19. Norah
Chapter nineteen
Norah
It’s the lunchtime rush downtown, and Silas is treating me to my favorite birria tacos from a little stand on a corner with picnic tables under a tarp. The street is packed, with people moving in every direction and horns sounding from the intersection.
Normally I like it. The movement, the horns honking, nothing is required of you except to keep moving.
Today, though, I’m distracted. I can’t stop imagining Silas’s hands running up and down my body.
I fixate on the press of him against me, him rock hard and me yielding.
I’ve imagined him in so many ways that I can’t be trusted to cross my legs in public—I can’t keep my thighs from squeezing together when he comes to mind.
And then he’s right here, solid and warm at my shoulder, and the imagining and the reality collapse into the same thing.
It feels off, and when Silas moves closer to me without touching me, it’s a silent acknowledgement of what we’re both feeling.
It’s the first time we’ve been on a public street during the day so there’s some reason for apprehension and caution. He reminds me of a bodyguard, checking the storefronts, monitoring what’s behind us in the reflection of the plate glass shop windows, his eyes on a swivel.
“You’re counting people,” I say.
“Yes.”
“That’s not normal.”
“It makes me feel better. Better to be aware of what’s around us.”
I don’t argue. He’s not being difficult; he’s stating a fact that makes complete sense inside his world. I’ve spent enough time over the last month on the edges of his world to understand the hesitancy. I slow instead, staying closer to him without making it obvious.
A man steps off the curb too quickly, and Silas angles us both to the right in one smooth movement. My hand brushes his sleeve before dropping away. I face forward again and try to concentrate on lunch instead of the man beside me.
This is the thing about being with him—it requires absolutely no maintenance.
No handling the dynamic, no monitoring the temperature of the interaction, no small calibrations of tone and subject designed to keep things comfortable.
Silas Coulter is so unlike any of the men I’ve half-ass dated that it makes my head spin.
Being with him is effortless. I’m definitely getting used to being with him.
So much so that I think my blood pressure is at an all-time low.
And then I see her.
Not all at once. First a shape, moving through the crowd without weaving, without sidestepping, doing none of the unconscious negotiation that most people do on a packed street.
People move for her without realizing they’re doing it.
When the shape resolves, my chest tightens before my brain has finished catching up.
Aunt Claire.
She’s dressed like always—clean lines, monochromatic, sniffing at color. She found me in the crowd before I found her, which is also characteristic. Her expression when she stops in front of us isn’t surprise, but assessment.
I stop walking before I consider doing anything else. The old reflex is immediate, the same one that used to straighten my spine at fifteen while I stood in her kitchen trying to explain myself. I hate that she can still do that to me.
Her eyes move over me first in that kind of inventory she’s always taken and then move to Silas. They stay there.
Beside me he goes still in a different way. The stillness of someone who knows how to hold his ground during it.
They’re not the same kind of person. They both know it immediately. They understand each other anyway. The uncomfortable part.
“Aunt Claire,” I say. My voice comes out even. That takes more effort than it should.
She doesn’t answer right away. She finishes inspecting Silas and brings her attention back to me, and what’s in it isn’t warmth. It isn’t even the complicated ambivalence that has characterized our relationship until I was old enough to stop needing her approval.
But from the age of twelve until I went to college at seventeen, Aunt Claire was my guardian after our mother’s death.
I had five grueling, brutal years with Aunt Claire, while Penny only had three.
And while leaving me with Claire, according to Penny, was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, she hot-footed it out of that house as fast as she could, rushing into a first marriage that lasted two months.
Even after that, Penny was always Claire’s favorite.
And now I see her face has found its conclusion, her eyes narrowing and her jaw going rigid. She is ready to make her position clear.
“I didn’t think it would be this obvious,” she says.
My chin lifts, a knee jerk reaction to any blanket statement Aunt Claire made about me. “What would be?”
“That you’ve decided to ignore every boundary that’s ever been set for you.”
Not even a greeting. Not even the pretense of one.
“That’s not what this is,” I say.
Her gaze moves to Silas again, briefly, precisely. “He’s a wolf.”
The word sits in the middle of the sidewalk between us. A verdict.
“Yes,” I say.
“And you’re walking down a public street with him.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“No,” she says. “It’s worse than that. It’s careless.”
The word hits harder than I want it to. Careless, like I haven’t thought about this, like I’m playing at something I don’t understand the weight of, like I’m seventeen, and she’s already decided what I’ve done wrong before I’ve explained myself.
I feel the familiar tightening in my chest, the old defensive fury rising through it.
“You don’t get to decide that,” I say.
“I get to decide what affects this family.”
“My relationships don’t affect you.”
“It affects all of us when you make decisions like this in public.” Her eyes move around the street, pointed, making a point. “In front of people who know us.”
I feel it now. The attention. The subtle stilling of people nearby, catching tone rather than content, ambient curiosity working in a crowd. I hadn’t noticed it before.
Silas has.
I step forward, putting myself more fully between them. Not a conscious decision. My body just does it.
“This is my life,” I say.
“And you’re putting it in the hands of a man you don’t understand.”
“I understand him.”
“You understand what he is,” she says. “That’s not the same thing.”
“She understands more than you think,” says Silas.
His voice is low and even. Entirely without apology. Someone who has decided not to rise to the moment. Claire looks at him, and her expression moderates. She expected deflection, probably, or defensiveness or outrage. The absence of it has made her recalibrate.
“Then you know exactly what you’re doing,” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
Claire’s attention comes back to me, and it sharpens. She’s been circling something since she stopped us. I can feel it in the conversation, as if she has a destination in mind and has been choosing her route carefully.
“Tell me something,” she says. “Why do you think your mother spent years warning you away from wolves?”
The question hits differently than I expect.
Not because I don’t know the answer—I do.
I’ve always known my mother’s careful cautions whenever the subject came up, how she would go still in a way I learned to read early.
I know the shape. I’ve always attributed it to the world she grew up in, the attitudes she absorbed, and the things she was taught.
But the way Claire says it—
The weight she puts on years…
“Claire,” I say, warningly.
“Your mother loved a wolf,” she says.
Claire says it without softening the words.
The words arrive clean and direct and with no softening, because Claire has never softened anything in her life, and she isn’t starting now.
“She was young. She was certain it was worth whatever it cost. And it cost her everything.”
She pauses. Lets it go where it’s going.
“It nearly destroyed our family. Years, Norah. Years of our parents trying to hold things together while your mother came apart over a man she couldn’t have, who couldn’t stay, who made every single person around her pay the price for what he couldn’t give her. ”
I hear it.
All of it.
And I feel the pavement under my feet move.
It’s not the information exactly, my mother’s private confession lives in me. I hear her say I wish I’d been braver with her eyes somewhere else, somewhere long ago, and I’ve always known there was a shape behind it I didn’t have the full picture of. I’ve always known.
But hearing it said out loud, in the middle of a sidewalk, with Silas standing two feet to my left—
I feel the crack happen.
It’s small. Hairline. I pull it back before it shows, or I try to, pressing the pieces back into place, refusing to fall apart on a public street in front of this woman who has been waiting for exactly that.
“She told me she wished she’d been braver,” I say. My voice stays level. I don’t know how.
“She told you what a grieving woman tells her daughter,” Claire says, and it’s not cruel how she says it, which somehow makes it worse. “She told you the romantic version. She didn’t tell you what the rest of us lived through while she was busy trying to be brave.”
People keep moving around us.
Laughter filters from a group on the corner.
A bus passes on the cross street, the sound of it large and indifferent.
I don’t look at Silas.
I can’t look at him.
Because if I look at him right now I will feel the full weight of what just happened, my mother’s history, my mother’s grief, my mother’s private confession turned into a weapon and fired on a public sidewalk.
Witnessed by the man I trust but know instinctually I probably shouldn’t.
And I know I cannot hold the crack closed.
“She also tried to warn you,” Claire says. “You know she did. Because she knew. She knew exactly where this goes.”
“You don’t get to speak for her,” I say.
“I’m not speaking for her. I’m telling you what I watched happen to my sister for the better part of a decade.”
She steps back. “I loved your mother. And I watched her love almost ruin her. So, when I tell you this is a mistake, I’m not judging. I’m speaking from experience.”
She looks at Silas one last time, a warning delivered directly, one person to another, without the pretense of it being about anything other than what it is.
Then she turns and disappears into the crowd. The street keeps moving.
I stand in the middle of it.
“Norah,” Silas says.
“Don’t,” I say. Not at him. Not really. I use the only word I have that will keep the crack from widening before I get somewhere private enough to let it.
I start walking.
Faster than before.
“Come with me,” I say. I don’t look back, and I know he’s there, and right now knowing is the only thing keeping everything in its right place.