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She looks at me.

For a long time. A genuinely long time, the kind that other people would rush to fill with more words. I‘ve learned not to. I wait.

Her eyes move over my face. She’s checking for the lie. She’s looking for the seam where the manipulation lives, the place where I’m playing an angle she hasn‘t found yet. I know what she’s doing. I know her method.

I don’t give her anything more. I let her look.

Because that other angle?

There’s something there. I just don’t have the fucking words for it, and if I don’t have the words for it, there’s no fucking chance she does.

Finally, she reaches across the table. She picks up a piece of bacon — the last piece, the crispest one, the one I left on the plate because I knew she’d want it — and she takes a slow, deliberate bite.

The crunch of it fills the quiet kitchen.

She chews. Swallows. The corners of her lips quiver. Just a moment. Her eyes, when she meets mine again, are not warm. Not yet. Maybe never.

“You make great bacon, Wraith.”

Chapter Twelve

June

Bacon is the answer.

Because bacon is always the answer.

That’s the problem. I chew the last bite and the crunch of it fills the quiet and I look at my plate and I look at his plate and I look at the rooster mug with the orange juice and I think: this is the first time he has ever cooked for me. In the entire catastrophic arc of our relationship — a relationship that I have described to my reflection in various gas station bathroom mirrors as “a dumpster fire inside a tire fire inside a larger, dumber fire” — he has never once cooked for me. He used to take me places occasionally. Decent places, sometimes, with napkins that weren’t made of paper, which I now understand was a control thing, a this-is-what-I-provide-so-you-owe-me thing, dressed up as a sick interpretation of romance and care.

But cook for me? Set a plate of food in front of me made by his own hands and without me even asking?

Never.

I look across the table at Dylan Mercer, who is watching me with those pale gray eyes and not saying anything, and I think: I could put him back in the cuffs. I have them. They‘re right there. The bag from The Love Hole is still sitting on the floor by the nightstand, a monument to my first full night of responsible adulthood where I told my brother I was going to an orgy party to pee on a guy.

“Fine,” I say.

He raises an eyebrow.

“You can stay un-cuffed. For now. Don’t make me regret it.”

“I’ll try,” he says.

“Try really hard.”

“Always do.”

I look at him for a moment, trying to find the trap in it. The angle. The particular glint in his eye that used to precede something I’d end up regretting. But his face is just his face, and maybe it doesn’t look so bad, and maybe the morning light is just the morning light, and there’s egg in my hair and there was bacon on my plate and there is something in my sternum is doing something small and warm that I absolutely do not trust.

I feel… not threatened.

Not the way I always used to.

Not the specific cold-water feeling of someone watching for the right moment to remind me of the shape of my cage. He’s just sitting there. Eating. Breathing. Existing in my apartment like a person and not a problem, and the confusion of that is more destabilizing than everything else combined. Violence, I know how to handle. This — whatever this is — I don‘t.

It scares me more than the knife did.

Then my body, which has been a fairly good sport about everything up to this point, decides it’s done being a good sport.