Sidney bristles. He turns back to the stove and flips a pancake harder than necessary. “And what exactly did you want me to do? Close the door on a literal child and tell her to find her own way home? Hope the boogeyman doesn’t get her on her way out?”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have come here.” Erath’s voice is strained. Tight. Sidney can hear him chewing the words. It’s obvious he’s not used to having conversations with living people. “I’m saying you shouldn’t be capable of being here. Within this realm. Alive.”
“Well.” Sidney finishes the last pancake. Turns the stove off. Moves the skillet to the back burner. Turns to face Erath fully. “I don’t feel dead. And I did come here. And I am currently here. So I’m not sure what you want me to tell you. Maybe you need to check your security system or something.”
“You don’t understand…”
Erath steps forward. Into his space. And Sidney doesn’t move back, but something inside him tenses, a reflexive clench he can’t fully suppress. Not the panic. Not the shutdown. Just the awareness, the body’s inventory of where the other person is relative to exit points and surfaces and the distance required to leave. It fires automatically. It always fires. It’s the background process that runs beneath every interaction Sidney has with every man who gets close enough to touch.
Except Erath doesn’t touch him. He keeps his arms at his sides. He stands close, close enough that Sidney can smell him, something earthy and cool, moss and rain and the mineral scent of deep stone, and Sidney has to look up to maintain eye contact because Erath is taller and closer and looking down at him with an expression that is unhappy but not dangerous.
The danger alarm doesn’t fire. It’s not firing. Erath is standing in his space and Sidney’s body is tense but the alarm, the one that has kept him alive through a decade of bad decisions and worse men, the one that fires with everyone, always, without exception, is silent. It’s silent because Erath isn’t between him and the door, because Erath is close but not enclosing, because some part of Sidney’s nervous system, the part that reads threats, has scanned the configuration and returned: clear.
“Penny creates a bond,” Erath says, and Sidney can hear how difficult this is for him, every word extracted at cost, “between people who are important to her. And that bond transcends the rules of life and death.” He pauses. “For you to be here, alive, within my realm, means she has linked us. Irrevocably.”
Sidney stares at him. He processes. He attempts to process. The information arrives and sits in his brain and refuses to organize itself into anything comprehensible. “What do you mean linked?”
Erath looks as though the next words are going to require surgery to remove. He takes a breath. “The only other person Penny could bring here was her mother. My wife.”
“Your wife?!” Sidney takes a sharp step backward. His hip hits the counter. His hands go behind him to brace and his right palm lands flat on the burner he just turned off.
The pain is immediate, vivid, searing. He jerks his hand up, cradling it against his chest, hissing through his teeth, and stares at the stove as though it has personally betrayed him, which, given the morning he’s having, is just one more appliance in a long line of things he can’t trust.
A hand wraps around his injured wrist and Sidney’s eyes snap to Erath’s face.
Erath is right there, close, closer than he was a second ago. He’s holding Sidney’s wrist gently and turning his hand palm-up and looking at the burn with an expression that is focused andintent and entirely devoid of the awkwardness that’s been filling the kitchen for the past ten minutes. The awkwardness is gone. Whatever Erath was managing, whatever careful distance he’d been maintaining, it’s been overridden by the simple fact that Sidney is hurt.
Erath lifts Sidney’s hand. He leans down. He presses his lips against the burn.
Sidney’s entire body goes still. Not rigid. Not the panic, not the shutdown, not the lock-and-brace that had happened in the other kitchen. This is different. This is every nerve in his body focusing on a single point, every receptor lit, every part of him tuned to the exact location where Erath’s mouth meets his skin. The press of lips is brief, light, barely there. It’s warm. Warmer than lips should be. And there’s something underneath the warmth, a hum, a vibration, the same frequency as the pull in his chest except it’s coming from Erath’s mouth and traveling through Sidney’s palm and radiating up his arm and into his sternum and the pull recognizes it. The pull surges, once, a single bright flare of heat that makes Sidney’s breath catch, and then settles, and Erath pulls away and lets go of his hand.
Sidney looks down at his palm. The burn is gone. The skin is smooth, pink, uninjured. As though it never happened.
He looks at his palm. He looks at Erath. He looks at his palm.
He has absolutely nothing to say. For the first time in his adult life, possibly, Sidney has no words. His mouth is slightly open and his brain is empty and Erath is standing there watching him with dark eyes that are steady and patient and waiting and Sidney can feel his own heartbeat in his healed palm and the ghost of Erath’s mouth on his skin and the pull in his chest is not quiet anymore. The pull is very, very loud.
The scrape of a chair.
They both turn as though caught. Penny is climbing into the small chair at the table, the one with the booster cushion. She’ssleep-rumpled, braids askew, wearing pajamas with stars on them, and she picks up the small fork that’s been set beside a plastic plate and looks at both of them with the sleepy, pragmatic eyes of a child whose primary concern is breakfast and who has zero interest in whatever is happening between the two adults in the kitchen.
“I’m so hungry,” she announces.
Sidney stares at her. Then at Erath. Then at his healed palm. Then back at Penny. He swallows around the heart in his throat and snaps back to himself with the practiced efficiency of a man who has been putting his feelings aside to take care of other people for his entire life.
He grabs the plate of pancakes, the good ones, and brings them to the table and slides one onto her plate with the spatula.
“Breakfast, milady,” he says, and his voice is steady. He’s proud of that. He is proud of the steadiness because his hands are not steady and his heart is arrhythmic and his palm is tingling where Erath’s mouth had been, the skin healed but the memory of contact still burning beneath it, and the pull in his chest is pointing directly at the man standing six feet away watching him serve pancakes to a five-year-old.
He ignores the pull. He ignores Erath. He focuses on Penny.
Penny looks at the pancake on her plate. She looks at it the way you’d look at a pony that’s been delivered to your front door, with pure, uncomplicated rapture. She beams up at Sidney, a smile so wide and so bright it rearranges the entire room around it.
“Sid, you made pancakes!”
“I did.”
“They’re so pretty!”
