Chapter 14: What He Won't Do

Three days had passed since the moment in the hallway, and I had done nothing but think about it.

"I have been trying not to."

It was a sentence that lived in my skull. Not I do not want to. Not I am not interested. But I have been trying—which meant he wanted to. Was wanting to. Present tense. Still.

I had been a contract attorney for nine years. I knew the difference between what someone said and what someone meant. And Kael did not mince either. If he had not wanted me, he would have said so plainly. Instead, he had said I have been trying, which translated through the careful architecture of his formality into something that sounded a lot like I want you, and I am not acting on it despite that.

The structural problem with that statement was that it implied a structural problem with my own interpretation of the situation.

I turned it over in my head while doing dishes on Thursday evening, my hands in warm water, thinking about how he had looked at me—really looked at me, not the careful peripheral surveillance he had maintained for weeks. That look had had teeth in it. He had not manufactured that. And then he had turned it off like a switch.

Kael was at the kitchen table behind me, the way he often was in the evening, reading one of the books from my shelves. He moved through my apartment the way he had been invited to move through it: carefully, deliberately, aware of the implicit boundaries even though there were no explicit ones between us anymore. We had moved past the stage of him asking permission to exist in the same room.

But not past this.

I dried my hands on the dish towel—bought specifically because it was not his aesthetic, it was aggressively cheerful, forest green with little embroidered lemons—and turned around. He was three pages into what looked like Tresspass by Melissa Harrison, which seemed like a book choice that said nothing good about his mood.

"Do you want me?" I asked.

He did not look up from the page. For a moment, I thought he was going to pretend he had not heard me. Then he closed the book with care, set it on the table, and looked at me.

"Yes," he said.

No preamble. No hedge. No legal qualifier of any kind—just the word, steady and plain as a brick wall.

I absorbed that. It was harder to absorb than I would have expected, which probably said something about how much I had been hoping for a different answer and how much I had been preparing myself to accept it anyway.

"Then why haven't you done anything about it?" I asked.

He watched me for a long moment. The amber of his eyes was particularly pronounced in the warm kitchen light. He had this quality—not at all like any person I had ever been attracted to before—of thinking before he spoke. Of considering the question as if it deserved more than a reflex.

"Because the circumstances are untenable," he said finally.

"Untenable how?"

"I am bound in your apartment," he said. "I cannot leave without your consent. That fact creates a power differential that supersedes any mutual feeling. You cannot meaningfully consent to anything between us while I am here on a clause you cannot void. The situation is structurally wrong, not interpersonally so."

I leaned back against the counter, trying to work through the logic of that. "You're saying—what, exactly? That my consent is invalid because I'm empowered to trap you here?"

"I am saying that any consent you give me is poisoned by proximity and necessity. You have a demon in your apartment who cannot leave without your say. You cannot divorce that fact from what you decide about what happens between us." He paused. "I have been aware of this problem for approximately fourteen days. I have no intention of ignoring it."

There was something in his voice that was not quite anger and not quite pain. It was the sound of someone who had thought himself through something and arrived at a conclusion he hated but intended to keep.

"What if I want to?" I said.

"That would not resolve the structural problem."

"I'm a contract attorney," I said. "I specialize in structural problems."

He was quiet. Then: "Yes. I am aware."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"I am also still bound in your apartment," he said.

It was not cruel. It was just true. The brick wall was still there, holding its shape.

I turned back to the sink and turned the water on, running my hands under it for no particular reason except that I needed to do something other than stand there. The water was warm. Ordinary. The kind of thing that happened in every kitchen in every city, the background hum of normal life while a demon and a lawyer negotiated the metaphysics of consent in the middle of Manhattan.

"How does the renegotiation work?" I said, not turning around. "In Infernal law. What does it require?"

"Both parties," he said. "Full knowledge of the original terms. Mutual consent to the new terms."

"And then?"

"And then we sign."

I turned off the water.