3. Silas
Chapter three
Silas
She’s talking about modern fiction.
I know this because her mouth is moving, and words are coming out, and I can tell she cares deeply about what she’s saying.
What I’m less certain of is whether I’ve absorbed any of it, because I’ve been sitting on this stool for long enough that my ass might be going numb.
Besides which, being alone with Norah in the back room of The Last Chapter is wrecking my concentration.
It’s warm back here. Warmer than the shop floor, the overhead fans not reaching this far, and she’s close—across a table designed for one person eating lunch, not two people having a conversation.
Besides, the lightweight cotton of her tank top does very little to conceal the curve of her breasts when she reaches past me to pull a book from the shelf behind my head.
I note this with the detached clarity of a man who has been celibate for six months and is only now registering how inconvenient that is.
Six months. The last time was at a wedding—here in Larkin, a pack from Maine in attendance that nobody had adequately warned me about.
One of their women climbed into my pickup truck at the end of the night with the focused intention of someone who has already decided and is simply executing it.
Dark-eyed, relentless—and conditional. She made that clear before anything else: she wanted to film it. On her iPhone. Non-negotiable.
I said yes.
I’m not entirely sure what that says about me.
Nothing flattering. She was insatiable—wore me out within an hour—and I drove home alone with the distinct feeling that I’d made a decision I couldn’t entirely justify.
Her pack was back in Maine by Sunday. I’d never see her again. I told myself that was the point.
Mostly I try not to think about it.
The point is: six months. I’ve been busy.
The operation doesn’t run itself, and my brother, Logan, has had his hands full with the north corridor negotiations.
Someone has to keep the warehouse efficient and profitable.
Somehow, women stopped happening. I hadn’t noticed until three minutes ago when Norah Keane reached past me for a book to make a point.
Her scent hits me at close range, and my wolf came fully, immediately awake.
There is a thing about wolf women. They’re direct about what they want, matched in energy and appetite to men, and the transaction is clean on both ends—no performance, no pretense, no morning-after ambiguity about what it meant.
I appreciate that. I’ve always appreciated that.
The Maine woman was an extreme version of it, but the principle holds.
Human women, in my experience, fall into two categories.
There are those who are careful about everything—themselves, you, what it means—so careful that nothing starts even if we both are interested.
And then there are the ones who are too interested in what I am.
In the wolf, not in me. Super-sexualized risk-takers. We call them groupies.
Neither category has ever held my attention past a first impression.
Norah is getting under my skin in a way I can’t categorize.
She’s not careful. There’s nothing high-strung about the way she moves through her own space, the way she talks without checking if I’m keeping up, the way she put a mug of tea in front of me like it was already decided and moved on.
And she’s not wolf-curious. She knew what I am the moment I walked through the door and has not once looked at me with a combination of fascination and horror I’ve learned to identify in about ten seconds.
She looks at me like I’m a person.
And that shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing.
Her looks don’t hurt either. She has hips that a man can put his hands on and hold.
Not slim in the way that makes you feel like you’re handling something breakable—but substantial enough, curved, the kind that moves when she walks, with a sway that is entirely unconscious.
It’s messing with my concentration worse than if she were trying.
I watched it in the aisle, and I’m watching it now as she crosses to the other side of the small room.
I need to get this under control before she turns around and reads it on my face.
She turns around.
I meet her eyes.
“You zoned out,” she says. It’s more a statement of fact than an accusation, delivered with the mild interest of someone noting a detail.
“I was listening,” I say.
“You were somewhere else.” She sits back down and pulls her mug toward her. “Where did you go?”
I consider the honest answer and decide on a version of it. “This morning,” I say. “I was thinking about this morning.”
She tilts her head. Waiting.
“I had an early site visit,” I say. “Walked afterward. Wasn’t going anywhere in particular.” I look at my tea. “Your door was open.”
She’s quiet for a moment, turning it over, fitting it against the conclusion she’d already half-formed.
“The door’s always open in July,” she says. “Heat gets trapped otherwise.”
“I’ve driven down this street for three years.”
One of her eyebrows rises slightly in speculation. “And today you walked.”
“And today I walked.”
She looks at me, and I let her look. Most people I keep at a distance. She isn’t staying there.
“So,” she says. “Now that you’re back. What was I saying?”
“Something about your staff picks wall,” I say. “The criteria.”
She points at me. “The criteria are non-negotiable. Come on.” She’s already standing, moving toward the curtained doorway. “I’ll show you.”
In the shop’s main aisle, she explains the logic of the staff picks wall with the seriousness of someone presenting a policy proposal, and I’m listening, actually listening this time, to the way she thinks—the architecture of how she connects a book to a person, the instinct she’s developed for matching the right story to whoever’s holding it.
She’s good at her job. There’s an obvious joy in sharing the written word with people.
For no other reason than she thinks reading makes us all better.
She pulls a book from the wall. Holds it out. “This one,” she says. “Take it.”
I look at the cover then flip to the last page. “I didn’t come in for 1424 pages.”
“Nobody comes in for 1424 pages,” she says. “That’s the entire problem with readers today.” She pushes it toward me. “Take it anyway. Consider it a worthy alternative to the engine manual.”
I take it. She rings me up at the register.
She walks me to the door. Outside, the evening is cooling, the grip of July heat released, the street quieter than when I arrived. The lunch crowd is gone, the dinner crowd not yet arrived, the in-between texture of a city block waiting for the next wave of activity.
I stop on the sidewalk and look back.
She’s already turned away, back to the counter, back to whatever comes next in her evening. She doesn’t watch me go. Noted.
I stand there for a moment longer than is necessary.
Then I start walking.
My feet take me to Elmwood without deciding it.
The Coulter Cleaners on Elmwood runs the evening shift until nine, meaning the floor will be half full and Rory will be at the folding table. One of the oversized dryers has been making a sound for three days, and I’ve been meaning to look at it.
I hear it the second I step through the door.
A knock—faint, irregular, dropping out of rhythm with the other machines. Rory hears it too. His shoulders drop a fraction. The small change of a man who’s already identified the issue and doesn’t need it named.
He’s at the folding table near the counter, working through a stack of pressed shirts with the same method he’s used since before I was old enough to be in this building unsupervised.
Palms flat first, smoothing the fabric into submission, then clean, exact folds that turn a wrinkled shirt into a clean, finished fold.
“Back bearing,” I say, nodding toward the machine.
“Already put in the request.” He doesn’t look up.
“I saw it.”
“Then you know it’s handled.”
There’s an edge in his tone. Mild. Aimed at the world, not at me. Rory doesn’t like things slipping. Doesn’t like the suggestion that something under his watch could fail before he fixes it. I know the feeling well enough not to push.
“I’ll have someone out tomorrow,” I say. “No point letting it run worse.”
He exhales through his nose, somewhere between agreement and don’t make a thing of this and goes back to the shirts.
The floor is half full, as I expected—regulars running their loads, a few people who want a level of anonymity in their weekly task.
A woman near the front window watches her washer like it might eat her clothes if she looks away.
A kid against the wall with headphones in, foot tapping against the tile in time with something only he can hear.
Everything is moving. Everything is working.
That’s what matters.
I watch Rory, taking in the small compensations he makes when he thinks no one’s paying attention. The slight lean to his left side. How his shoulders tighten and release between movements.
I’m always paying attention.
“How’s the back?” I ask.
“Fine.”
“Rory.”
“It’s a back,” he says, lifting the next shirt. “It aches. That’s what backs do.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
I let a beat pass. “I ordered you a chair.”
He stops. Enough that the rhythm breaks. From Rory, that’s the equivalent of dropping everything and staring.
“You did what?”
“Padded,” I say. “Adjustable. Built for people who spend too long pretending they don’t need support.”
“I don’t need a chair.”
“It’s already ordered.”
He looks up, eyes narrowing. “Silas.”
“It’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll bring it over and set it up.”
“I said I don’t need it.”
“I heard you.”
He holds my gaze, measuring how far he wants to take it. Rory doesn’t like being handled. The direct approach is always the wrong one with him.
“You’ve been standing at that counter longer than most of these machines have been bolted down,” I say. “No reason to make it harder than it has to be.”
“It’s not hard.”
I don’t argue. I lean back against the counter instead, easing the pressure out of the exchange. “Next thing you know,” I add, “you’ll be asking me to bring in a sixty-four-inch TV. Put your feet up between loads. Ottoman. The whole situation.”
That hits. Rory lets out a short laugh before he can stop it and shakes his head.
“I don’t want an ottoman.”
“Not yet.”
“And if you bring a TV in here, I’m sending it right back.”
“We’ll see.”
He snorts. The edge is gone. He reaches for the next garment, movements a fraction looser than a minute ago. There’s no thanks coming from him. I don’t expect any.
“Call me if anything else comes up,” I say.
He waves me off without looking up. “Go. I’ve got it.”
I don’t doubt that.
I’ve been in that shop twice. The wolf has been quiet about women for years. It isn’t quiet about this one. I don’t know what to do with that yet.