11. Norah
Chapter eleven
Norah
Penny always adds cinnamon to the coffee grounds.
She’s been doing it since she was twelve years old and decided that the coffee our father made was unnecessarily grim, and she’s never once wavered on this position despite decades of evidence that most people consider it eccentric.
The coffee smells warm and slightly sweet, like cinnamon rolls without the frosting, and on most mornings I love it.
Recently divorced, Penny lives in a two-bedroom walk-up apartment adjacent to her old neighborhood, only three blocks from the expansive single-family home where she and her husband used to live.
Now, he’s in Richmond with his secretary, living his best cliché of a life, and Penny is skimping every dime she has to keep her kids going to the same tony private high school.
I love her, but I want something better for her and my nieces.
I don’t know how to help them get it.
This morning I’m sitting at her kitchen table with her across from me. I drink the cinnamon coffee anyway. It isn’t helping.
The morning light comes in thin and sideways through the gap in the curtains, catching the steam rising from our mugs and turning it briefly golden before it dissolves.
Outside, a delivery truck rolls past, slowly enough that I hear the tires against the pavement.
A dog begins howling two floors below, and someone starts a car on the street.
I haven’t slept well in days.
I’m not telling Penny that. She is three years older than me and has always known when I’m bothered before I’m ready to admit it.
Right now, I’m on the inconvenient side of that.
“Someone saw you the other night,” she says.
Her voice is matter-of-fact. She gives me the information and waits to see what I do with it.
I blow across the top of my coffee. “What?”
“Hannigan’s,” she says. “Someone who knows someone. You know how it goes.”
I do know how it goes. Larkin may be a city, but gossip still travels like it belongs to a town with one stoplight.
“It was trivia night,” I say. “Half the neighborhood was there.”
“Apparently,” Penny says, turning her mug once between her fingers, “the half that was there included someone who caught your attention.”
I take a sip of my coffee.
It has cooled more than it should have.
“We were short on team members,” I say. “I recruited. We won. It was a very productive evening.”
Penny watches me with the expression that means she heard everything I said and is more interested in what I didn’t say.
She sets her mug down without drinking from it.
When Penny stops drinking her coffee mid-conversation it means she’s decided the conversation is more important than the coffee. Never a good sign.
“He’s a wolf,” she says.
I keep my face neutral.
The word sits between us.
I don’t react to it, or I try not to. “There were four people at the table,” I say. “Jewell was there. And we tag teamed with some women from a table nearby who were surprisingly good at geography.”
“They’re not who I’m concerned about.”
“It was trivia,” I say. “Nobody submits documentation before they sit down.”
Penny doesn’t smile. “Norah.”
“Penny.”
She exhales through her nose, not quite a sigh. “You know how people feel about them.”
“I know how some people feel about them. That’s different from how I feel about them.”
She squirms in her chair, and I can almost see her searching for a way to say this without sounding prejudiced. Penny isn’t cruel. She grew up hearing the same warnings about wolves that I did and never had much reason to question them.
Most people don’t examine things too carefully when the thing being taught is the ambient noise of their entire social environment. That doesn’t make it right. It makes it understandable.
“They keep to themselves,” she says. “They have their own neighborhoods. Their own businesses. Their own...”
“Rules?” I say.
She points at me. “Yes.”
“They follow the same city ordinances we do,” I say. “The same laws. They pay the same taxes. They use the same streets.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?”
She looks at the window for a moment, then back at me. “They’re different, Norah.”
“Different how?” I keep my voice even because I’m genuinely asking, not debating. “Different in how they look? Different in how they move? Different in what they’re capable of?”
Penny’s jaw tightens slightly. “All of it.”
“Okay,” I say. “So, what you mean is that they’re too different from us.”
I’m almost sympathetic. Penny has never had to explain this before because most people we know simply agree with her.
“Yes.”
“And that’s the problem.”
“It’s not a problem,” she says, with the frustrated precision of someone trying to articulate a position.
“It’s that they’re wolves, Norah. They’re built differently. They operate differently. They have loyalties we can’t be part of and instincts we can’t predict and...”
“Have you ever talked to one?” I ask.
She stops.
“Not across a counter,” I clarify. “Not over a bill or a transaction. I mean have you ever sat down and had an actual conversation. Like the one you’re having with me right now.”
Penny looks at me for a long moment.
“That’s not the point,” she says.
“It might be exactly the point. You’re telling me how they are. I’m asking if you know how they are, or if you’re telling me how people say they are. Those are different things.”
She puts both hands on the table. I can tell she doesn’t like the question, but she doesn’t dismiss it either.
“People get hurt,” she says finally. “When those lines get crossed.”
“What lines?”
“The ones between us and them.”
“People get hurt on every side of every line,” I say. “That’s not specific to wolves.”
“It’s different with them.”
“Because they’re stronger?”
“Yes.”
“So, the fear is about power,” I say. “That they can do things we can’t.”
She looks up at me. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Geez, Penny. Someone with a gun has more power than either of us do. Most men have more power than women. Adults have more power than children. Where do we draw the line?”
I can’t pretend her fear came from nowhere.
Humans have spent decades talking about wolves as dangerous while still hiring them for the strength and loyalty we claim to distrust. Penny absorbed that contradiction the same way most of us did.
I did too. The fear has a logic to it. The logic is wrong, but it has one.
“I used to think their physical power wasn’t important,” I say.
Penny’s eyes sharpen. “Something happened.”
I trace the rim of my mug with my thumb and think about how to answer that, or whether to, and decide that since Penny has been honest with me this morning, she deserves the same, within limits.
“What happened?”
I stop. I can still see Silas on that sidewalk too clearly.
“I saw something yesterday,” I say. “With Jesse from the shop.”
“What kind of something?”
“A fight,” I say. “Outside of a dry cleaner. There were three men, humans, and they were only interested in stirring up trouble...”
I stop because the memory is more vivid than I want it to be, and I need to get through it without making it bigger than it already is.
Penny is very still now, giving me her full attention.
“Anti-wolf?” she asks.
“That was the impression,” I say. “They walked in off the street and started with words and then it stopped being words.”
“And he was there.”
“It’s his business. His people.”
Penny processes this. “And there was a fight.”
“Yes.”
“And you saw it.”
“Yes.”
She gapes at me. “And you’re not afraid?”
I’ve been sitting with this since yesterday afternoon, since I stood across the street with Jesse’s hand on my arm and watched Silas Coulter put three men on the ground with a speed and a precision and a brand of controlled violence that wasn’t anything like watching people fight on television or reading about it in a book.
It was real, and it was fast, and it was—and this is the part I keep returning to—it was him.
The fight isn’t what stayed with me.
I was turned on. There is no respectable way to dress that up for Penny, so I’m not going to try. Watching Silas control three men who came looking for a fight sent a hard, unmistakable rush of desire through me. I wanted my hands on him.
A small thrill travels from my stomach south, thinking of that day.
I’ve never really been attracted to ‘bad boys’, finding I have more in common with men who are more cerebral.
Apparently, controlled violence is an exception to my long-standing preference for cerebral men.
Silas is a different creature. Literally.
That’s the thing that keeps coming back.
The fight should have been what stayed with me.
The wolf pressed forward in him, brightening his eyes with something that wasn’t human and lending him a strength that seemed wildly out of proportion to the moment.
It had been startling to witness, especially with Jesse standing beside me, too petrified to utter a peep.
But my mind kept circling back to something else.
The moment he looked at me.
One heartbeat, and his eyes finding mine through the noise and the aftermath and the three men on the pavement. In that beat, in that held second, what I saw in his face wasn’t aggression. And it wasn’t pride.
He looked like a man who already knew what I would do next. Walk away.
That bothers me far more than the fight did.
It was the resignation of a man who has watched this moment happen too many times to expect anything different from it.
A human who sees what’s underneath and walks away, because walking away is easier than staying and asking questions, and enough people have walked away that he’s stopped being surprised by it.
The idea that he thinks I’m going to be one of them lodges behind my breastbone, uncomfortable and hard to ignore.
“No,” I say. “I’m not afraid.”
Penny studies me. “Because you know him.”
“Because it was him,” I say. “If it had been a stranger, I might have been afraid. If I’d come around that corner and seen what I saw without knowing who it was...
” I stop. “Maybe. Probably. The honest answer is I don’t know.
But he isn’t a stranger. He’s someone I know.
Someone I’ve been talking to and having tea with, and winning trivia with.
The fight was frightening, and the wolf was real, but none of it made me want to walk away. ”
Penny is thoughtful for a moment.
Outside the window, a pigeon flutters on the window ledge, sending a burst of small gray feathers into the air. My coffee has gone fully cold, but I barely notice.
“He thinks I’m going to disappear,” I say.
“What makes you say that?”
“How he looked at me,” I say. “Before he left. He drove away because he expected me to walk away. Because enough people have walked away that it’s become the default.”
Penny pinches the tablecloth between her thumb and finger, her eyes following the ruching pattern she’s creating.
“And you’re going to prove him wrong,” she says.
Her tone tells me she’s stopped trying to talk me out of it.
Not quite a question and not quite a statement. It sits somewhere between the two, in the tone Penny uses when she’s made her peace with a decision she can’t talk me out of and is moving toward acceptance.
“Yes,” I say.
She looks at me for a long moment.
“He could hurt you,” she says. But this doesn’t come out in the wolves-are-dangerous version. This is different, and more honest.
“So could anyone.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It’s true.”
She exhales. “Be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” I say.
I see Silas across the street again, blood at the corner of his mouth, already braced for me to leave.
She gives me the look that says we both know that’s not entirely accurate, and I give her the look that says I know and I love her for worrying, and for a moment neither of us says anything.
I think about the resignation on his face.
That’s the thing I keep returning to, underneath everything else—the resignation. The look of a man who saw me across the street and started preparing for the version of things where I walk away.
I push back from the table.
“I’m going to find him,” I say.
Penny watches me stand. “Because?”
I reach for my bag.
“Because I don’t want him assuming I’m afraid of him.”
She doesn’t stop me. She stands, pushing her chair back in. “Take my rain jacket. You’re going to need it.”
From Penny, this is equivalent to a blessing. I grab it from the hook by the door, and I go.
The decision feels easy while Penny is standing there watching me leave. I suspect it will feel considerably less easy once I’m alone in the car.