77. Sage
SEVENTY-SEVEN
SAGE
“You’re not yourself today.” Jamie’s brow furrows as he lowers the lid of his laptop and studies my face. He’s in a booth today, notes spread out and a half-eaten BLT pushed to the side.
“I’m fine,” I say, topping off his coffee. “Just a rough couple of days.”
“I noticed you weren’t here. Your boss said you were off sick. You feeling well enough to be back?”
I consider lying, but Jamie is the sort of person who can spot a fib at ten paces.
“Yeah, mostly. Just out of it.” Which is close to true.
I’m adrift. The stuff with Eli braided with the home invasion, and then this weird bloated sense of being too loved and not loved enough at the same time. “Are you trying to tell me I look like crap?” I give him a smile, so he knows it’s just a joke. But it lands a little flat.
“You’re too gorgeous to ever look like crap.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “Still, you do seem quiet. And I’d have to be blind not to notice that your guys seem a little more . . . intense today. The big one has been out there since before I got here. He’s sitting in his truck.”
Knox.
Of course Jamie noticed. The man is the size of a small building—he doesn’t exactly blend into the background.
“They’re protective,” I say.
“That’s one word for it.” Jamie smiles, but his eyes stay serious. “You’d tell someone if you were in trouble, right? You wouldn’t just . . . white-knuckle it alone?”
The sincerity in his voice makes my chest ache. I set the coffee pot down and slide into the booth across from him. My section is dead and my boss is in the back, and I need thirty seconds of feeling like a regular person having a regular conversation.
“I haven’t been feeling a hundred percent,” I admit. “Physically and . . . otherwise. I took a couple of days to rest. That’s all.”
“Otherwise?” he repeats. “That’s a word that’s doing a lot of heavy lifting.”
I almost laugh. “You sound like a therapist.”
“I’m a grad student who’s so behind I’m working on my thesis through the summer.
I probably need therapy.” He takes a sip of his coffee.
“Seriously though, you don’t have to tell me anything.
But I’m here. If you need someone who isn’t one of the five very large men who follow you around, I’m here. ”
“Thank you, Jamie. I mean it.”
He nods and goes back to his laptop. I go back to wiping tables that are already clean, and the normalcy of it—the clatter of dishes, the hum of the fridge, the afternoon light coming through the windows—is both a comfort and a lie.
Because nothing about my life is normal right now, and pretending otherwise is getting harder by the day.
It’s been four days since Eli gutted me in Odin’s back room.
Four days since he looked me in the eye and called me easy. Called what we have a phase. Asked if I seriously thought five men could love the same woman and have it mean something.
Those words were like a knife right through my heart, and I still don’t know if I hate him or miss him.
Not knowing is worse than either would be on its own.
When Holden went to him that afternoon, he came home looking like he’d gone twelve rounds with something mean and invisible.
He didn’t tell me much. Just that Eli knew exactly what he’d done and that he was “handling it.”
Which is detective for I have violent thoughts and am exercising restraint so hard it’s giving me an ulcer.
Knox came back close to dawn the next morning, which is later than he normally gets home after his work shift, and I could smell Eli when he climbed into bed and held me—some stupid trace of safety my body recognizes even when my heart wants to spit in his face.
I didn’t say anything.
Knox didn’t offer.
He just tucked himself behind me, one huge arm banded over my waist, and held me with a tension in his body that made it obvious he’d done something. Or almost done something. Maybe both.
I let myself be held anyway.
Which probably says something deeply unflattering about me.
“You missed a spot.”
I blink and look up. Jamie is pointing at a table I’m wiping with the kind of distracted determination usually reserved for exorcisms.
“That’s because I’m providing abstract cleanliness,” I say.
His mouth twitches. “Bold new business model.”
“Very upscale. People pay extra for implied sanitation.”
That gets a laugh out of him, low and warm. It unties a tiny knot in my chest.
The bell over the diner door jingles.
My whole nervous system reacts before my brain catches up—spine straightening, shoulders tightening, pulse kicking once, hard.
Not Eli.
Just a family of four. Summer tourists by the look of them—sunburned shoulders, sand on the floor, kids sticky with soda. I put down my cleaning rag and take them some menus.
The house feels bruised now. Micah has kept me laughing when he could.
Milo’s been feeding me and hovering and making obscene jokes at strategic moments.
Holden watches me like if I blink wrong he’ll drag the whole town into interrogation rooms one by one until somebody confesses to something. And Knox—
He’s gone even quieter.
Which is saying something, because Knox already treats words like they’re a nonrenewable resource. But now there’s a stillness to him that feels sharpened. Honed. Like all that violence he keeps folded up neat inside himself is sitting closer to the surface, waiting for the first excuse.
It would be hot if it weren’t terrifying.
It’s still hot. Obviously. I’m not dead.
I get the family settled, put their order in, and when I glance out the diner windows, Knox’s truck is still there. Parked across the street. Engine off. Dark silhouette behind the windshield.
Watching.
Protecting.
Lurking, if you wanted to be less charitable about it.
My phone buzzes in my apron pocket.
Milo:
Eat something on break or I’ll come in there and breastfeed you myself.
I stare at the text.
Then another comes in.
Milo:
That sounded less weird and threatening in my head.
And then:
Milo:
More nurturing. Earth mother shit.
I bite my lip so I don’t laugh like a lunatic in the middle of the dining room.
Me:
Please never say that to me again.
Three dots appear.
Milo:
Rude. I’d lactate beautifully.
Ethically sourced. Artisanal.
Free range.
Seriously, though. Eat a muffin.
Or a man. I don’t care. Just consume calories.
I tuck my phone away with a helpless smile, appreciating the care.
But I’m just not hungry. It’s like my ability to feel much of anything disappeared the moment Eli called me easy. And that’s not even the worst part.
The worst part isn’t the things Eli said. I can survive cruelty. I’ve been surviving it my whole life.
The worst part is that I believed him.
That his cold detachment has gotten into my head and made a home there.
Frankly, I’m crushed. Gutted.
I’m not going to say Eli is my soulmate.
I don’t believe in soulmates. I believe in gravity, and entropy, and the reality that your DNA is a dice roll and nothing that happens afterward is truly preordained.
But I also know there are people who change the axis of your world, and Eli did that for me whether I wanted him to or not.
In his case, just a look—a look that could slice open your insides and rearrange your self-understanding with a single pass.
Now that axis is empty. I keep waiting for the ache to fade, for the day when I wake up and my heart doesn’t hydraulic ram itself into my ribcage every time I think of him. But it doesn’t.
It’s been four days. Four lifetimes. However you want to count it, it doesn’t fade.
I miss him. God help me, I miss him. I miss the way he called me little savage. I miss his hands on my knees and his forehead against mine and the way he smelled. I miss the version of Eli who crouched in front of me and said you’re not alone in this and meant it with every cell in his body.
I hate that I miss him, because missing him feels like losing an argument I should have won.
I should be madder.
That’s the really humiliating part.
A self-respecting woman gets verbally flayed by a man in front of his terrifying rich murder-boss and then, when she thinks of him, she should feel rage. Acid. A clean righteous hatred.
Instead I feel grief with teeth.
My shift ends at four. I hang up my apron and tell Jamie I’ll see him tomorrow.
He waves back, distracted, typing on his laptop.
When I step outside, Milo has taken over from Knox.
He’s leaning against his car with his arms crossed and his sunglasses on, looking like a catalog model who got lost on his way to a photoshoot.
“Kitten,” he says. “How was work?”
“Uneventful. You?”
“Sold forty-seven dollars’ worth of nails and a leaf blower that I’m pretty sure the guy is going to use to just blow himself. So, standard Saturday.” He opens the passenger door for me. “Knox said you wanted to swing by your apartment?”
“I do. I’m running out of clothes and underwear.”
“Oh, kitten! You should have said. I’m happy to do your washing for you.”
“Thanks, Milo. But that doesn’t solve the problem. I’m running low because you guys keep tearing them off me since you can’t wait two seconds to take them off.”
Milo grins. “In our defense, your pussy is like Christmas morning. Tearing the wrapping is expected.” His teeth gleam. The sun makes his hair look like it has streaks of red in it. It’s criminal how hot he is for someone who can’t make it through breakfast without forty-two side quests.
“Let’s be efficient,” I say, sliding into the passenger seat. “Hit the apartment, grab some essentials, and get back to the house before Holden gets home.”
“Speaking of Holden, has he asked you to go over all those social media images from the party? See if you recognize anyone or if we can narrow down who this Stephen guy is.”
I pick at my cuticle. “He has. I just haven’t had the headspace for it.”
“Fair. But it’s kinda important, kitten. We need to figure out who the bad guy is.”
“I know, I know. And I’m sorry. I’ll sit down with him tonight, okay? But I won’t be doing anything if we don’t hurry up and go get my stuff.”