He brings my coffee refill at 2:15. I didn't ask for one. He just noticed my cup was empty and brought it.
"How is it?" he asks, nodding at the book.
"Forty pages. Already destroyed."
His face lights up, the sudden animation that comes when someone engages with him about something he loves. "Wait until you get to Jehane. She's — I can't even describe her. Just keep reading."
"No spoilers."
"No spoilers. But you're going to need tissues."
"You said it would destroy me in a good way."
"I said by a book, always. I didn't say you wouldn't cry." He's almost grinning, and it opens him up, makes him look like the person he probably is underneath the careful politeness and the customer service voice and the thin jacket. "When you get to chapter twelve, text me. I need to know your reaction in real time."
"I don't have your number."
He freezes. The grin flickers. Not disappearing, but shifting. The realization of what he just said, what he just implied. That he wants me to text him. That he wants to be connected to me outside of this café, this library, the physical spaces where we overlap.
"I —" he starts.
"Here." I pull out my phone, open a new contact, hand it to him.
He stares at it. Then he types his number in with careful, steady fingers. Hands it back. The contact says DEVIN with a book emoji next to it.
"For chapter twelve emergencies only," he says. Trying to make it light. Trying to take back the weight of what just happened.
"Chapter twelve emergencies only," I agree.
He goes back to the counter. I save the contact and don't look at my phone again for forty-five minutes, which is a personal record in restraint.
* * *
Tuesday night. The bar.
"You've been at the library every day for a week," Ezra says. Not accusatory, observational. Ezra notices patterns the way some people notice weather. It's just data to him.
"I read at the library."
"You read here. You read in your room. You read on the back porch when it's not raining." He's doing the bar's books on his laptop, Nico beside him cross-referencing something on his own screen. "But sure. The library."
Knox doesn't say anything. He's in the doorway of his office, coffee in hand, listening without appearing to listen. That's his thing, the ambient alpha, the man who absorbs information through walls.
"Is this about Robin's barista?" Jason asks from the kitchen. He's plating something that smells like rosemary and butter. "The one who reads?"
"Who told you about —"
"Robin," everyone says simultaneously.
Of course. Robin, who can't keep a secret unless it actually matters, and who apparently decided that Silas talking to a human being is newsworthy enough to broadcast to the entire pride.
"He's a reader," I say. "We recommend books to each other. That's it."
"That's a lot, for you," Ezra says mildly. "You recommended a book to Nico once and then didn't speak to him for three days."
"Nico doesn't read fiction."
"I read the one you gave me," Nico says, not looking up from his laptop. "The butler one. It was devastating."