“I tried,” he said. “I cannot seem to stop.”
I should have been annoyed. Should have told him to leave, to give me space, to stop hovering. But he looked so wrecked. Standing there with a footstool he didn’t know why he’d brought, staring at me like he was waiting for me to tell him he was broken.
“Why?” I asked. “Why can’t you stop?”
“I do not know.” The words came out rough. “You need things. I can feel that you need things. And when I am not bringing them to you, there is a sound in my head. Like screaming. I do not know how to make it stop except by…” He lifted the footstool helplessly. “I am sorry. I know this is strange. I know I am making you uncomfortable.”
“You’re not,” I said, and realized it was true.
He went still. “I am not?”
“You’re making me nervous. That’s different.”
“How is that different?”
I stood up from my chair and walked toward him. His eyes tracked every step. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe, just watched me approach like I was something dangerous.
“Uncomfortable is wanting to leave,” I said. “Nervous is wanting to stay but not knowing if you should.”
“Which do you want?”
I stopped in front of him. Close enough to feel the heat pouring off his skin. His eyes shifted again, gold swallowing the amber, like something inside him was fighting to get out.
“Give me the footstool,” I said.
He handed it over. His fingers brushed mine. Fever-hot, just like last night.
“Thank you.” I turned and walked back to my corner and put it exactly where my feet would rest. “You can bring one more thing. One. And then you have to sit down somewhere and stay still for at least an hour. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” He said it like I’d given him a gift instead of an ultimatum. “Yes, I can do that.”
He disappeared. I went back to cataloging. And when he came back, he was carrying a lamp, larger and brighter than any I’d seen in the Aerie, and he set it on the table with that same anxious precision and then settled on the floor by the door.
He watched me work for three hours without moving.
I felt it the entire time. His attention like a physical weight. Not threatening. Just there. Constant and steady. Like I was a fire and he’d been cold for two hundred years.
“You can do something else,” I said without looking up. “You don’t have to just sit there.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t bother you? Just watching?”
“No.”
I made myself keep working. Made myself focus on the books, the lists, the systems I was building out of chaos. But my hands weren’t steady anymore. I kept making mistakes. Kept losing my place.
“Why me?”
The question came out before I could stop it.
“I do not understand.”
“At the market. You could have bought anyone. Why me?”
Silence. I forced myself to look at him. He was still sitting by the door, perfectly motionless except for his hands. They were gripping his knees so hard I could see the tendons standing out.
“I saw you,” he said.
