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He could wait for a girl to eat. He could wait for the food to do what food does, what warmth does, what the simple physics of calories and shelter do to a body that's been denied both for far too long.
He would wait for her to understand that she was safe.
He lifted his mug again. Drank. Set it down.
Waited.
3
SAGE
“That’s it?” Sage asked. “Just… eat?”
Her voice came out wrong — too sharp, too loud, brittleness trying to sound harder than she was while her entire body vibrated like a plucked string.
The food was right there. Steam rising off the mashed potatoes. The meatloaf glistening. The roll with its split top and its warmth reaching across the narrow distance between the plate and her hands, her mouth, was filling with saliva so fast she had to swallow twice before she could speak again.
“Fuck…look, you don’t need to — act weird about it, okay?” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. A nervous gesture. Stalling. “I said I’d do… stuff. So just —”
She trailed off because he wasn’t reacting.
He was just sitting there. Those steel-gray eyes steady on her, his expression unreadable. Not blank, not cold, just *contained*. Like everything he felt was happening behind a wall so thick that only the faintest warmth leaked through, and even that was enough to change the temperature of the booth.
Then he moved.
Slowly. With a deliberateness she was already learning to associate with him — every gesture announced in advance, telegraphed, like he knew inherently sudden movement in his vicinity would be terrifying and had built an entire physical vocabulary around preventing it.
He set his mug down. Placed both hands on the table.
Palm up.
Sage stared at them.
The fuck?
His hands were fucking enormous — she’d noticed that already, couldn’t *not* notice, the sheer scale of them dominating the table the way the rest of him dominated the booth. But palm-up they looked different. The scars were more visible — white lines and rough patches across the knuckles, a thick ridge of tissue along the base of his right thumb, calluses layered over calluses like mountain strata. These were hands that had done things. Hard things. Maybe violent things. Hands that could break her without effort and were currently resting on a diner table, open and upward, asking for nothing.
She didn’t understand.
“What?”
Her voice cracked. The confusion was worse than the fear. At least fear she knew how to navigate. This was just…uncharted.
“I — please, can I just eat?”
He reached forward. Slowly. Giving her every possible second to pull away, to flinch, to bolt. His fingers found hers on the table — her small, chapped, shaking hands disappearing inside the warm enormity of his — and he held them. Gently. Like she might break. Like he was holding something that had already been broken. Like he was trying not to make it worse.
Sage went rigid, her body shivering.
Every alarm in her body fired at once — the old system, the one Rick had installed, the wiring that said *hands on you means danger, hands on you means brace, hands on you means count the ceiling tiles and go somewhere else.* But his grip wasn’t tight. Wasn’t controlling. It was just — warm. Present. His thumbs resting against her knuckles without pressure.
She didn’t pull away.
She didn’t know why. Maybe she was just too tired.
He bowed his head. Just slightly — enough that she could see the silver threading through the dark hair on top, the vulnerability of the thick bent neck on a man his size.
She stared at him and felt the diner recede, felt the noise and the light and the other people fall away until it was just this booth and his hands and the sound of his voice when he spoke — low, quiet, rough at the edges, like something unused that still remembered how to work.
