Out in the yard, the sun has just set. Remnants of it blister, liquid gold, between the distant trees. The air here isn’t as cold as up north, but there’s a chill regardless. She pinches her flannel closed as she joins Lys at the railing. A dark-eyed junco clings to a nearby balsam sprig and bobs in the wind, assessing them with suspicion.
Lys waits as Shea fits her hearing aids in and turns them on. There’s a telling beep. A rush of sound, indistinguishable at first, until she remembers the waterfall. Heralded by the deafening cataract, they watch the bird. Neither of them mentions the fight in the bathroom, or the way he’d looked half mad as he whispered,I feel it, too.
“My mom calls them snowbirds,” he says, breaching the quiet. As if in answer, the white-bellied bird lets out a single, sharpkew. Shea glances up at him, surprised.
“Yourmom?”
“Did you think I materialized out of thin air?”
“I don’t know, actually. Cyrus says you were spat out of hell.”
His face crinkles in a smile. She’s amused him. Anotherkewsounds, farther than the first, and the songbird takes flight. They watch as it fades to nothing against the blackening sky. The wind picks up, tugging strands of her hair loose from its plaits. Their hands sit flat on the railing between them, their pinkies close enough to touch.
“She used to tell me that whenever I saw a snowbird, I should remember to be brave,” he says. “Everything has an end. Winter. Night. Pain. None of it’s permanent, and the snowbird knows.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Waiting for an end?”
He looks slighted by the question. “Waiting is a coward’s game.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I stopped listening to my mother’s advice a long time ago. If you want to be done with something, you end it yourself.”
She tries to picture him as a little boy, looking for the junco. Remembering to be brave. Waiting for spring to bloom, for the sun to rise. For a wolf, sharp and snarling. She wonders if he only ran because he realized no help was coming.
She wishes he would hold her hand.
He doesn’t, of course. He stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and pivots to face her, propping an elbow atop the railing. He is deceptively casual this way, his ankles crossed and his lean lazy, his hair spilling into his eyes. His nonchalance is a ruse. His features are gaunt, his skin gray. Dark vessels pop into the wide column of his throat.
“Don’t do it,” he says.
“Do what?”
“You’re thinking about offering up a vein. Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have the discipline to turn you down.”
“So then, don’t turn me down.”
He catches her forearm, flattening her wrist between them. Carefully—carefully—he drags the pad of his thumb along the bowed gash of his bite. Teeth, sunk deep. Until the aching stops.
“Thorley won’t like it.”
“He’s not the boss. And you’re starving.”
“And you want it.” He drops the accusation between them like a gauntlet—like he’s daring her to deny it.
“I wouldn’t have followed you out here if I didn’t want it, Lys.”
His face is a barrage of emotions, relief warring with disappointment. He tips his forehead to hers, his eyes drifting shut. He exhales. She inhales, the knot between them slack enough to draw breath. In the quiet, she can almost pretend he’s just a boy—that this is just a crush.
When he bites down, she doesn’t make a sound. And when it’s done, she tucks her hand into her sleeve and cleans the blood from his chin. The gesture is absurdly intimate. Both of them freeze, caught, the wind battering them from all sides.
“Sometimes you make me nervous,” he says quietly.
It’s so unexpectedly earnest, it startles a laugh clear out of her.
