Her scent shifts again. Not back to the vanilla warmth I know, but not the acrid terror from before. This is different—bitter and closed, the smell of someone folding inward. She's not angry at me anymore. She's afraid of what I just saw.
"I'm fine, I—"
"You're not." I keep my voice where it is. No pity. No panic. "And that's okay."
"I don't need—"
"I know you don't need me." I hold her gaze when it snaps back. "But I'm here anyway."
I almost say it. The three words I've been choking on for months, the ones that keeps climbing my throat every time she looks at me like that.
I swallow them back down, because right now she doesn't need my feelings piled on top of hers. She needs the floor under her feet, the sound of my voice and the space to breathe without me crowding it.
We sit on the floor in the back hallway, shoulders against the plaster, the linoleum cold through my jeans. The patients sleep. The generator hums. Rain finds its way through the towels I shoved against the window sill and pools in a thin line between our boots.
Jess stares at the opposite wall. Her palms rest flat on her thighs.
"Afghanistan," she says. "Two tours. The second one, our convoy hit an IED outside Kandahar. Three dead. I pulled the fourth out of the wreck and kept him alive for forty minutes until the medevac landed."
Three sentences. Clipped and factual, delivered in the flat cadence of a soldier handing in a report. No emotion. No detail. The way you talk about the worst day of your life when talking about it at all costs more than you can afford.
I don't push. I sit close enough that my shoulder presses against hers, and I listen.
She goes quiet.
"Your tusk," she says after a while. Her chin tilts toward me without turning her head. "What happened?"
My tongue finds the rough edge where the left tusk snapped clean. I've touched it more times than I can count, a reflex, a reminder, a scar I carry on the outside of my face instead of hidden underneath my skin.
"Long time ago. Before we came to Nightfall Cove." I shrug. "Some asshole took a swing at Knox. I stepped between them. Fist caught the tusk at the root. Cracked half of it clean off."
"Knox must be grateful."
"He feels guilty. Still brings it up." I run my thumb along the break, feeling the ridge where the bone healed rough. "I don't regret it. I'd do it again. Every single time."
"Always the second," Jess says.
I turn my head. Every defense she's spent weeks rebuilding is gone. No anger, no suspicion, no heat. She knows what it feels like to give everything and have it treated like less.
"Except with you." The words leave my mouth before I can trap them. "With you I want to be first."
The back window explodes.
Glass and rain and the splintered end of a pine tree punch through the frame in a shriek of tearing wood, and freezing water hits us both like a wall. Jess scrambles to her feet and her boots slide on the wet tile, her legs go out from under her, and I catch her before she hits the ground. My arms lock around her waist, and for one second she's pressed flat against me, her heartbeat pounding against my chest so hard I feel each beat through my shirt.
One second of rain soaking through our clothes and her fingers gripping my forearms and every thought in my head narrowing to the places where she touches me.
Then she shoves off and turns toward the breach, and I'm right behind her.
I strip off my cut and fold it over the back of a chair. The tree branch juts through the window frame at an angle, rain pouring in around it, and I grab the trunk with both hands and shove it back through the opening. The wood scrapes and cracks against the frame, and the branch drops into the dark on the other side. I yank my shirt over my head and press it against the gap, but the hole swallows the fabric and the rain keeps coming. Not enough. Not even close.
"Plywood," Jess shouts over the wind. "Supply closet, the first one of the left."
I'm back in ten seconds with a sheet under my arm and a fistful of nails between my teeth. She holds the board flat against the breach, but the wind fights her for it, and I step in behind her to brace it over her head. My arms cage her in, my chest an inchfrom her back, and the warmth of her body cuts through the freezing rain on my skin. I drive the nails through with the heel of my palm, four corners, the wood splitting around the metal. She doesn't move. Doesn't step out from under me. Just holds the board steady and breathes.
She turns. Her eyes travel down, tracing the green skin, the scars across my ribs, the dark hair trailing below my navel, and her scent floods with heat. It cuts through the adrenaline and the rain and the fear, unmistakable and raw, and she doesn't know I can smell it but I can. Every molecule of it.
She looks away. Fast.
