Page 9 of Night Shift

Erebus watches from the bar while I finish my closing tasks with my usual half-tired efficiency.

“You know, most customers come here because they want caffeine.”

“I have caffeine.”

“Most customers also eventually leave.”

“I have noticed.”

I look at him, and he looks back with such complete seriousness that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

At midnight, I flip the sign to CLOSED.

“You don’t have to go home,” I tell him, “but you can’t stay here.”

Erebus stands slowly. “I have no home.”

The answer catches me off guard. “No home at all?”

“Not in the sense you mean.”

There’s clearly a story there, but something tells me Erebus could take six hundred years to tell it, and I have a load of laundry waiting upstairs that has already spent two days becoming part of the furniture.

I grab my bag and tuck the night’s tips into the inside pocket.

“Where are you going now?”

“I had not decided.”

He pauses before asking, “Do you require an escort?”

His tone is so grave I almost miss the fact that he’s asking to walk me home. I weigh it for a second, not out of any actual fear, but because accepting an escort from a man I’ve met exactly twice would normally rank high on the list of Ways Women Become Cautionary Podcasts.

Then again, this is Blackthorn Bay.

Besides, nothing about Erebus frightens me.

“Sure,” I say. “But only if you don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“I never make anything larger than it is,” he deadpans.

I let out a little bark of laughter before he holds the door open for me.

Outside, the fog has dropped in to settle like a used blanket over everything. I feel the mist right through my coat, but nothing seems to land on him. We walk side by side down Kingfisher Street, the silence between us not awkward so much as deliberate, like we’re holding our words for when they really matter.

He doesn’t ask about my life, so naturally, I volunteer it.

“I grew up here, you know. Same town, same house, same everything. Most people talk about leaving Blackthorn and coming back someday, but I never even got around to the leaving part.”

“Do you wish you had?”

“Sometimes,” I admit, surprised by how easily the truth comes out.

My parents died when I was young, Mom when I was seventeen and Dad a couple of years later, and by the time I might have considered going somewhere else, I had the house, the bills, and a freezer full of casseroles from every neighbor in town. Life has a way of making decisions for you while you’re still trying to figure out what the choices are.

“I am sorry,” Erebus says.

“Don’t be. I survived.”