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“Have you been listening to my show?”
He was way too intuitive for his (or my) own good.
“I tune into all the shows and podcasts on occasion. It’s kind of part of the job—knowing what works, or doesn’t, and why.”
“All of them? Even the one that spends an hour explaining why women will never understand how hard it is to be a ‘traditional man’ in modern society?”
“Is it sad that I’m not entirely sure which of those podcasts you’re talking about?”
That got a low chuckle out of him.
“As someone who was around ‘traditional men,’ I can say from experience that they had enough actual problems to worry about without needing to sit around and bemoan how hard their lives were.”
“Right? Kind of hard to look for an audience for your rantings when you’re working sixteen hours a day in a coal mine or tilling a field. But to answer your question… yes, I’ve listened to them all. I just don’t tune in often to some of them. I will typically just check in when ratings seem to jump a suspicious amount.”
“Why would that trigger a review?”
“It might not for all shows, but for ones that say controversial things, it can mean someone said something incendiary. We just want to make sure it’s not something that would have blowback on the station.”
“Understandable,” Silas said, pushing the front door open for me.
The steady rain that had been pouring down when I’d run out to get dinner had slowed to a light trickle.
“Well, goodnight, Silas.”
“Maggie,” he said with a nod.
Damn.
It sounded just as good as I’d been imagining in the supply room.
But when I turned to walk toward my apartment, Silas turned as well.
“You’re this way too?” I asked, glancing over.
He didn’t have a raincoat or an umbrella, so the rain was making his dark hair and the shoulders of his suit jacket glisten. Also, he walked with his arms clasped behind his back. It was such a throwback gesture that you never saw anymore.
“I am not.”
“Are you following me?” I asked, trying not to panic. And I would have panicked if he were just any man following me. But there was, you know, an added threat when it came to someone who could—theoretically—feed off you.
True, it didn’t happen often. The penalties were steep for that kind of thing. But it did happen. And it wasn’t wrong to be aware of that threat.
“I am concerned with the state of the world that a man escorting a woman home safely is no longer indistinguishable from a threat.”
“You’re escorting me home?”
“It is nearly three in the morning.”
“One might make an argument for not wanting a strange man to know where she lives, no matter how noble his intentions.”
“Maggie,” he said, my name like a period at the end of a sentence he hadn’t finished yet.
“What?”
“You work with shifters, witches, and warlocks.”
“Yeah…”
