I don't look happy.
But I look like someone who's about to do something brave.
I grab my jacket and walk out the door.
Chapter 10
Silas
I stand on the sidewalk for four minutes after he walks away.
I count. It's the only thing my brain can do that isn't replaying the sound of his voice going flat, it's fine, don't worry about it, the customer service mask sliding over his face like a door closing. Like something I'd spent a week carefully opening had been shut and locked from the inside.
My lion is furious. Not at Devin, at me. The low steady warmth that's been building all week has turned into something sharp and agitated, pacing behind my ribs, snarling at the part of my brain that opened its mouth and ruined everything.
I get on my bike. Ride to the bar. Don't remember the ride.
The bar is quiet. It's always quiet, because the bar isn't really a bar. It's the pride's living room with taps and a pool table and sixty years of oak. Nobody comes here who isn't family.
Knox is behind the bar. Ezra's on his stool with his tea and his laptop. Nico's beside him, working through NSRC case files, their shoulders touching. Jason's in the kitchen. Vaughn's somewhere, garage, probably. The bar smells like oak and cooking oil and years of people crammed into not enough room.
Knox looks at me. One look. His face changes.
"What happened?"
"Nothing."
"Silas."
"I fucked up."
He pours me a beer without asking. Sets it on the bar. Waits.
I don't know how to explain it. The walk, the conversation, the kiss that escalated. His back against the wall and his hips rolling against mine and the sound he made, that small wrecked sound that went straight through me. How good it was. How right. How my hands knew exactly where to go and his body responded like we'd been doing this for years instead of hours.
And then my brain. My stupid, responsible, thirty-two-year-old brain catching up to what my body was doing. He turned twenty-one yesterday. He lives in a shelter. He has nothing and you have everything and he said don't stop without hesitation and what does that mean? What does it mean when someone with no safety net says don't stop to the person who represents safety?
"I was kissing him," I say. "Against a wall. It was good. And then I stopped."
Knox's expression doesn't change. "Why?"
"Because he's twenty-one. Because yesterday he was twenty. Because he lives in a youth shelter and has three shirts and a countdown clock to homelessness and I had him against a brick wall and he would have let me do anything."
"And?"
"And that's — Knox, the power imbalance —"
"What power imbalance?"
I stare at him. "He has nothing. I have a home, a pride, stability. He —"
"He has a job," Knox says evenly. "A plan. A timeline. A brain that works. He's not a child, Silas."
"I know he's not a child —"
"Do you?" Knox leans on the bar. "Because pulling away from him in the middle of a kiss and telling him it's because he's twenty-one, that's treating him like a child. That's you deciding he can't know his own mind."
"That's not what I —"