Micah had no idea, and he couldn’t exactly ask Damon, as the man had so eloquently pointed out: it wasn’t his turn to ask a question.

Micah hadn’t been able to sleep well, even on the pristine mattress Damon had bought him, huddled in silky-smooth sheets. Instead, he’d spent his night tossing and turning, thoughts chasing each other around in his head.

While he couldn’t be sure Damon had meant to punish him with that succinct response, Micah felt suitably chastised by the next morning when he woke up with a headache pounding behind his eyes and nervous energy buzzing beneath his skin where it had gathered with nowhere else to go.

He swallowed down a couple Tylenol before attempting to get some off-the-book work done at home. He managed to put the … incident aside long enough to concentrate for a couple of hours, using the time to send messages to the dozen or so regular subscribers to Nico’s webcam show. (Not that he expected them to respond.)

Micah hadn’t been able to dig as deeply into Nico’s missing persons case at work as he would have liked since Jensen had allotted him other assignments – nothing more interesting than vehicular theft – on top of Nico’s case. They couldn’t use “all of their man hours” on a “simple missing persons case”, after all. (Insert eyeroll here.)

Regardless, it wasn’t until Damon texted Micah around noon, reminding him that he was picking him up at five, that Micah’s anxiety truly began to ebb.

At least the man was still talking to him. That meant he couldn’t be too mad? Right?

Damon had failed to tell Micah where they were having this family dinner at in the message, however, so Micah had no idea what he was supposed to wear. He started typing out a message to simply ask the man, but halfway through, Micah remembered that it wasn’t his turn to ask a question.

In the end, he rifled through the clothes Damon had purchased him last weekend and settled on a pair of gray wool slacks and a collared dress shirt, over which he pulled on a navy sweater. Micah hoped it was formal enough that he wouldn’t be stared at if they ended up at a high-end restaurant, but casual enough that he didn’t look like a try-hard at what Damon had described as a perfunctory family dinner.

Fifteen minutes before five, Micah couldn’t contain his nervous energy any longer, and he threw on his coat before locking up his apartment to wait for Damon down on the curb.

Micah was drawing nonsensical squiggles in the slush that had gathered on the sidewalk with the tip of his shoe, wondering if he should have worn boots instead of the loafers he’d decided on, when a familiar vehicle rolled up at exactly 5:00.