Page 22 of Subduing the Shark

Consent.

The shiver didn't have consent. It had rules. Rules were different. Rules told him what to do and consent asked him what he wanted. Jack had spent his entire life inside a system that never once asked him what he wanted because the system didn't care. The system needed bodies. Jack had been a body. Available, compliant, trained.

He shifted back to human form and treaded water in the center of the pool, naked and breathing hard, his broken rib pulsing with every inhale. The water was cold on his human skin. He wasn't supposed to shift back before his time was up because the pool was for swimming, not for having a crisis in human form, but his body had made the decision without consulting him.

He got out. Dried off. Dressed slowly, protecting the rib. The dolphin at the counter gave him a look when he left early but didn't say anything.

Jack walked to KK in the afternoon sun. His shift didn't start for five hours. He sat on the concrete steps by the staff entrance, in the same spot where Harold had found him before, and watched cars pass on the main road.

The silence was gone. The pool was ruined. The shiver was what Harold said it was. And Jack was a person who had been broken by the same system he'd used to break someone else, and the only man in his life who'd ever stopped when Jack's eyes went blank was a bloodhound who smelled like the earth after rain.

He sat on the steps until his shift started. Then he went inside and put on the shorts and got to work.

Chapter Thirteen

The next day Amani gave Jack a direct order for the first time in weeks.

It wasn't dramatic. Jack was restocking the napkin holders along the bar when Amani came out of the back with a case of tonic water and set it on the counter. Nero was in the security office. Reza was cutting limes. The club was two hours from opening and the light was up and the space felt like a workplace instead of a dungeon.

"Put those on the bottom shelf behind the bar," Amani said. "Not the middle. The middle is for the flavored stuff."

Jack looked at him. Amani was looking back. Direct eye contact, no flinch, no tension in his shoulders. His hoodie was unzipped and the sleeves were pushed to his elbows. He was holding the case of tonic like it weighed nothing, because he was a lion and it probably didn't.

"Bottom shelf," Jack repeated.

"Yeah. And make sure the labels face out. Reza grabs the wrong thing when they're turned sideways."

Jack took the case. Their hands didn't touch during the transfer but they were close enough that they could have. Amani didn't step back. He turned to the register and started counting the drawer, and Jack crouched behind the bar and loaded the tonic bottles onto the bottom shelf with the labels facing out.

It was the first time Amani had spoken to him directly in three weeks.

Jack didn't comment on it. He finished the tonic, broke down the cardboard case, and took it to the recycling bin by the supply closet.When he came back, Nero had emerged from the security office and was leaning against the far end of the bar.Jack noticed his position. Not between him and Amani. To the side. Close enough to intervene if needed, far enough that he wasn't a wall anymore. The shift was small and deliberate and Jack understood it because he'd spent weeks learning the room and reading everyone in it.

Nero beside Amani instead of in front of him meant something had changed.

Reza handed Jack a Coke without being asked. He did that sometimes. A glass would appear at the edge of the bar wherever Jack was working, cold, no ice, with a lime wedge on the rim that Jack never used but Reza kept putting there anyway. It was the most casually kind thing anyone did for him on a regular basis. Reza didn't make a production of it. He didn't ask if Jack wanted it. He just poured it and put it where Jack would find it and went back to his limes.

Jack drank the Coke and wiped down the bartop and tried not to think about the fact that Reza's lime wedge made him feel more seen than anything the shiver had done for him in a decade.

The evening shift went smoothly. The crowd was smaller than usual, a midweek lull that left gaps between the tables and let the music breathe. Jack ran drinks, cleaned, restocked, and the broken rib was healing enough that the sharp pain had dulled to a constant ache he could work through. Nobody at the shiver had offered to help him, or even get him some pain meds for it. Nobody at KK had asked, though Harold's eyes tracked the way Jack favored his left side the way they tracked everything about him.

Halfway through the shift, Amani called him over to the bar. Not through Nero. Directly.

"You're loading the trays wrong."

Jack stopped. He'd been loading trays the same way for a month. "Wrong how?"

"The tall glasses go in the back. Short glasses in the front. When you put the tall ones up front, they block the customer's view of the short ones and people think their order's missing. I've gotten three complaints this week."

Jack looked at the tray in his hands. Two pint glasses in the front, two rocks glasses behind them. Amani was right. The pints blocked the rocks glasses from view. He'd been doing it that way because it was faster to grab the closest drink first, but speed wasn't the point. Accuracy was.

"I'll fix it," Jack said.

"Good." Amani turned back to the drink he was mixing, and then, without looking up, he said, "The grenadine is on the wrong shelf too. You moved it last week when you were restocking."

"It was closer to the mixing station there."

"It was in Reza's way. The syrups go left to right: simple, grenadine, blue curacao, orgeat. That's the order. Don't rearrange my bar."