“Apparently.”
He pushed off the doorframe and came into the room, looking around with the unhurried assessment of a man who had built this place and still felt proprietary about it even on the days he stayed away. Which were most days now. He ran a hand along the edge of the suspension rig, checking it the way you checked things that were yours even when you had no immediate use for them, and then looked back at me with that steady, patient gaze.
“You’ve never forgotten anything in your life.”
“First time for everything.”
“Mmm.” He didn’t push it. That was one of Declan’s qualities. He knew when to let a silence do the work. “I didn’t know you were coming in.”
“I didn’t plan to.” I folded the jacket over my arm. “You?”
He lifted one shoulder. “Couldn’t settle at home.”
I didn’t say anything to that. We had known each other long enough for silences to carry their own content, and this one said:I know exactly why you can’t settle at home, and it has nothing to do with the building.
The building was an excuse. We both knew whose fault it actually was, though fault was the wrong word, and Declan would be the first to reject it. Marissa wasn’t anybody’s fault. She was simply herself: dominant, brilliant, restless, and constitutionally incapable of being contained by any single dynamic or any single person. She and Declan had been circling each other for years in that particular way that the entire group had learned to watch with a mixture of affection and frustration. Everyone could see it. Nobody said it. Because the problem wasn’t feeling. The feeling had been obvious for longer than either of them would admit. The problem was the shape of the thing.
Declan was fully, completely Dominant. There was no other mode for him, no gear he could shift into when the situation required it. And Mari? Mari was a switch in the truest sense,and she could no more be purely submissive all the time than she could stop breathing. She needed someone she could Dom alongside as much as she needed someone to hold her down, and that equation didn’t resolve neatly into two people no matter how much either of them wanted it to.
I had a thought, occasionally, about what might resolve it. A third. Someone they could both direct their dominance toward, someone who could hold the balance between them. It wasn’t an uncommon structure. I’d seen it work. But it wasn’t my problem to solve and it wasn’t my place to suggest it, and until one of them asked, I was going to keep that thought exactly where it was. Filed under none of my business and left there.
We moved out to the main floor. Someone had left two glasses on the bar—water, still, which meant the afternoon manager had either expected Declan or had long since learned to. He claimed a barstool. I took the one beside him.
“Dottie tells me you did a second scene with the woman from the Midgard event,” he said, without particular preamble.
“Dottie tells everyone everything.”
“It’s her greatest gift and our collective burden.” He picked up his glass. “You don’t do second scenes.”
“I do occasionally.”
“Not with the same woman.” He looked at me sideways. “Not back to back. Not within a week of the first.” A pause, precisely weighted. “Not in the private room at Valhalla.”
I drank my water and said nothing. Which was its own answer, and we both knew it.
Declan was quiet for a moment. Outside the staff entrance came the rhythmic sound of a delivery being taken in, crates, voices, then nothing.
“Erik almost let Raia walk,” he said eventually. “You remember that?”
“I remember.”
“Stood there with every reason in the world to keep his distance. Nearly convinced himself it was the right call.” He turned his glass slowly. “Noah spent three weeks deciding Shelby was the wrong fit. Gabriel had Rose in front of him for too long before he pulled his head out.”
“I take your point.”
“Do you?” Not a question. “Because from where I’m sitting it looks like a man who has spent eleven years making sure nothing sticks, deciding to be very careful and very rational about someone who has apparently stuck anyway.”
He didn’t say:I know what it costs to be careful and rational about someone who has stuck.
He didn’t say:I have been careful and rational about a specific woman for longer than I want to count, and I can tell you with some authority what that particular carefulness buys you.
He didn’t say any of it because we were not the kind of men who said those things out loud to each other.
But Marissa’s name was in the room with us as clearly as if he’d spoken it. It sat in the space between his careful words and his carefully neutral expression, in the slight tension around his jaw that appeared only when he was holding something back that had significant weight. Everyone saw it. Every one of them had made the same silent calculation—not my place, not my business, say nothing unless asked. And so nobody said anything, and Declan kept not settling at home on Friday afternoons, and Marissa kept traveling to cities that required her to be unreachable, and the two of them kept circling with the grim patience of people who had decided that wanting something wasn’t sufficient reason to reach for it.
I understood the impulse. More than I wanted to, and more than I had yesterday.
“Her situation is complicated,” I said.
