He watched me the way a man studies broken stone he intends to fit back together. “You look like you’re about to bolt.”
“Not tonight.” I thought of the note nailed to the door, the headlights on the lane, the shredded blanket under the barn. I thought of his hands on the porch—firmness that had been half anchor and half warning. I owed Jamie more than running.
He nodded once. “Good.”
The farmhouse filled with people who couldn’t sleep. The storm pressed its face to the roof and we answered with small noises: someone hummed, someone clipped a safety bolt into place. The radio sputtered with static and old country songs, theannouncer’s voice strained by weather. It felt like the world had folded into a single, worn room and every heartbeat inside it amplified.
When the power failed for good, Ethan lit candles and set them on the table. The flame threw his profile into barbed shadows. I watched him watch the child. Jamie slept like a washed-out thing after the accident—deep and merciful. He reached for his bear in sleep and relaxed again.
“Sleep here,” Ethan said suddenly, softer. He looked at me in a way that made the space between us too small. “There’s a spare bed down the hall. Take it.”
I thought of the rules he’d laid out the night I arrived—temporary, mornings only, paperwork by Friday, no common-area sleeping. I thought of how he’d already crossed lines. How he’d let me and Jamie stay under his roof with his permission like a favor and like a claim.
“I can sleep on the couch,” I said, hearing the pack’s low mutters behind him and feeling the old instinct to stay small.
Ethan stepped around the table and set his hand at the hollow of my neck, fingers splayed at the base of my skull. “You’re not staying on the couch,” he said. “You’re not staying anywhere cold.”
His thumb brushed my skin and the guard I’d built—the one that kept my heart on a short leash—felt like ice thread by thread. I could have said no. I could have folded my fears into neat squares and walked back into the rain. Instead I let him guide me to the small guest room with kitchen-scented soap on the sink and a quilt that smelled like sun and hay.
We stood in the doorway and the wind wound its long voice around the house. Ethan’s hands didn’t leave me. He didn’t make a show of anything—no hot breath, no violent urgency. Just steady presence, a warning and a promise wrapped together.
“I don’t want to complicate things,” I said.
“Then don’t,” he returned. He leaned in so close our foreheads met. The smell of him filled me. It answered something ancient under my ribs. “Just… be with me tonight.”
Consent slid between us like a thin, necessary thread. I wanted a hundred things I’d vowed never to want again, but the truth was simple: I wanted shelter. Warmth. A man who would stand between me and whatever watched the lane.
We did not rush. The kiss came slow and careful, tasting of rain and diesel and the faint iron of old sorrow. His hands memorized the line of my jaw. Mine found the soft place on the inside of his wrist and clung. Clothes became a quiet noise we left behind. I was aware, the whole time, of Jamie three rooms away and Miguel’s boots on the porch—aware of who I was and the promises I’d made myself. I made the promise again with every breath: this would be mine to stop.
Ethan was careful. He asked with his eyes. He kept asking with little movements—clasp of a hand, tilt of his head—and I answered because I wanted to. It was not frantic or reckless. It was the kind of intimacy that felt like coming home after being lost.
After, when the storm had softened to an oceanic hiss, we lay tangled under the quilt. Ethan’s chest rose steady as a plow. My fingers traced a ridge behind his ear, memorizing where the muscle twitched. His scent threaded into my hair like smoke. Our breathing matched.
I thought the night would end quietly. Instead a small electric pain uncoiled in my sternum, a thin ache like someone taking hold of the inside of me and pulling gently. Across the room Ethan shifted and cursed softly. I felt his annoyance and his fear like a sixth sense.
“Did you—” He stopped, eyes wide with something I hadn’t seen before. Not anger, not wounded pride. Something raw. “Do you feel that?”
I did. His scent flared like a map. It settled into me and claimed corners I’d kept locked for years. A thread of memory, not mine entirely, unfurled—fear and hands and a barn burning in a dream I’d never had. Warmth, the sound of wolves.
We slept in fits. In the dark hours both of us dreamed the same fracture: fire licking at edges, a calf’s panicked cry, a man’s howl that was more a wordless thing than any speech. I woke with the echo lodged in my throat. He woke at the same time, hand on my wrist, eyes like a hunter’s.
“Same dream,” he said.
“Yeah.” My voice was small. “You—what did you?—?”
He closed his eyes and for a moment looked very old. “Loss,” he said finally. “We both smelled it. Felt it.”
It was a confirmation I didn’t want. So much of my life had been built on logic and careful avoidance. Fate was paint on a wall. Bonding was for novels. Except now my skin tasted of him and my dreams braided with his.
Morning came in thin, bruised light. Rain had slackened to drizzle. The yard was a map of puddles and flattened grass. The storm had taken pieces of fence and left jagged gaps like broken teeth. Somewhere in the field a cow wandered with a limp, and a shout about missing stock made my stomach drop.
Ethan was already up. He stood with his jacket on, listening to the wind, smelling of sleep and something else—a marker of him. He moved onto the porch without looking back.
“Come on,” he said. “Help me check the line.”
I hesitated. Jamie stirred and then woke, blinking. He smiled—the fragile kind that seemed to hold everything good left to him. I kissed the top of his head and he crawled into my arms. For a second my boundaries wobbled.
“Be careful,” I told Ethan.
