18. Chapter 18 #2
"But we had Xela, and we had some errands to run, and you can't expect Penny to live in this coffin her entire life, she needs fresh air, and I needed clothes, and I needed to check in with Xela because she's been running the bar alone for three days and she was about to send a search party and honestly I think the search party would have been worse for everyone involved than just going up there myself, and we were careful, we were really careful, and nobody saw us, well, people saw us but not Coven people, and—"
"Sidney."
Sidney stops. His mouth closes. He looks at Erath with the wariness of someone bracing for a reprimand, shoulders squared and chin slightly lifted and every line of his body preparing.
Erath says, "You don't have to explain yourself."
Sidney blinks. The wariness doesn't leave, exactly, but it shifts.
It softens at the edges, confused by the absence of the reaction he was expecting.
He looks at Erath and Erath looks back and neither of them says anything for a moment.
Penny, who has grown bored with the silence that adults sometimes need, wriggles out of Erath's arms and runs to her room to do whatever five-year-olds do when they've been set free after a long day.
"You're not mad," Sidney says. It's not quite a question.
"No."
"You're not going to tell me I was reckless or stupid or that I should have waited for you."
"You were with Xela. You were careful. You came back.
" Erath stands up from the couch and crosses his arms, not in defense but in the way that he does when he's being deliberately, visibly casual, because he's learned that Sidney responds better to calm than to intensity. "I trust you with her, Sidney."
Something moves across Sidney's face. It's there and gone too fast and he looks away before Erath can name it. He adjusts the bag on his shoulder and says, "There's macaroni and cheese from the box in that bag, if you want to attempt dinner. I'll supervise."
"I don't need supervision."
"You absolutely need supervision. The last time you made pasta the noodles weren't done enough."
"That's called al dente."
"They were literally crunchy, Erath."
The corner of Erath's mouth pulls, just barely, and Sidney catches it and raises an eyebrow and there's the faintest bloom of pink at the tops of his cheekbones.
He pushes past Erath into the kitchen and drops his bag on the counter and starts pulling things out, and Erath follows him because it's kind of a routine they have now.
Erath makes the macaroni and cheese with Sidney hovering at his elbow, sometimes leaning his head on his shoulder, and Erath doesn't call him out on it. If he wants to claim he's supervising and not seeking him out intentionally, then Erath is happy to play along.
Sidney and Penny eat. Erath sits at the table and doesn't eat, because he doesn't need to, but he sits there anyway because this is what they do now.
Penny gets the first bowl and Sidney gets the second and Erath gets a mug of coffee that Sidney makes him even though he doesn't need coffee either.
He drinks it because Sidney made it and Sidney makes the best coffee.
He's aware of how that sounds, but he's not interested in changing his opinion.
Penny diverts her attention between the sticker book she's playing with and the macaroni she's eating.
She tells Erath, between bites, about everything she did today, which is a retelling of the same story she already told him but with additional details she's remembered or invented or forgot she told him.
Her details are questionable, but her enthusiasm is charming.
Erath listens. He says she can go back to the park, but not tomorrow, because tomorrow they have things to do. She asks what things. He says boring grown-up things and she makes an appropriate face that expresses her opinion on that.
Sidney finishes first and stands up to take his bowl to the sink.
He runs the water and rinses the bowl and sets it in the rack to dry, and then he stands there.
His hands are braced on the edge of the counter and his head is slightly bowed and he's staring at the sink with an expression that Erath can't see from this angle but can feel.
There's a weight in Sidney's shoulders that wasn't there a moment ago. Something settling over him.
He stands there for a long time. Long enough that Penny stops talking and looks at his back and then looks at Erath with a question on her face. Erath shakes his head, just slightly, and Penny goes back to her macaroni.
Then Sidney turns around. He leans against the counter and crosses his arms and his face is doing something complicated. Not upset, exactly. Not sad. Something softer and more fragile than either of those things, something that looks startled to find itself on his face.
He says, a little softly, the words coming out uneven, "No one I've ever dated has made food for me before."
The sentence sits in the kitchen. It sits between them, small and enormous at the same time, and Erath hears everything Sidney isn't saying underneath it.
That no one has cooked for him. That no one has thought to.
That the men in his life before this, the ones August hinted at with careful words and worried eyes, didn't give him even this.
Even boxed macaroni and cheese made badly.
Even the most basic, unremarkable gesture of care.
What Erath feels is not anger, exactly. It's something older and colder than anger.
It's the quiet, settled fury of knowing that someone so remarkable has been treated as though he was not worth the effort of boiling water and adding powdered cheese.
But he doesn't want to make Sidney feel worse about it, so he deflects.
He says, aiming for lightness and almost achieving it, "Is that what we're doing? Dating?"
He knows it's wrong the moment the words leave his mouth.
He knows by the way Sidney's shoulders draw up, the way his arms tighten across his chest, the way his face goes from open and vulnerable to closed and guarded in the space of a breath.
The softness vanishes. The fragile thing that had been sitting on his face retreats behind a wall that Sidney builds with the speed and efficiency of someone who has built it many, many times before.
Erath has said the wrong thing. He meant it as a joke, or as an opening, or as a way to acknowledge what's between them without the weight of a declaration.
What Sidney heard was a question. What Sidney heard was doubt.
What Sidney heard was another man asking him to define something so that it could be taken away.
The guardedness passes almost immediately into something worse. Something too calm. Controlled. The kind of calm that comes from practice, from learning to absorb a blow without showing the impact, from knowing that the safest response to disappointment is no response at all.
Sidney turns to Penny and asks her, voice perfectly even, "You want a bubble bath tonight?"
"Bubbles?!" She shoves the rest of her food in her mouth and pushes away from the table and barrels down the hallway toward the bathroom with focus.
Sidney places Penny's bowl in the sink. He does it carefully, without looking at Erath, and then he starts into the hallway after her. Every step is measured. Every line of his body is saying this is fine, I'm fine, I didn't just hand you something fragile and watch you drop it.
Erath isn't great at relationships. He knows this about himself with the brutal clarity of someone who has exactly one data point and that data point ended with a knife in his throat and his child stolen from him.
He doesn't know how to do this. He doesn't know the right words, the right timing, the right way to navigate the minefield of Sidney's history and his own catastrophic inexperience with being gentle.
But he knows enough to know that if he lets Sidney walk away right now, the wall goes back up and it will be harder to get past it the second time.
He stands and crosses the room in a few strides. He grabs Sidney's elbow in a light grip, just enough to get his attention, not enough to hold him, and says, "I didn't mean it as a question."
Sidney shrugs him off. The motion is casual, practiced, the shrug of someone who is very good at creating distance without making it look deliberate. "You kind of did though. It's fine. I shouldn't have assumed."
"No." Erath steps closer, but doesn't touch him again.
He can see from the tension in Sidney's spine that he's in a fragile place, the kind of place where one wrong move will send him spiraling inward to where Erath can't reach him.
He keeps his voice steady. Keeps his hands at his sides.
"I meant to say that dating seems inconsequential compared to what we're doing.
I misspoke. I didn't mean to imply this doesn't mean something to me. "
Sidney's shoulders ease, just the slightest bit.
A fraction of an inch. The wall doesn't come down, but it stops going up, and he finally looks Erath in the eye.
His face is still guarded but there's something behind the guard that is searching, testing, trying to decide if what Erath is saying matches what Erath means.
"It doesn't have to mean anything," Sidney says, and his voice is quiet and level and it guts Erath to hear it. "It wouldn't be the first time I fell for someone who didn't want more."
Erath stares at him. His mind goes momentarily blank, every thought scattering, because he heard every word in that sentence but the ones his brain has latched onto are fell for and the magnitude of them in Sidney's mouth, said with such resignation, such practiced defeat, the way you state a fact you've accepted rather than a feeling you're still hoping for.