Ethan's hand was warm in his.
Gabriel didn't move. Didn't push. Just held on and let the room settle around them, the fight losing its last edges the way fires do when they've burned through everything available.
Ethan looked down at their hands.
"I'm still angry," he said.
"I know."
"Not at you." He said it carefully, like he was figuring it out as the words came. "At him. At the situation." A pause. "At the fact that I couldn't draw a single clean line today."
"That's a lot to be angry at."
"It is." Ethan looked up. Something in his face had shifted — the hard set of it gone, what remained younger somehow, tired. "I'm also slightly drunk."
"Slightly."
"Don't push it."
Gabriel looked at the whiskey glass on the table. Two fingers gone, maybe three.
Ethan was steady on his feet but his eyes had that particular quality a little too honest, a little too open, the careful management of himself temporarily offline.
"Sit down before you fall down," Gabriel said.
