"You helped cause the situation."
"The Gold House guy started it—"
"And then you escalated it very enthusiastically—"
"I was responding to instinct—"
"And then Alex fixed it," Leo says, spreading his hands in the gesture of someone making a very simple point. "You're welcome. She worked very hard on that table."
Torres looks at me. "Thank you," he says, with great sincerity and a slight air of lingering trauma.
"You're welcome," I say.
"I'm going to be normal about it," he says. "Starting now."
Jake makes a sound. It takes me a moment to identify it because I've never heard it before.
He's laughing.
Not performing it — actually laughing, low and brief, at his food, his shoulders moving with it. Jim looks at him and something in his face does the thing that is not quite a smile but is significantly more than neutral.
Torres points at Jake.
Jake stops laughing but continues to look extremely unbothered.
"Everyone at this table is terrible," Torres says.
Leo puts his arm around Torres's shoulders briefly, the gesture of a man bestowing wisdom. "Let me introduce you to our female alpha," he says. "Do not fuck with her. Do not fuck with us. She will absolutely end you." He releases him. "You're welcome for the warning."
***
The conversation moves the way dinner conversations move when everyone is deliberately choosing to be present rather than anywhere else. Leo talks about the coursework with Jake, which he has Opinions about, and extracts more sympathy from Torres than from anyone else at the table because Torres is new to Leo's particular relationship with academic material and hasn't yet learned not to engage.
"The module assumes a baseline knowledge that I simply do not have," Leo says. "I have practical knowledge. I have field experience. What I do not have is the educational vocabulary to describe experiences I have been having successfully for years."
"So you failed the module," I say.
"I failed the module with significant contextual nuance."
“Just do it again Leo.” Jim says quietly.
Everyone looks at Jim.
Jake looks at his food. "Cal is good at his job." He says it flat, factual, stripped of everything except the information itself. "You can ask for help."
Jim goes still beside him. He doesn't say anything. He reaches for his water and drinks it and I watch the careful attention he pays to Jake when Jake isn't looking.
I look back at my food.
Leo looks at me. I look at him. Neither of us says anything.
Something sits warm in my chest anyway.
***
At some point the conversation thins out into the comfortable near-silence of people who have run out of words but haven't run out of wanting to be in the same place. Jake and Jim sit close, not talking, the ease between them something I can feel from across the table.
I watch Dalton's eyes move around the table and find each person and check them off some internal list, and then find me, and stay.
