She’s fine, and I forced my way in here, into something incredibly private for Elethior.
I back up a step. “Okay. I should—”
Martha smiles at me, that same perceptive smile Nithroel had. “Thio, aren’t you going to introduce him to your mother?”
Oh.Oh.
Oh no.
I shake my head as Elethior pivots sharply from the bed and marches for the hall. “Sebastian. A word?”
Yeah. Several, probably.
He cuts out of the room and I follow, hands bunched in my pockets.
We stop to the side of the open door and my head lowers, eyes on his boots.
Before he can speak, I grind out, “I’m sorry.”
Silence.
I force my gaze up, braced to find him glaring at me—
But he’s frowning.
“Why?” he asks.
“I thought you needed someone with you, but I’m intruding. I’ll catch a bus back to campus.” Fuck if I’m going to use his car now. “I’m… I’m glad your mom’s all right.”
I get two steps away when his hand wraps around my arm.
Like it did at the cocktail party, it freezes me, no fight or flight, no reaction other than complete inertness.
We’re both trapped in that inertia for four full heartbeats. I hear them, feel them in the base of my jaw.
“I won’t be here long,” he tells me. “Enough to sit with her some. Then we’ll go back to school. If that’s okay?”
We’llgo back to school.
Testing the weight of each word, I nod at the room and ask, “Do you want me to—”
His hand spasms on my arm and I think I pushed too far, misread what he was saying, but he releases his hold.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ll introduce you.”
This thing has hurtled so far over any boundaries that I’m not sure we’ll ever find our way back, and everything Nithroel and Martha implied tells me that accepting this would be… significant.
Elethior and I are working together. That’s all.
Itisn’tsignificant. It won’t be.
“Sure.” I wince. “But—I don’t want to wake her up?”
Elethior’s smile is sad. “We won’t wake her up. She doesn’t… even when she’s awake, she’s—” His face falls. “We won’t wake her up,” he repeats.
I bite my lips together until pain stabs down my neck. “Ah. Then, yeah, of course.”
Of course. Like any of this is assumed.
