He didn’t stop, but he didn’t crowd me either. He lowered himself into a crouch beside the broken post, turning the flashlight so it illuminated the damage instead of my face.
Heat flared under my skin. Anger, humiliation, and something else I refused to name tangled in my chest. “I don’t need you,” I said.
Still nothing. He shifted the flashlight, gripped it gently between his teeth, and reached into his back pocket. When his hand came out, he had his own fencing pliers and didn’t listen to me at all. He reached over to the bucket and grabbed a staple.
“I can do it,” I muttered.
He nodded once, slow, like he was agreeing with me. Then he stood, stepped to the far end of the wire, and lifted. He just raised the tight wire into place and held it there, steady and sure.
He was making it possible for me to work, and somehow that felt worse than him doing it for me.
“I said,” I started.
“I heard you,” he mumbled around the flashlight, the words slightly muffled. “You’re hurt.”
“I am not,” I scoffed, and his eyes flicked to my hand, where blood smeared across my knuckles anddirt already packed itself into the scrapes. He looked at it for half a second, long enough for shame to burn hot under my skin, then he looked away like he didn’t want to embarrass me further.
His jaw tightened. He wasn’t pushing, he wasn’t taking over, he was just there. Steady. Solid. Uninvited.
I snatched up a staple, set it against the cool metal of the wire, and swung the pliers. The impact jolted all the way up my arm, and we fell into a rhythm.
He set the stretcher in place with ease and spliced the line. I drove the staples in, one by one, the sound beating a rough cadence into the quiet field. My breathing turned ragged, more from everything in my head than from the work.
The night thickened. Sweat cooled on my back. My fingers ached. Somewhere along the way, the trembling in my hands eased. The shakes shifted into something like focus.
We didn’t speak.
He didn’t correct me or rush me. He didn’t tell me I was doing it wrong. The only sounds were the hammering against the staples, our breathing, and the distant wild calls that reminded me there were always eyes in the dark.
When I drove in the last staple, my shoulders sagged in relief. I stepped back and let the pliers drop to my side.
“It’ll hold,” he said. The words were simple, but something about the way he said them landed deeper than they should have.
I swallowed and looked at the fence, then at him. The flashlight beam cut across the lower half of his face, catching the stubble along his jaw and the faint lines at the corners of his eyes.
“Thank you,” I said, the words dragged out of me like they weighed something.
He didn’t say you’re welcome. He just shifted the flashlight, so it swept along the repaired section one last time,like he wanted to be sure. Then he turned and let the beam slide back to me.
It caught my cheek and the curve of my mouth. Then it hit my eyes.
Our gazes met in that narrow circle of light.
For one heartbeat, all the noise dropped away. The coyotes. The hum of insects. The ache in my knuckles. Even the simmering anger that usually rose the second I saw him.
“Lock your doors tonight,” he said quietly.
The lingering edge in his voice slid under my skin. “Why,” I asked.
His eyes flashed briefly in the dark. “There are coyotes working closer than usual. A calf got pulled on my side last week. They’re testing fences. They always do it harder when something changes.”
“Have they evolved to opening doors?” I asked, my voice more bitter than I’d meant it to be.
He studied me for a moment. I could barely see his face now, but I felt his attention like a warm hand on my shoulder.
“Just lock the doors,” he repeated, and handed me the flashlight. “Take it, I’ll get it back one of these days.”
“Don’t you need it to get home?” I asked as I stared at the light in my hand.
