"By the fire." I gesture at the shirt as though this requires explanation. "The clothes. They'll dry faster." I smooth the fabric out against the stone, laying it properly, giving myself something to do with my hands. "I didn't — I wasn't thinking. I just." I clear my throat. "I won't look. If you wanted to do the same."
A long pause.
"Turn around," she says.
I turn around. I face the cave wall and look at the stone and listen to the rain and to the fire and to the soft sounds behind me that I absolutely do not think about, the rustle of cloth, the quiet of it. I look at the wall. The stone has interesting texture. I count the layers.
"Alright," she says.
I turn back and I try. I genuinely try. She's sitting beside the fire with her coat, shirt, and pants laid out on the stone to dry, her dark hair loose and damp around her shoulders, and she's — the problem is that she'sher, precisely herself, green eyes catching the firelight, and the word I keep not-thinking sits there anyway.Devastating.She is devastating, sitting in a cave in her underthings with her arms around her knees, and I sit down beside her and look at the fire and not at her.
She shivers.
"Come here," I say.
She glances at me sideways.
"Just body heat." I extend my arm, an invitation, nothing more than that. "I'm warm. You know that. You've complained about it twice."
"I haven't complained?—"
"You said, and I'm quoting,you put out heat like a furnace, it's unreasonable?—"
"That's not a complaint?—"
"Aislin." I keep my arm where it is. "Come here."
She looks at the fire for a moment, working through something, and then she shifts and tucks herself against my side and I close my arm around her and she fits there exactly as I'd known she would, slight and precise and warm despite the shivering, and I feel her exhale slowly, degrees of tension leaving.
We sit in the fire's sound.
"I'm glad you were my partner today," I say.
She doesn't answer immediately. The rain hits the rock outside in sheets.
"I know I'm—" I try to find the honest version of this. "I know I'm loud. I know that's most of what I am, most of the time. I shout at sparring matches and I argue with Kerra and I'm not exactly quiet company." I watch the fire work through the deadfall. "But I've liked this. What we've been building. I've liked becoming your friend."
Aislin shifts against me.
"Is that what we are?"
I look down.
She's looking up at me, and there's something open in her face that she doesn't usually allow — no barricades up, no sharpness held ready, just Aislin looking at me from three inches away with the firelight moving across her.
"Have I not earned it by now?" I ask. "Your trust? Your friendship?"
She's quiet for a beat.
"Yes." It comes out soft, almost a whisper. "I think you have."
I hold her gaze and she holds mine and neither of us look away.
"Do you regret it?" she asks. "The kiss."
"No." The word is immediate, no hesitation in it, because there isn't any. "I didn't want to press you. You ran and I—" I stop. "I wasn't going to push for something you weren't ready to give. I'll take whatever you want to give me, Aislin. As little or as much. I'm not going anywhere."
She looks at me for a long moment, reading me the way she reads everything, looking for the angle, the catch, and she doesn't find one because there isn't one, and something shifts in her face.
