34. Norah
Chapter thirty-four
Norah
The sound of it is sharper than I expect.
Not the punch itself—that lands with a kind of terrible efficiency that I don’t have a word for—but the sound of the man hitting the floor is almost deafening.
Then silence as the bar goes still for exactly one second. After a moment it resets as the patrons decide collectively what they just witnessed.
Nobody does anything about it.
The bartender moves first, pointing toward the door with the calm authority of someone who has made this calculation before and arrived at the same answer. The man on the floor blinks, reassembles himself in slow increments, and pushes upright with one hand on his jaw.
I sit very still in the booth.
I’m not frightened anymore. I’m watching Silas because I don’t want to miss whatever his face does in the next few seconds.
What it does is almost nothing. He slides back into the booth with the easy calm of a man returning from a minor errand, picks up his burger, and looks at me with an expression that is waiting to see what I’m going to do with all of this.
I pick up my own burger.
“Well,” I say.
“Could’ve gone worse,” he says.
“That’s a low bar.”
“It usually is.”
I watched a man get knocked flat in a roadside bar, and my primary response is to finish my eighteen-dollar burger. Either I have excellent priorities or the last several weeks have recalibrated my baseline for what constitutes a notable evening.
Both, probably.
“You didn’t hesitate,” I say.
“No.”
“Is that always how it works?”
He looks at me. “What do you mean?”
“When it goes like that. When someone pushes. Is it always that fast?”
“Usually,” he says.
“And you always know it’s coming.”
“Almost always.”
I consider that, turning it over. “Wow. That’s quite extraordinary,” I say finally.
“That’s one way to describe it. That guy had it coming.”
I don’t deny that. The room relaxes around us now, the low hum of conversation returning, someone racking balls at the pool table with a sharp decisive click. The bartender is back behind the counter, the whole incident already receding into the evening’s background.
I reach across the table and cut a piece of his burger and slide it toward me.
“Hey,” he says.
“Research,” I say. “I need to know if mine is better.”
He watches me eat it with the expression of a man exercising considerable restraint.
“Well?” he says.
I chew. I consider. I take another sip of my drink.
“Mine is better,” I say.
“That’s not possible.”
“It absolutely is. Try it.” I cut a piece of mine and push the plate toward him.
He takes it, and I watch his face for the verdict. He delivers the answer with a silence that is more damning than anything he could say out loud.
“Yours is better,” he says.
“I know.”
“How did you know?”
“Because I always order the thing that sounds like it has the most going on,” I say. “It’s a philosophy.”
He picks up his own burger. “That sounds like a way to be wrong a lot.”
“It also sounds like a way to find the best burger in every roadside bar between here and Paxton,” I say. “Sample size of one. Very promising.”
His expression eases, the last of whatever the confrontation left behind dropping back into the attentiveness he’s had all evening: focused, warm, a little more present than he usually lets himself be in public.
I lean back in the booth.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“That’s fair.” I rest my elbows on the table.
“I’ve had wolf customers in my shop for years.
Regulars. People I see every week, same time, same kind of books.
I know what they read; I know their routines; I know who prefers the armchair by the window and who always asks about new releases.
” I pause. “But I don’t actually know any of them. ”
He sets his burger down.
“They come in; they’re polite, but they never really engage. Like there’s a whole part of their lives they don’t let anybody see.”
“That’s not an accident,” he says.
“I didn’t think it was.” I tilt my head. “Why?”
He leans back, his forearm resting on the edge of the table. “Because it’s easier,” he says. “If people don’t know you, they can’t decide what to do with what they know.”
“They decide anyway,” I say. “People always decide.”
“Yes,” he says. “But distance gives you a little control over how much of that decision matters.”
I ponder that. “That’s not really living.”
“No, I guess not. It qualifies as surviving, though.”
I trace the edge of my glass with one finger and think about the wolves who come into The Last Chapter every week, who pick out their books, who conduct their transactions with a politeness that has always felt like a wall I never thought to question.
I was someone they were keeping their distance from.
That hits harder than I like.
“What about work?” I ask. “Jobs. Is it always as limited as it seems from the outside?”
“What do you mean by limited?”
“When’s the last time you saw a wolf accountant?”
He looks at me steadily.
“Or a doctor,” I say. “Or a lawyer.”
“You already know the answer,” he says.
“I’m realizing that,” I say. “I never put it together before.”
He lets out a breath. “There are a few professions wolves are in. My father’s accountant went to Pitt.
But he’s of mixed parentage, and he married a human, so his world revolves around his human clients.
He keeps dad as a client because his old man and my father were friends.
Other than that, people trust wolves in certain roles,” he says.
“Physical work. Security. Things where strength is the point. Everything else is less available to us.”
“Why, though?”
“Any system becomes normal if it runs long enough,” he says. “People stop questioning it. They stop seeing it. It becomes how things are.”
I frown. “That’s sad.”
“It’s normal,” he says. “Which is worse.”
“And your family’s business,” I say. “How many people does it employ?”
“Fifty-seven employees,” he says.
My eyes widen before I can stop them. “That’s bigger than I thought.”
“Yeah. Coulter Cleaners supports about a third of the pack families.”
“And that’s still, what? Blue collar. Lower tier.”
“That’s how it’s categorized,” he says.
“By people who have never thought about it for more than thirty seconds,” I say.
“By people for whom it’s never been necessary to think about it,” he says.
I look past him at the room—the bartender, the pool players, the couple in the far corner sharing fries. None of them know they’re sitting inside a system that put fifty-seven people in a box and locked it by deciding the box was all they were capable of.
Silas shakes his head slightly. “You gotta remember, lots of people have blue-collar jobs, regardless of whether they are human or wolf. It’s an honest living, and our pack is proud. We don’t let what humans believe minimize our accomplishments.”
I feel a blush of embarrassment warm my neck.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to sound elitist. The work itself isn’t the issue. It’s the lack of opportunities. It’s skewed against the packs. That’s not fair. You think Paxton is different?”
“Different in that the tension and bias against wolves is not what it is in Larkin,” he confirms.
“How?”
“They contribute,” he says. “They protect the surrounding land. Patrol the forests during hunting season. They made deals with the town council decades ago, and they’ve held them.”
“And people know they’re wolves.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody…”
“Not anymore,” he says. “There’s a wolf couple who runs a diner. Supposed to be the best breakfast in three counties. Another guy in the pack runs a construction company. Builds half the new houses in town.”
“So they…” I stop. “They just live there.”
“If you’re asking if they’re fully integrated, the answer is no.
But humans respect pack territory and hierarchy.
And the wolves don’t hide from the human community.
They decided surviving meant working together instead of disappearing.
It’s not unlike how Elias has run Coulter Cleaners, except we have to stay vigilant to keep our facilities in human territory. ”
I look at him across the table. Three hundred miles from everything I’ve spent three years building, in the warm light of a roadside bar, and all I can think about is a town where he doesn’t have to measure every step. Where the fifty-seven aren’t invisible. No apologies. No explanations.
“I’m still thinking about the bookshop,” I say.
“I’ll pass that along to the Council,” he says.
I laugh and lean back in the booth, and the room feels warmer than it did an hour ago—the bar, the conversation, the gorgeous man across from me who has described a world I didn’t know I was looking for and made it sound entirely possible.
“What about you?” I ask. “What are you planning to do there? I didn’t even ask you. You had plans in Coulter Cleaners.”
“That was still being worked out,” he says.
“And now?”
He looks at me directly. “Now I figure it out myself.”
Love, pride, and a fierce empathy for him tighten my chest.
“Good,” I say, with an adamant shake of my head.
For a few minutes longer we stay there, talking about the town ahead of us, what it might look like, what we might find, whether the diner does a good lunch or just breakfast, because we’re both breakfast people, and that is a critical question.
The bar is back to its usual noise and chatter, the earlier interruption absorbed and forgotten, and the evening has passed through its worst moment and come out the other side still intact.
By the time we stand to leave, I feel lighter than I have in weeks.
The waitress comes by one more time and says something that makes me laugh with my head tipped back, and I promise her we’ll be back, and I mean it.
It’s the kind of thing I’ve been saying more of lately: small future promises and small certainties, with the confidence of someone who has stopped hedging every commitment against the possibility of everything going wrong.
I feel Silas’s attention on me before I look at him.
Not heavy. Just there. Steady.
“Ready?” he says, stepping up beside me.
“I think so,” I say, and I slip my arm through his as we turn toward the door.