He wasn't mortal, he couldn't be.
“Are you from Oversight?”
“Not exactly.”
“Are you a reaper?”
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“Curious.” Noah smiled. A car rushed by at high speed and the wind stirred his hair. “I'm not anything you have to fear. Just answerthe question.”
The question… right.
Greg was still here because…
Because Dustin held him together last night. Because Dustin's hands on his face and Dustin's voice sayingstay with mehad been enough to reverse what should have been irreversible. Because even now, forty miles away, something about the fact that Dustin was waiting for him—that there was a place to go back to, a person expecting him—was keeping the edges from fraying all the way.
“I'm here because I have a reason to be here,” he said.
“And that's why you need your clipboard back?”
“Yes.”
“And what will you do with it once you have it?”
“I'll...” Greg started, and then the words stalled.
He couldn't lie and say he'd go back to work. He could never go back to work now. He'd known that when he left this highway without his clipboard. Maybe he'd even known it in the ice cream parlor, when he'd wanted a kiss more than he'd wanted to get his job done.
Noah watched him with patient, unreadable eyes.
“I just don't want to dissolve,” Greg said honestly. “I need more time.”
“Time for what?”
“To figure out what's protecting Dustin. Something is interfering with the natural order and I was assigned to?—”
“Grigoreth.” Noah said his name gently, but the gentleness had something firm to it. “I'm not asking what you were assigned to do. I'm asking what you want time for.”
The highway hummed beside them. A truck roared past, shaking the guardrail, and Noah didn't flinch. Greg's edges rippled in the displaced air and he pressed his hands against his thighs to keep them solid.
“I want to protect him,” Greg said quietly. “I want more time with him.”
There it was. The raw, stupid, terrifying truth.
Greg wanted to go back to the motel. He wanted to sit across from Dustin at a restaurant and watch him explain what a taco was. He wanted to exist in the same space as someone who made him feel like existing was worth the effort.
Noah studied him for a moment. Then he smiled.
“Good.” He held out the clipboard.
Greg took it. The moment his fingers closed around it, he felt more solid. The anchor caught and held, pulling him back into definition, his edges sharpening, his hands going opaque. The relief was so sudden and so total that his knees almost buckled.
He stood there clutching the clipboard to his chest with both hands, breathing hard, solid.
“Thank you,” he managed.
