CHAPTER 8 #2
"Nope, you asked, you're getting it. " I smiled, and meant it, and it cost me.
"So I don't do the thing where I want what someone else has.
I never learned how to want something that bad, because wanting it that bad is how you end up in the car again.
I learned to be glad. Glad is portable. You can take glad to the next house. " I shrugged.
"Holloway's got a thing with you. Good. I'm glad, and I want you to hear that as the truest thing I own rather than another panel of the wall you keep accusing me of.
I'm glad when good things happen near me.
I figured out a long time ago it's the only way to make sure good things keep happening near me at all. "
The storm hammered the roof. The percolator ticked itself cool, slower now, tick... tick, a clock running out of somewhere to be.
"That's the saddest thing anyone's said to me in a building full of werewolves," she said finally.
I laughed, surprised out of myself. "There she is."
"I'm serious."
"I know you are. That's what makes it sweet.
" But the joke had gone soft in my mouth, and I think she heard it go soft, because she did something then she hadn't done once in three days.
She let it stand. No fix, no deflection, no exhibit laid down between us.
She just looked at me, plainly, the way you look at someone you've recognized.
"My grandmother worked forty years," she said, slow, like the words were heavy to lift.
"Trusted the wrong signatures to look after her, and they were the very thing that gutted her instead.
I went to law school to be the person who reads the clause everyone skips, so that nobody I...
" She stopped. Reached up and pressed the cap of the steel pen down once, hard, the small steel click standing in for whatever she wasn't going to say.
"I don't get carried, and I don't get taken care of. That's the deal I made with myself, and I've kept it."
"I know," I said.
"You don't understand. You can't."
"Counselor. " I crouched down so I wasn't looming, so we were eye to eye across the warm narrow kitchen, and I kept my voice as low and easy as I'd use on a spooked thing on a back road at night.
"I've eaten at forty tables where I made the first bite look like a favor.
I know exactly what you're doing with those eggs.
I've been doing it my whole life. You're not hiding it from me.
You're just performing it for a guy who wrote the play. "
Her throat moved. Her eyes went bright and furious at being seen, which is the only kind of being seen that ever counts.
We stayed like that a second too long, in the good way, the kind of too-long where the storm drains off to somewhere very far away and the whole world narrows to a warm steel kitchen and two people not looking away.
She'd taken the wool blanket off one of the loft bunks at some point and had it pooled around her waist where she sat, and it had slid down off one shoulder, and without deciding to, I reached out and drew it back up.
Just that. Just the edge of the blanket between two fingers, lifting it to her collarbone, over the thin pale line of the old scar there.
My knuckles grazed the side of her neck on the way, and her skin was cool against mine the way every human's was, set those handful of degrees below the wolf-heat I carried around under my own, and the gap of it startled me the way it always did and made me want to hand her some of the warmth I never knew what to do with. She went still. I went still.
Her pulse jumped under the place my hand wasn't quite touching, and I felt it the way you feel a low growl, in the sternum, before you hear it.
I could've closed it. The want sat right there, easy and bright as the flame behind me, and the distance was an inch, maybe less than that.
I held still instead, and not for lack of wanting.
She'd just handed me the thing she kept under the wall, and you don't grab at a person in the same breath they trust you with the soft part, because that's exactly how you teach them the soft part is dangerous to show.
I'd been the kid who got taught that lesson young.
I would chew glass before I taught it to her.
So I tucked the blanket, and I let my hand fall, and I stood back up, and I let the moment be a thing that almost happened, which is its own kind of gift if you give it right.
"Eat your eggs," I said, gentle. "They worked hard."
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh and almost something else, and picked up the fork, and the kitchen came back, the blue flame, the tick of the cooling pot, the storm.
"Hey. " Cady's voice, from the comms nest, pitched low so it wouldn't carry down the stairs. "Omar."
"Yeah."
She came halfway back, framed in the doorway with the sat phone in her hand, and her eyes did that flicker again, that thing where she saw a little further into the bones of the world than the rest of us.
She looked at me, then at Sloane, then at the place between us where the air still hadn't quite settled, and something crossed her face that read less like surprise than like plain recognition, the look of someone spotting the shape of a thing she already had a name for and the rest of us didn't.
"What," I said.
"Nothing. " She wet her lips. "Just. Dane wants the fuel numbers when Grant's got them. Generator's dipping faster than the chart says it should. This storm's a pig. " Then, quieter, almost to herself, looking at the two of us: "Huh. A shared anchor. Okay."
Sloane's head came up. "A what?"
Cady blinked like she'd said it out loud by accident, which I think she had. "Nothing. Fuel numbers. I'll be in the nest. " And she was gone, pink hair and three sweaters and a blanket cape, vanished back into her glowing corner before the question could chase her.
"Omar," Sloane said. "What's a shared anchor."
"No idea what she's on about," I said, which was, God help me, almost true, because I had the feeling itself but not the name for it, and even the name belonged to somebody else to give.
Ask Julian, something in me said. It's his.
It always was his. "Cady talks to herself.
She sees stuff. Comes with the territory.
Drink your coffee, it's going cold and cold coffee is a war crime in this kitchen. "
She let me dodge it. She filed it instead, the way she filed everything, and I watched her file it and knew it would come back, because nothing ever stayed buried for long with this one, and that bone-deep refusal to let a thing lie was exactly what had already snagged three wolves the way it had — don't, I told myself.
Leave the word where it lives. You'll know when it's time to say it out loud.
The lights dipped. Just a flicker, the work-lights browning down for half a breath and surging back, and somewhere below the percolator ticked one last time and went silent, finally cool, and outside the storm leaned its whole weight on the steel and the steel groaned and held.
"That's the generator," she said, stating it rather than asking, because two days in she was already reading the building's tells like clauses in a contract.
"That's the generator," I agreed. "Hollis'll nurse it. We've got fuel for a while yet. Don't borrow tomorrow's worries, sweetheart, today's came fully assembled."
She looked at the dead pot, and the dimmed lights, and then at me, and her face did something complicated and unguarded, there and gone.
"Thank you," she said. "For the food. For not...
" She gestured, a small economical motion that took in the whole morning, the wall I hadn't built, the inch I hadn't crossed, the egg I'd made her eat. "For all of it. I mean it. Thank you."
And she said it the way people said it to me right before a house got smaller in a mirror, the way you thank someone you've already decided not to count on.
It was a goodbye she was getting out ahead of, a debt she meant to settle before it could ever come due, and I felt the old car-window cold of it go straight through the warm kitchen and into the part of me that had spent thirty-four years being glad so nobody could leave me first.
I crouched again. I caught her eyes and held them, and for once I didn't reach for a single joke, didn't have one, didn't want one.
"Don't thank me like I'm leaving, Sloane," I said softly. "I'm not one of the ones who leaves."