Page 43 of Fate, Interrupted

The prickling at the back of my neck intensifies. Not fear, I decide, cataloguing it as honestly as I can. Awareness. The physical awareness of being in a space where I’m the only human and everyone else knows it.

They’ve all stopped working and are staring openly at me now.

“My name is Norah,” I say.

The man at the railing lifts his eyebrows.

Nothing happens for a moment.

Then the man at the railing lifts his eyebrows, his face moving — not surprise exactly, more the expression of a piece of information arriving in a place where it was expected.

“Well,” he says, more to himself than to anyone else.

Matt glances at him. “What?”

“Nothing,” he says, although the grin he is trying to suppress says otherwise. He leans toward Matt and says something I can’t hear, his voice dropping below the ambient noise of the dock.

Matt looks back at me dangerously close to smiling. “Is that right?”

I fold my arms. “Anything funny you’d like to share with the class?”

“Not funny,” the second man says quickly. “Unexpected.” He straightens slightly. “What do you want with Silas?”

“That’s between me and Silas,” I say.

Matt makes a sound that is technically not a laugh. “You hear that?” he says to the second man. “Between her and Silas.”

“I heard it,” the second man says. He looks at me for another moment. “You sure you want us to get him?”

“I’m sure.”

“Because once we call him out here,” Matt says, “you’re committed.”

His voice carries through the open bay. The men around me stop pretending they aren’t interested.

I meet his gaze without looking away. My tone is tight, bordering on anger. “Then I guess you’d better call him.”

He holds my gaze for a beat, and I think he sees the human version of a she-wolf about to pop. His expression looks like he’s running a quick calculation. He turns toward the open warehouse.

“Silas.”

The name goes into the building, and the dock goes quiet around it, the human activity on the platform pausing, waiting to see what comes next.

I stand in the open space with every eye still on me, and finally admit why I drove across Larkin this morning.

It wasn’t, if I’m being fully honest with myself, only to tell him I’m not afraid of him.

It wasn’t purely, or even primarily, to clear the air.

I needed to see him again. I need to see his face when he realizes I came after him instead of walking away.

And I need to know what happens when we’re standing in front of each other again, because whatever this is between us stopped feeling casual several days ago.

Silas has skipped several steps, and somehow I’m the one who drove across town to find him.

My stomach tightens. This is what I came for—the honest accounting of it. Terrifying, but honest.

I’ve been in relationships. Two that lasted longer than a year. None of them felt like this, this fast, this completely. With the others there was a reasonable progression: interest, then time, then actually knowing the man.