“Really,” I confirm. “You know. If you were interested.”
“Might be worth checking into,” he says, and he’s making a serious face but he’s got that note in his voice, that crinkle around his eyes and it almost hurts, what a gift he is. When he’s like this, quietly happy in a way that feels like walking on sun-warmed stone.
“Might be,” I agree, and steal his robe from the hook on the back of his door, just in case Reid got home while we were busy. “I’m gonna go grab some water.”
When I come back five minutes later, he’s swapped the book for his phone, and I crawl under the covers and get nosy.
“Shit, that was fast,” I say as he scrolls through vibrating cock ring after vibrating cock ring. He taps on one and—yep, he’s reading the reviews.
“Never leave for tomorrow what can be done today,” he says.
I blink at the phone for a second.
“Did you just quote Thomas Jefferson at me? About sex toys?” I ask, and he turns his head. Our faces are two inches apart.
“Fuck no,” he says. “I quoted Benjamin Franklin at you.”
“Is that better?”
“Of course it’s better,” he grumbles, then gets his arm around me with only a little shoving. “Here. This one’s well-rated and waterproof, tell me what you think.”
CHAPTERFORTY
GIDEON
The cages outside are empty.I can barely see them in the dark, faintly moonlit, clouds wandering over the night sky. It’s good when they’re empty, because it means that there’s no hurt wildlife out there with no place to go. Critters only wind up here when the real wildlife rehab centers are too full, or too understaffed, or too underfunded. Too still and too quiet, but good.
It’s been a couple weeks since the two of them went back, the eagle to the wild and the fox to be an Educational Ambassador at a wildlife refuge, but I haven’t quite gotten used to it yet.
I never meant to start taking in critters, but a few years back—after Reid but before Dolly—I got a call about a Great Horned Owl who’d nearly died from ingesting rat poison and needed a safe place to recover, so I built an enclosure big enough for an owl. Then another, and another, and then a few years had gone by and I was a sometimes-waystation for wildlife who needed it.
It’s good, I remind myself, that they’re empty right now, even if it looks and feels a little wrong. Even if the empty cages are a little like a gentle itch somewhere in the back of my brain that I can’t scratch. It’s nice to have fewer responsibilities and creatures who depend on me. It’s relaxing when the cages are empty.
“Hey,” says Andi’s quiet voice behind me. I turn and watch her vague shape pad across the kitchen, wearing pajama pants and the same sweater she kept borrowing at the cabin. It still looks good on her. “You okay?”
“Fine. Just woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep,” I say. “You can go back to bed if you’d like.”
Andi makes a sleepy, noncommittal noise, and walks over to me. Next thing I know she’s got one arm slung over my shoulder, her chin on the other, her arm wrapped around my waist. She sways against me like she’s on tiptoe, and I plant my feet a little more securely.
“Anything out there?” she asks, her voice all dreamy and rough from sleep.
“The usual,” I say, covering her hands with mine, sliding my fingers between hers. It feels good, letting her drape herself over me like this.
“Hm.”
“Was I an asshole for not giving them heating pads?” I ask. The question takes me by surprise almost as much as it does her.
“Fluffy and Vicky?”
They didn’t have names, but, “Yeah.”
“No. They were wild animals, that’s what they do.”
“But this isn’t the wild,” I point out.
“But that’s what they were going back to,” she says, and she sounds like she’s frowning.
“Maybe I should have been a soft place to land,” I say. “Tough love is kind of bullshit.”
