Back to the present.
Salvar had nearly forgotten, somewhere in the stretch of the last several minutes, the precise shape of the fear he had moved through to get here and so when Silas asked, the memory was just far enough away that he could almost believe his own answer.
"No," Salvar said. "I wasn't worried about you."
"Then why did you come to save me?"
Salvar considered this for exactly one second.
"Because I figured it wouldn't be good for you to die before I've had sex with you at least once."
He said it the way he said most things that detonated quietly in enclosed spaces casually, without ceremony, as though the sentence were perfectly ordinary and the timing were not spectacularly ill-advised.
Silas went silent.
Not the silence of someone formulating a response. The silence of someone whose entire processing capability had been briefly redirected. He opened his mouth. Closed it again.
