It started the way most things between us started.
Quietly. Without announcement.
Zevran had come back from three days at the Hold — pack council sessions, administrative decisions, the ordinary machinery of leading a pack — and he came through the door at nine in the evening looking like someone who had been in back-to-back significant conversations for seventy-two hours and was done with significance.
I was on the couch.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
"Bad three days?" I said.
"Long three days," he said. "Nothing wrong. Just — long."
I moved over.
He sat beside me.
He did not immediately decompress the way some people did — talking through everything, processing out loud. He just sat. Shoulder against mine. The specific quality of someone who needed a moment to come back to
