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Voices swirl towards me. The bus driver, already out of his cab, phone in hand. A couple who’d been sheltering under a shop awning, now hurrying over.

Dark swoops me up, and suddenly I’m standing. He’s still holding me against him, like he’s not quite ready to trust gravity to keep me upright on its own.

But by the time the people reach us, Dark’s gone, melted back into whatever shadow the nearest wall can offer. I’m standing alone in the rain, looking, I imagine, thoroughly shaken and entirely unharmed.

“I’m fine,” I tell them, three times, in increasingly convincing tones. “Genuinely. I stepped out without looking, that’s all. I’m so sorry to have frightened everyone.”

It takes a while to convince the bus driver, and even longer to convince myself. By the time they finally let me go, apologising and insisting I get home safe, I’m soaked through and shaking. Adrenaline is finally catching up with the fact that I very nearly died on a perfectly ordinary evening.

I’ve barely gone twenty feet when the cold arrives again, familiar, insistent.

“You should not be alone right now,” he says, low, appearing at my side like he’s never once left it.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You are shaking,” he says.

“It’s cold,” I say. “It’s raining. This is a normal amount of shaking for the circumstances.”

He doesn’t argue. He just falls into step, closer than the pause technically allows, and I find I don’t have it in me to remind either of us of the rules tonight.

We’re nearly at Coffeelicious when he stops walking entirely.

“Here,” he says. “It is warm and dry. You have the keys.”

“It’s closed,” I say.

“You work there,” he says.

I don’t have a counterargument for that, mostly because I’m too cold to think of one. So I dig the keys out of my soaked bag and let us both in, locking the door behind us against the rain lashing against the windows.

The shop is dark, lit only by the streetlight outside. Everything looks strange and unfamiliar, the way ordinary places always do after hours. Dark disappears into the back before I’ve even found the light switch, and reappears with an armful of paper towels. He sets about using them on me with the same careful, methodical focus he brings to everything.

“I can dry myself,” I protest, half laughing, as he works at my hair.

“You are shaking too hard to do an adequate job,” he says.

“I’ve been drying myself for twenty-two years,” I say. “I think I’ve got the technique down.”

He ignores this entirely.

Once he’s satisfied with my hair, he turns his attention to the rest of me, deciding, apparently unilaterally, that my soaked clothes need to come off entirely.

He produces my apron from behind the counter. And holds it out with the solemn gravity of a man presenting a medal.

“You want me to wear this. And nothing else?” I ask, desperately fighting back a blush.

“Your clothes need to dry,” he says. “This will preserve your dignity in the meantime.”

I laugh properly at that, delighted despite the circumstances, and disappear into the stockroom to change.

It’s a struggle to get out of my wet things. I discover I’m soaked down to my underwear, so those have to be stripped off too.

By the time I emerge, apron tied at my back, I feel considerably more ridiculous than dignified.

Dark looks at me. Properly looks, the way he did that very first evening he sat solid in my kitchen. Except there’s something different in it now, something that makes the amber of his eyes flare, bright and sudden, before settling.

“Better,” he says, voice rougher than a moment ago.