she settled back into her seat, Kenza could still see the tip of the obelisk at the Washington Memorial. She watched people at a crosswalk, and wondered what it would be like to be one of those pedestrians, an outsider experiencing this town like a tourist still enamored by its institutions and the symbology of it all. Where they saw grandeur, she saw flagrant hypocrisy. Where they paid respects to a sanitized history, she saw the roots of corruption through the cracks in the marble.

Noa stopped in front of the glass building on Jefferson Place, and spoke into his wrist.
"Keystone is secure. I'm signing off."

This was normal protocol for her arrival at her apartment, but Agent Blain had been deviating from normal protocol all night. He waited a moment, and then turned back onto the street. He drove a few miles further north, through a park that insulated a quiet neighborhood from the bustle of the city. Kenza didn't recognize the townhome he parked in front of. Federal style, worn red brick, picturesque and framed by a white oak that had seen a hundred seasons.

She only realized where she was when she stepped inside, and it smelled like him. Fresh vetiver, and a spiced cashmeran, mixed into the aged woods of the house.
She hadn't really imagined it before, what Noa did when he left her place for the night; where he woke up when he wasn't welcome in her bed.
Some lights came on, and she shrugged her jacket off. She felt it fall out of her hands and into his.
"I'll be right back," Noa said as he ducked into the kitchen to click a kettle on before jogging up the stairs.
The rumble of the water working up to a boil softened the silence in the living room. It was decidedly contemporary, but grounded with the rich woods and original architecture of the house. The creakiness of the floorboards underneath the silk Oriental rug, the dark blue velvet couch, and the Japanese-style low coffee table. The story became more cohesive as she approached the library bookshelf built into the wall spanning the entire room.
Her eyes scanned over the small collection of vinyl, and the clusters of souvenirs, and stopped where her curiosity was captured - the books with broken-in spines, the ones that looked like they had seen some company in the hands of a bibliophile. She read the titles closest to her, and stifled an amused chuckle. Fanon. Walter Rodney. Marx. A Biography of Fred Hampton. Joan Didion. There was a break in the middle - a framed photo of a young boy sitting on his father's shoulders, showing off a gummy smile. She reached out to touch it with a delicate hand, and then pulled back when she heard footsteps shuffling back down the stairs.

Noa had slipped out of his suit, and was dressed down in a crisp white t-shirt and black sweatpants. She had only seen him two other ways before, in a suit, or naked.

She lowered herself into the couch while he prepared a cup of soothing peppermint tea in the kitchen. He placed the steaming mug in her hands, and sat facing her at the edge of the coffee table.
"There's an internal investigation ongoing," he broke the news without padding it first, the only way he knew how. "The car that ran the red light at the intersection and collided with your mother's vehicle - they believe it was deliberate. The driver was stationed around the corner waiting for the motorcade. This is all I know right now. I haven't been cleared to be briefed on this."

Kenza felt her pulse rise into her temples. She stared at the mug in her hands until the FBI Academy emblem went out of focus.
"I don't know who would do this. Not because I can't think of anyone who would want to, but because my mother has made so many enemies I cannot even narrow it down," she said, and then stopped to take a sip of her tea."Whoever it is, they are going to be very disappointed that she is still breathing."
"The only thing any of it means to me right now is that I need to keep you safe," Noa responded, leaning in closer. "Your mother is a target. And you could be in the crosshairs."
He studied her face in the silence, but his hands remained clasped together in front of him, with his elbows resting on his knees.
"Hey," he offered carefully. "Consider calling your sister before Ari's people swarm her in the morning."

Kenza's eyes shifted away from his, and she nodded towards the back of the room. "Your bookshelf looks a lot like my mother's. When she was in college. Long before she got that bob and put on her first pantsuit."
"Your mother?" He laughed. "The one running on abolishing social security? How do you make that ideological jump?"
"She's power hungry. She believes in nothing. She's a perfect empty vessel, like a carrier oil for greed and corruption," Kenza knew it was more complicated than that. But it felt good to say.
"The perfect politician," Noa conceded.

"I need you to stay here for the night, I need to make sure your place isn't compromised," he said as he took the mug from her hand, and summoned her gaze back to his.
"Kenza. Don't push me away right now. I know that is your impulse. It has been since your father - "
"My father killed himself," she snapped defensively.
"Yeah, your father killed himself," he nodded, and then pointed a finger to the center of her chest. "And he was just like you. Callous and armored, and he shoved everyone away to whatever he decided was the appropriate distance until he couldn't bear the isolation he relegated himself to."
"Don't you blame him," she raised her palm up to stop him.
"I am not," he paused, and chose his words more intentionally as he reached for her hand. He cradled it in his lap, and found a pressure point to dig his thumb into. "I am not blaming you. But you cannot keep burying everything underneath nightly escapades, shots of vodka, fucking me until it's all sufficiently numb, whatever else you do."
He pulled in a deep breath, almost willing her to breathe with him.

"Say something real," he pleaded gently.

"If she had died tonight I would have been free," Kenza's words were cold, but he shook his head in disagreement.
"If she had died tonight your regret would have consumed you. You would have felt like an orphan. And then you would have done everything you always do to not to feel a thing. Only to your own detriment."

She resented just that, his ability to cut through her pretense of apathy that she effortlessly charmed everyone else with. It was confirmation of her greatest fear; that he had seen glimpses of her that she couldn't possibly take back.

A tear escaped the corner of her eye, and Noa defeated the instinct to brush it away. He wanted her to allow herself to feel it.

He shifted into the space next to her on the couch, and reached for her feet. He propped them up, and began pulling her boots off, the ones she had hastily slipped on when they left her apartment earlier that night.

"No shoes in my house," he managed a half smile at her. He obliterated the last of the distance between them by pulling her into his lap. She didn't bother putting up a fight against it as his arms wrapped around her to envelop her, the pressure sedating her like a weighted blanket. She buried her face into his shoulder, and she silently cried into the seam of his t-shirt.