And weirdly, when I picture the two of them alone together, jealousy isn’t what hits me first.
It’s worry.
Because I don’t just stand to lose Sierra here. I could lose all of it. Her, them, whatever this is becoming.
With two people, it’s complicated enough. With four, everything multiplies. Every feeling, every misunderstanding, every risk.
If this is going to work, it has to be built on honesty. On trust. On actually giving a damn about each other.
Otherwise, it collapses. Simple as that.
“Aren’t you worried?” I ask, watching as Talon dips his head back into the engine.
He glances at me.
“I mean about this… relationship,” I say. “It’s your first time in one. I bet it’s not what you expected, huh?”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t have any expectations.”
“What?”
“I didn’t expect anything,” he says calmly. “So, it doesn’t defy expectation.”
I blink. “What does that mean? You just thought you’d be alone for the rest of your life or something?”
He shrugs, and the casualness of it hits harder than if he’d made a big deal out of it. That really is what he thought.
And when I think about it, it makes sense. He spent the first twenty-five years of his life barely talking to anyone—just his grandmother and a handful of people he did business with intown. Silence and loneliness weren’t the things he feared. They were the things he already lived with.
The first time I met him, I genuinely thought he was deaf or mute. He didn’t say a word, just grunted or gestured in response, and that was on a good day. Sometimes he wouldn’t respond at all. I remember wondering how the hell Reid managed to do business with him if they couldn’t even communicate properly.
I even went as far as teaching myself some basic sign language, read up on selective mutism, tried to figure out how to meet him where he was.
Then one day Reid invited him to lunch with us, and right in the middle of the meal, Talon looked straight at me and, in perfect tone and cadence, asked me to pass the salt.
The look on my face must’ve been priceless, because Reid nearly choked laughing. Talon cracked a smile too, just enough to let me know I’d been played from the start.
That was the moment I decided we were going to be friends. Whether he liked it or not.
Even after that, he never turned into a big talker. Not with strangers, not even with people he knew unless he had something worth saying. You don’t spend that many years alone on a mountain and come back suddenly ready for small talk and polite society.
But I pushed him anyway.
Once we started working together, I dragged him into town, into bars, into conversations he didn’t want to have. I made him try.
He was terrible at it. Painfully so.
But he’s good-looking in a muscular kind of way, and he’s got that quiet, brooding thing going on, and there’s always a certain kind of woman who’s drawn to that. Still waters running deep, that sort of thing, so he got by. Not so much because of his charm, more in spite of his complete lack of it.
And once things got physical, that part at least wasn’t a problem. He figured that out fast.
Still, none of the rest ever stuck. He never learned how to keep someone, never showed any real interest in trying. No dates, no follow-ups, nothing that looked like a relationship.
So yeah, he’d already made peace with being alone.
Then Sierra showed up.
And suddenly that whole assumption just… cracked open.