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"Leave while you're still standing right in front of me."

That got him. Barely. A slight tightening through his shoulders, but after four days of almost nothing I caught it. Before I could talk myself out of it, I reached out and settled my palm between his shoulder blades. Right where his wings should have been.

River froze. Every muscle beneath my hand locked so suddenly that my breath caught. It wasn't the instinctive flinch of someone startled by a touch. His body had recognized something before his mind could stop it and braced, as though whatever came next was going to hurt him.

My anger cracked straight down the middle. I didn't move my hand. Neither did he step away from my touch. Cold seeped through his shirt into my palm and then deeper, until my fingertips started to ache, and a thin ribbon of frost crawled along the metal edge of the dryer beside him. I swallowed against the pressure building in my throat and pressed a little more firmly against his back. Not enough to push him. Just enough that he'd know I hadn't pulled away.

"River."

"Hazel." My name carried a warning, and something underneath it I couldn't identify. Pain, maybe. Or fear.

I nearly pulled away. Instead I kept my hand where it was.

"I'm not asking you to talk about it in detail. I mean it. Whatever they did to you in that place belongs to you until you're ready to give it words, and I'm not going to drag it out of you because I'm uncomfortable with not knowing."

The cold eased by a fraction as he took a breath under my palm that came easier than the last one had. Good, I thought. He's listening.

"But I've watched you for four days, River. You've driven the truck, brought me coffee, watched every doorway, made sure nothing got close enough to touch me. You've done everything you normally do." I swallowed around the ache gathering in my throat. "Except be here with me."

He turned beneath my hand, slowly enough that I had no choice but to let it happen.

"I am here." There was no anger in his voice, which made me want to cry.

"I know. That's the problem." My chest tightened as the truth assembled itself faster than I could stop it. "You're here enough to protect me. Here enough to make sure I eat, to check the motel windows twice before you sleep, to put yourself between me and anything you don't trust. But you've spent four days acting like the rest of you is somewhere I can't reach."

River stared at me while the laundromat hummed around us, and I suddenly wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

"You've had rather more important things to worry about than me."

"That isn't your decision to make." His expression changed, and I knew I'd hit the nail on the head. "You don't get to decide you're one more thing I can't afford to worry about and quietly remove yourself from my to-do list."

"Hazel…"

"No. You spent four hundred years learning that people shouldn't make choices for somebody else, you said it yourself. And then apparently decided the rule doesn't apply when you're the one being noble about it."

Irritation flickered across his face, and I almost smiled.

There you fucking are, Blackman.

"You're being extremely difficult."

"I'm trying." I grinned at him. "Is it working?"

"Spectacularly."

The familiar dryness loosened the knot behind my ribs.

I folded my arms and looked at him. Really looked. "I miss you, asshole."

The words escaped before I could stop them, and River went very still again. Apparently, there were multiple kinds of River stillness and I had just discovered a new one. I looked away first. "That came out wrong." If the ground could open and swallow me I'd be grateful, thank you very much.

"Did it?" The change in his voice made my heart trip.

I glanced back. Some of the exhaustion remained, but something warmer had slipped beneath it, and it was far too interested in the fact that I'd just handed him a weapon.

"Yes. Very wrong."

"Pity, that." A slow smile touched his mouth, and Hecate help me, I'd missed that too. He took one step closer. I stayed where I was. "You miss me."