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“Ah. I wonder if it’s the same reason I see every shade of blue in your eyes.”

His lips turn up in a rueful smile. “What if it is?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, my friend.”

“Neither do I.” Poet’s hands slip from my face and we ease back from each other just enough to take the intensity down a notch.

He doesn’t go anywhere, though. And I don’t want him to. I always feel peaceful around Poet, even when I have a lot on my mind. Even when he has a lot on his mind.

I lace our fingers together. “Did something happen today?”

Poet blinks. “Hmm?”

He looks tired.

No, he looks weary.

I squeeze his hand and repeat myself, and it is his turn to release a slow breath.

“I went to the Joker to give Sol his dad’s wages.”

“That is the arrangement?”

“It’s what Dav wants.”

I nod, letting it go. “Then what?”

Poet draws the inside of his cheek between his teeth and scrubs a restless hand through his wheat-gold hair. “There was a women’s group singing and it got under my skin.”

“Why?”

“Because I couldn’t hear any of it. I only knew they were making sound by looking at other people and it messed with my head—it happens, sometimes.”

He’s told me before that he can sometimes hear the lowest register a man’s voice can reach. Though even then, it’s more sensation than sound.

“It’s stupid.” Poet speaks rapidly, cutting into wherever my thoughts were going. “But I used to get bad anxiety whenever I left the farm, when I was younger—after it happened. It’s mostly gone, but when it comes back, it always rattles me. I can’t handle feeling like I’m drifting outside my own life.”

His words cut deep. Because I know where I was when he was feeling like that—trapped in a room of moving mouths and faces. I was a few minutes from being by his side. From being his anchor to a world that has no right to shut him out.

Velnias. A fierce ache blooms in my heart. When did I start thinking like this? When did I start wanting to be Poet Whitlock’s solid ground?

I don’t have the answer.

I only know that the idea of him feeling so alone in a crowded pub has me reaching for him with an instinct, an urge, I can’t ignore if I tried.

And I do not try.

I lift our joined hands and kiss his knuckles.

Then I wrap my other arm tight around him, and I do not let go until I feel him draw back and take a breath to speak.

His eyes still carry the tired weight of what’s shaken him tonight, but I see the wry humour dancing in them as he breathes a confession against my lips. “I could’ve waited until tomorrow to find Sol.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Poet shrugs. “I wanted to see you.”

He says it like it is nothing. But it doesn’t feel that way. Because knowing I didn’t have Aras tonight, Poet had called to me all the way home. Perhaps it’s why I hadn’t waited for Sol before I’d gone inside the Joker. Maybe my heart had known Poet was there, but it got the memo a few beats too late.