Page 72 of Fate, Interrupted

Logan steps back.

“Be careful,” he says. Same two words everyone keeps arriving at independently—my father, my brother, probably Greer if he had any interest in stating the obvious. “With her. With yourself.”

He turns and walks back into the warehouse, his boots steady on the concrete.

I watch him go and think: he’s right about everything and I’m going to do it anyway. That’s the part I can’t tell him. That’s the part that would really worry him.

For one irrational second, all I want to do is get back in my truck and drive to Norah’s. But I don’t. I pick up the clipboard someone left on the dock, and I go inside instead.

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.