I should have said something sharp. I had something sharp somewhere in the back of my mouth, the usual thing, the deflection, and I didn't say it, because my eyes were doing that thing they did sometimes without consulting me. I was watching Cross's jaw, his mouth. I caught myself doing it and looked back up and found him already back at me.
The moment stretched out in the loud dark of the bar like something pulled too tight.
Neither of us moved.
Then the crowd moved for us.
The dance floor surged the way it surged when the song changed and everyone recalibrated at once, this wave of bodies pressing outward, and someone hit me from behind, not hard, just the thoughtless momentum of people moving in the same direction, and I went forward.
Into Cross.
My hand came up against his chest by instinct, catching myself, and his hand came to my arm, steadying, and for a second we were close, closer than the table had put us. My hand was flat against the front of his shirt, his fingers wrapped around my arm, and I could feel him breathe.
I looked up.
He was looking down.
The bar kept going around us, completely indifferent. His hand was on my arm, and my hand was on his chest, and I could feel his heartbeat under my palm.
It wasn’t steady.
His heartbeat wasn’t the controlled, metronomic thing I would have expected from Cross. No, it was something faster than that.
Neither of us moved for a moment. Then someone laughed loudly somewhere to my left and the spell broke the way spells broke—all at once. I stepped back, and he let go. We were two feet apart again with the bar noise rushing back in to fill the space between us.
His hand dropped to his side.
I looked at my own hand. The one that had been on his chest. I put it in my pocket.
"You're compensating," he said again. Like he hadn't stopped. Like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened and he was just continuing the sentence from before.
Except his voice was slightly different. Just slightly. A fraction lower. A fraction less certain.
I heard it. I was drunk but I heard it.
"Go home, Wesley."
He held my gaze for one moment that neither of us filled.
Then he turned and walked back toward the wall, back toward the training staff guy and his drink and his general existence as a person who had come here for reasons he was apparently not going to give me.
I watched him go and thought about his heartbeat under my palm, fast and human and not steady at all.
I stood in the middle of the bar.
The guy with the good shoulders materialized at my elbow.
"Hey." He nodded in the direction Cross had gone. "What's the deal with you two?"
I laughed.
It came out just slightly off, the way things went when you hadn't prepared for a question. "No deal. He hates me."
The guy watched Cross across the room. "Huh."
I got another drink.
I did not think about what I'd felt under my hand.
