“You don’t know which way I’m going.”
“I’m going the same way regardless.”
Sidney finally gets the lock to turn. It clicks, reluctant and defeated, and he pockets the key and straightens up and turns to face Erath fully. Despite the bruise that is a gradient of purple and black from his undereye to his jaw, despite the swollen edge of his lip and the way he’s holding his body so carefully that every breath is a calculation, he does not look the least bit fragile. He stares Erath down with the full weight of a man who has something to say and is going to say it.
“I don’t go home with men who smoke.”
Is he flirting?
Erath looks at him. Holds his gaze. The sentence is hanging between them, delivered with the dryness that Sidney seems to bring to everything, and Erath doesn’t know if it’s a joke or a boundary or an invitation disguised as a challenge, and the not-knowing is electrifying in a way that nothing has been electrifying in a very, very long time.
He drops his cigarette on the ground and grinds the blue flame out with the toe of his shoe. Deliberate. Unhurried. He looks back up at Sidney and says, “Just quit.”
Sidney stares at him. The corners of his mouth do something complicated. A twitching, a suppression, the visible effort of someone who wants to react and is refusing to give the satisfaction. He holds it for three full seconds before it breaks and his mouth curves, just barely, and he shakes his head and starts walking.
Erath falls into step beside him.
He matches his pace to Sidney’s, which is slower than Sidney clearly wants it to be. Every step is costing him. He’s paying for each one out of a reserve of stubbornness that must be deep because the reserve shows no signs of running out, and Erath walks beside him and doesn’t offer to slow down because offering would acknowledge the pain and acknowledging the pain would be something Sidney would have to accept or reject and either option would require him to drop the composure and Sidney is not going to drop the composure. Erath understands this. He’s met approximately three people in his existence who have this quality, this absolute refusal to be seen as weakened, and the other two were not human and not nearly this interesting.
They walk in silence for a block. Another. The Old City is quiet around them, amber streetlamps and cobblestones and the sound of their footsteps.
Sidney avoids the alley. He crosses to the other side of the street before they reach it, a deliberate, unhesitating detour that tells Erath this is not the first time Sidney has rerouted himself around a place where something bad happened, and the thought lands heavy because it implies there have been other places, other detours, other bad things. Erath positions himself between Sidney and the alley opening. Sidney notices. He glances at Erath’s placement, at the way Erath has angled his body between Sidney and the dark, and something moves across his face. Something complicated and quiet that he doesn’t comment on.
Another block. Then Sidney huffs out a breath that’s almost a laugh.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“I go by Erath.”
“Is that your real name?”
“Is your favorite color hot pink?”
Sidney laughs. Actually laughs, a short, surprised sound that he tries to suppress and can’t quite manage, and it turns into a wince halfway through as the motion pulls at his ribs and his hand presses against his side. He ducks his head, just slightly, and shoves his hands deeper into his jacket, and the laugh is still there in the shape of his mouth even after the sound has gone, and Erath catalogs this too. The laugh. The way it changed his face. The way it made the bruise look smaller, less significant, as though the act of laughing had briefly rearranged the hierarchy of what mattered on Sidney’s face and the bruise had been demoted.
This is Erath’s problem. His problem is not the Coven, although the Coven is a problem. His problem is not Penny’s custody arrangement, although that is also a problem. His problem is that he came to this bar tonight because a file in the back of his mind refused to close and he’d told himself he was coming for strategic reasons, to assess the threat level, to check on the human who’d been entangled in his daughter’s situation, and the strategic reasons had been a lie and he’d known it before Erath had put out a cigarette he’d been smoking for the better part of a thousand years because a bruised bartender with a pretty mouth told him to.
He is in an enormous amount of trouble. He’d known it in the apartment, looking at the pink toenails. He’d known it on the ceiling, staring at the stone and failing to forget. He knows it now, walking beside this man through the Old City, watching him wince and refuse to acknowledge the wince and keep walking and keep talking and keep being, relentlessly, exactly who he is. Sidney is brave and broken and dry-witted and stubborn and he looks at Erath with an eyebrow raised and zero deference and the combination is doing something to the architecture of Erath’s composure that hasn’t been done since Angelica, and the comparison terrifies him and doesn’t stop him.
They reach the brick building. Sidney punches in the code. He turns to Erath and his expression is careful, practiced, the face he puts on when he’s about to end an interaction.
“Thanks for walking me home,” Sidney says.
“We need to talk, Sidney.”
Sidney’s jaw tightens. His lips press together and his shoulders square and Erath can see him deciding whether to argue, weighing the cost against the outcome. He doesn’t argue. He holds the door.
Four flights. The carpet is still the worst thing Erath has ever seen. Sidney’s pace slows on the third flight, each step careful, and he grips the railing on the fourth and Erath watches the white of his knuckles and says nothing. He could offer to help. He could offer his arm, his hand, his strength. He doesn’t, for the same reason he said nothing about the pain in the street, and that reason is one he is still refusing to examine.
The apartment is the same. Small, warm, the ring stain on the coffee table and the bookshelf and the blanket folded on the couch where Penny had slept. Sidney goes straight to the kitchen and puts coffee on without asking if Erath wants any and gestures vaguely at the couch. Erath sits. He settles into the cushion where his daughter once slept, crosses one leg over the other, props his chin on his fist, and waits.
Sidney brings two mugs. He hands Erath the plain one and keeps the one with a cartoon dog on it and lowers himself onto the opposite end of the couch with a controlled exhale that barely conceals the hiss underneath. He’s taken off his jacket. His arms are scraped, road rash from the alley, but mostly fine. It’s the way he’s holding his torso that tells the real story, rigid and locked in, every movement an insurmountable project.
“Let’s get this over with,” Sidney says. “What do you want to talk about? The weather?”
“I heard you had a run-in with the Coven.”
Sidney’s jaw works. “I did. But I didn’t tell them anything, so don’t worry.”
