I didn’t have to pretend it was a shield.
It was, for now.
The sounds of the house faded. I listened instead to my own breathing, slow and regular, and the small fizz of pain whenever I stretched my mouth too far. I got used to it. Humans were highly adaptable. You’d be surprised what you can live with, given enough time and repetition.
I was tracing the seams of the hoodie with my thumb when I realized that I knew this scent. Not just the abstract idea of “male” or “comfort” or “firepit.” No, this was specific.
This was the aftershave I’d caught on the wind once, at the Memorial Day parade when I stood three rows behind Knox McKenzie and spent the entire service staring at the back of his neck.
This was the sweat and cedar and black coffee that had haunted me every time I passed him on Main Street or watched him unload lumber behind McKenzie Hardware, muscles flexing in a way that should be illegal in three states.
Oh.
Oh, fuck.
This was Knox’s hoodie.
My first instinct was to rip it off and bury it under the couch, then set the couch on fire. My second instinct, which won the battle, was to keep it on and curl up tighter, inhaling until I could almost feel the outline of his arms where they’d stretched the cuffs.
Somewhere in the process, I drifted off.
I must have, because the next thing I knew the sun had gone from slant to full, and I was waking up with my cheek pressed to the rough fabric, lips parted, drooling a little. Great. Add that to the long list of Newt Bridger’s Greatest Hits.
I sat up quick, half certain someone was watching.
Someone was.
Knox stood in the middle of the braided rug, arms folded over his chest, a study in controlled violence. The t-shirt he wore was nothing special, but it fit like a second skin and did nothing to hide the way his arms looked like they’d been chiseled out of something much less fragile than human flesh.
The veins popped in his forearms, a map of purpose, and the way his jaw worked suggested that he’d been standing there a while, thinking about things.
My brain flat-lined for a good three seconds before my mouth caught up. “Oh. Uh.” I wiped my lips on the sleeve, which seemed rude, but was better than licking them like a lizard. “Morning?”
His eyes flicked up from the hoodie—my hoodie, I guess, except not really—to my face, then did a quick survey of the room. “You sleep okay?”
I nodded, which hurt less than I’d expected. “Yeah. Thanks. It was—warm.”
He grunted, which I think was his version of a compliment.
There was another silence, the kind that vibrates like a tuning fork. He tilted his head, studying me, or maybe the hoodie, or maybe the fact that I had made myself into a blanket-burrito on his mother’s couch.
“How’d you get my hoodie?” he said. The words were sharp, but there was an edge of humor under them, like he was daring me to say something smart.
I tried to come up with something smart. All I had was honesty, which was its own sort of dangerous. “Harlow gave it to me,” I said. “I was cold.” My voice cracked on the last word, betraying every ounce of dignity I’d tried to muster.
Knox didn’t move for a second. Then his lips did something I’d never seen before—a twitch at the corner, a ghost of a smile, gone in an instant.
“If you want to keep it,” he said, “go ahead. It looks better on you anyway.”
I was not prepared for this. My heart did something it hadn’t done since third grade. It skipped a beat, then doubled up to make up for lost time.
I pushed the cuffs up my arms, exposing white wrists and hands that shook, just a little. “I mean, I can give it back. If you need it. I’m fine, I don’t get cold easy, I just—Harlow insisted. And then I fell asleep. I can take it off. Not right now, obviously, because, um…” My words derailed spectacularly as I remembered I wasn’t wearing much underneath except a t-shirt that said “Science is Real” in neon green, and it was very much not my size. “Never mind. Sorry.”
He looked at me like he was trying to decipher a foreign language. Then he huffed, which could have been a laugh if you’d run it through a meat grinder and filtered it for all emotion.
“Breakfast in ten,” he said, and turned on his heel.
I watched his back for a long time after he left, and for a second, I let myself imagine what it would feel like to be wrapped up in those arms for real, not just by proxy.
