CHAPTER 16
Morning After, Sort Of
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Wren woke to the unfamiliar sound of the salvage yard coming to life below her window — an engine turning over, someone's radio playing too early for the volume, the metallic clang of something being moved that probably shouldn't have been dropped quite that hard — and lay still for a moment, getting her bearings, before the previous night arrived all at once and settled into her chest with a weight that was equal parts warmth and quiet panic.
She'd kissed Silas. Silas had kissed her back like he'd been waiting months instead of weeks. And now it was morning, and Eli was still asleep in the next room, and none of the careful, hard-won architecture she'd built around her life had any established protocol for this development.
She found him in the small kitchen when she finally got up, already dressed, already working through what looked like his second cup of coffee, and something in his posture — not tense exactly, but deliberate, a man who'd clearly been sitting with his own thoughts for a while before she appeared — told her he'd been waiting for this conversation as much as she'd been dreading it.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning." She poured her own coffee, mostly for something to do with her hands, and sat across from him at the small table. "So."
"So." A ghost of something almost like amusement crossed his face, gone quickly, replaced by something more careful. "You want to talk about it, or you want me to pretend it didn't happen so you don't have to?"
She appreciated, more than she could easily say, that he'd made it a real question and not a leading one. "Talk about it. I don't do well with things left unnamed. Learned that the hard way."
"Okay." He set his mug down, gave her his full attention the way he seemed to give most things. "I don't regret it. Want to say that first, plainly, before anything else gets said, because I don't want you spending this whole conversation wondering if I do."
Something in her chest loosened at that, more than she'd expected it to. "I don't regret it either. But I'm scared of it. Those aren't the same thing, but they're both true at once, and I don't really know what to do with that."
"Don't have to know what to do with it today." He said it simply, no urgency in it, the same unhurried patience he brought to every conversation that mattered. "Just have to be honest about where you're standing. Today. This can move as slow as you need it to."
"That's not really how you're built, though, is it. Slow." She said it half-teasing, testing whether there was room for lightness this morning, and felt something ease further when he let a real, small smile through.
"Not naturally, no. But I've had six years of practice not getting what I want on my own timeline.
Learned some patience out of necessity." A pause, more serious now.
"This matters more to me than most things have, in a long while.
Which means I'd rather go slow and have it be real than rush it and lose it. "
She turned her mug in her hands, working up to the harder part of what she needed to say.
"Eli can't know yet. Not because I'm ashamed of this, or of you.
Because he's already attached to you in ways that scare me a little, and if this doesn't work — if we try this and it falls apart — I need him to lose a family friend, not a father figure he'd already started counting on.
That's not fair to build on a kiss from one night. "
Something crossed Silas's face at that — not hurt exactly, more like a man absorbing a boundary that cost him something to accept and choosing to accept it anyway. "Understood. We keep it between us for now. However long 'for now' needs to be."
"Thank you." She meant it more than the simple word conveyed. "I need you to know that's not me hiding something shameful. It's me protecting the one person in this whole mess who didn't ask to be part of any of it."
"Don't need convincing on that. Already agree." He reached across the table, not quite touching her hand, more offering the space for her to close the distance if she wanted to. "Protecting him first — that's not a complication to work around. That's the whole point, as far as I'm concerned."
She took the offered space, let her fingers rest against his, and felt something settle further into place — not full certainty, not yet, but a foundation solid enough to build slowly on top of.
They didn't discuss what this meant for the terms she'd set weeks ago — the safety, not money, ask-first-with-Eli architecture that had governed everything between them until last night — and she knew, without either of them saying it, that those terms hadn't dissolved just because something else had been added on top of them.
If anything, they mattered more now, not less.
A relationship built on top of boundaries that still held was different, she was beginning to realize, from a relationship that used affection as an excuse to erode them.
Eli woke twenty minutes later, delighted and oblivious, launching immediately into a detailed account of a dream involving the same dragon from weeks ago, now apparently promoted to co-pilot status on an unspecified vehicle, and the ordinary chaos of getting a three-year-old fed and dressed swallowed the morning's careful conversation into something that simply became the shape of their day, unremarkable and quietly, privately different than it had been the day before.