"I was just passing by and saw the door was open. Is Nezara around?" Lorkin asked Theeodus.
Then he saw me.
I watched it happen, the exact half second his whole body clocked that I was standing three feet off at the counter. And he did the opposite of what I'd just done.
Nothing in him shut down. Something opened instead, sure and unhurried, the face of a male who'd ducked into a room and found the one thing he'd been hoping was in it. His weight came toward me before he'd decided to move it. My name was already on his lips, warm, like I was a thing a person got to be openly glad about, in daylight, in front of the clerk and the pen and the open file.
I held my face bored and put everything I had into one look.Don't.
He stopped. Not all at once. I watched the gladness hit the flat of my stare and not understand it, watched him reach for the why and come up with nothing, and then watched him do the hardest thing there was, which was trust me without it. The warmth banked. He went still and careful, a big male gone unreadable, waiting on me to tell him the rest.
"Smith." Theeodus gave him the harried politeness he gave everyone. "I'll only be a few minutes. Unless it's urgent?"
"It'll keep." Lorkin's gaze touched me again and slid off. "Morning," he said to me, and put nothing in it, because I'd told him to.
"Morning," I said back, just as empty.
One flat syllable, and the male who'd held me all night was a stranger I half-knew.
It should have been a small thing, pretending not to know somebody.
People manage it all the time. But there's nothing small about standing an arm's length from the male you've been wrapped around every night, holding your face bored and your hands at your sides, while every nerve you own strains toward him, the one warm thing in a freezing room.
I could feel where he was without looking. I always could.
I kept my chin down and my mouth shut and did not look, and it was the hardest performance I've ever turned in, and I once convinced a roomful of people I was having the best night of my life.
He didn't know why I was there. I could see him working it, fast as I had, coming up with nothing good. He'd come for Nezara, for reasons I suspected were similar to mine, and walked into me instead.
I willed him hard not to say my name like it meant anything. Not to look at me at all, not in here. Not in front of the man with the forms.
I barely remember getting out of there. Theeodus was saying something about corporate, and backlogs, and coming back when Nezara returned. "Of course," I heard myself say, warm as anything. "Whenever's good. I'm not going anywhere." My face did its trick without me. Lorkin said almost nothing at all, and then the propped door was behind us and we were standing in the churned mud of the main street, not touching.
"Walk," he said under his breath. "Meet me past the cider house."
We did one more bit of theater, him one way, me the other, and found each other in the windy gap between the cider house and the butcher. He put one huge hand flat against the wall beside my head, not touching me, just close, just breathing, and I understood that he wanted to and wouldn't, not here, not where anyone could come around the corner.
"What was that?" he asked low. "You looked at me like I'd put a hand to a hot forge."
"Because you nearly did." I kept it quiet to match him. "You came through that door lit up like it was Christmas. One glad look in front of that clerk and his pen, and I'm gone."
"What are you talking about?"
"It's the stupid contract." I made myself say it plainly, with no patter to hide in. "A bride caught with a male who isn't her intended doesn't get a failed placement and another go. She gets removed, dumped on the next ship out."
It took him a second. Then his face did the thing mine must have done at the counter: the drop, the floor going out.
"They'd take you." Barely a question.
"For us. Yeah." I tried for wry, but my voice cracked.
He was quiet for a moment, and I could practically see his mind churning over options. "We need Zarcal to break the contract before someone realizes..." he didn't need to name what we'd been doing. I could feel his fingers imprinted in places no one would ever see.
"You think he'll do it?"
"I think he owes you that much. Chloe, do--" whatever he was going to ask, he cut himself off.
"What?" I pressed.
