I go still.
“I won’t make that mistake again.” He finishes the wing and reaches for another. “So if you have something to say—anything to explain or confess—you say it to Cora. Not me. If she lets you.” His eyes are still black, still fathomless. “And if she doesn’t let you? That’s the pill you swallow.”
The server returns with Rex’s second burger. He nods his thanks, takes a massive bite, chews, swallows.
“Then why are you telling me this?” I ask. “Why tell me about the fake dating at all?”
Rex sets down the burger and leans forward again. “Because I see what it’s costing her. Every single day you’re there, working beside her, existing in her space—it’s tearing her apart.”
He picks up a fry, examines it. “This conversation? This is me protecting her too. Giving you information. Giving you a chance to understand what you’re dealing with and what’s at stake.”
He eats the fry.
“So maybe,” he continues, voice dropping even lower, “you’ll finally have theskinto actually talk to her. Without worrying I’ll be jealous. Without whatever excuse you’ve been telling yourself.”
The word lands with deliberate weight. Skin, not guts or balls, even. Skin.
The thing I shed and reclaim. The thing that defines what I am.
“I don’t need you to make me another obstacle to whatever you’re doing here, Muir. I never was, and I refuse to be now or going forward.”
The server appears again with a refill for Rex’s beer. He drains the last of the first one and slides it toward her, taking the fresh glass with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes.
“I’m not here to hurt her,” I say quietly.
“Then be all in.” Rex’s voice is flat. Final. He takes a long drink. “A hundred percent. No half-measures. No middle ground that looks like kindness but isn’t. You stay, you show up, you do the work.” He sets the glass down. “Or you leave now and never come back.”
“I’m all in.”
He holds my gaze for another three seconds, still holding a half-eaten fry. Then he leans back.
The server arrives with onion rings.
Rex’s entire demeanor shifts. The predator vanishes. His shoulders relax, dropping back to their normal span.
The fathomless black recedes from his eyes, replaced by warm brown. His teeth return to human proportions. He’s all smiles and sunshine once more, that golden retriever enthusiasm rising again like the sun.
He thanks the server with genuine warmth, reaching for an onion ring, making an appreciative sound.
“God, these are perfect,” he says, like he didn’t just threaten to dismember me and dissect my entire moral character two minutes ago. “You want some? They do this beer batter thing?—”
I stare at him.
He grins and takes another ring, then reaches for his burger.
I pick up my beer and drink, watching him demolish food with the casual efficiency of someone who burns through calories like a furnace.
The whiplash from bloodthirsty protector to cheerful eating companion is genuinely impressive. His muscles work as he eats, easy and unselfconscious, the physical confidence of someone who’s never questioned his place in the world.
He signals the server for more wings.
“You’re terrifying,” I say.
“I know.” He doesn’t look up from his food. “But I’m also right.”
He is.
I have work to do.