"I know it don't make sense," Lyra takes the bottle again, but the revel's on her mind and the bodega wine can't match her memory. Doesn't make this wine bad, just means it's not that wine, just is a little reminder that maybe nothing will be that wine again, and she's allowed to grieve that, right?
"I just mean, I feel like I want to— I'm not gonna do it," she says to reassure Rosario, although she's not totally convinced herself. Rathellion waits on the back of her tongue, where it's been lingering since, out of nowhere, summoned by nothing, it snapped back into her memory. Kinda feels like she's been left alone in a room with a big red button labelled do not push.
When she was eight, Lyra pulled the fire alarm in their building for the exact same reason. She knew exactly what was gonna happen, it was just... the switch was right there. (She'd escaped any punishment, too. The security camera on their floor had died a few days earlier and no one had been round to replace it, so Rosario was the only one who knew what she'd done.)
When she was fourteen, she skipped school to take the Staten Island ferry, because the call of playing like some widow in a ballad on deck had been stronger than the call of English that day. When she was twenty-three she hitchhiked home from Tennessee, from one stranger's car to another. When she was twenty-four she went to Vegas and got married.
She can feel Rosario staring, and she knows she'll be more convincing if she turns to face her, to look into her eyes when she promises. Aw man, she knows a lot of things, but knowing doesn't stop the urge that's tugging at her. "I got restraint," she says, and passes the bottle back, buries her teeth into a second sweet donut so her tongue can't even be tempted to say anything it shouldn't.