Page 117 of Joker

Now?

Now it’s instinct. Automatic. Possessive enough to make me a pain in the ass if anybody notices. Which, of course, means Shadow notices first.

He comes up beside me outside near the row of bikes, flicking open a lighter and stealing my cigarette without asking because apparently boundaries are for other people. “You gonna keep staring at them like that,” he says, taking a drag, “or are you planning to blink sometime before lunch?”

I don’t even look at him. “Give that back.”

He ignores me completely.

Typical.

Blaze comes around the corner a second later, coffee in hand, and follows both our lines of sight without any subtlety whatsoever.

He grins immediately. “Oh,” he says. “He’s gone gone.”

I finally turn and glare at both of them. “You two got a hobby?”

“Yeah,” Blaze says. “This.”

Shadow hands my cigarette back. “You’re making it too easy.”

“I’ll make it hard to walk if you keep talking.”

Blaze just laughs and leans against the wall beside us, still looking way too entertained for this early in the day. “You know you’re doing the thing, right?” he asks.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you pretend you’re not doing exactly what you’re doing.”

That tells me nothing.

He sees that in my face and elaborates with far too much satisfaction. “You know where they are every second,” he says, ticking it off on his fingers. “You’ve adjusted your whole damn routine around them. You hover every time anybody gets too close. You keep moving like the kid’s yours to account for. And you look at Raven like you’re one bad day away from maiming somebody.”

I stare at him.

He grins wider.

Shadow adds, “You also haven’t brought a woman back to your room since she got here, which, frankly, is the strongest evidence we’ve got.”

I look at him flatly. “You keeping tabs on my dick now?”

“Unfortunately,” Blaze says, “your dick has become chapter business.”

That gets a reluctant snort out of me before I can stop it. Which is apparently all the confirmation they need.

Shadow points at me like he’s solved a crime. “There it is.”

“Shut up.”

“Nah.”

Blaze takes a sip of coffee and nods toward the lot where Raven is crouched down to fix Lexi’s jacket while Amy and Gio hover nearby like tiny overprotective security detail. “So what’s the move?”

“What move?”

“The move where you stop pretending this is temporary.”

That one lands. Harder than I expect. Because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.