"Stop squirming."
"Stop hurting me!"
He ignores that and rotates my foot a few degrees. I hiss through my teeth. His thumb finds the bone on the outside of my ankle—the same spot he checked the first night—and presses.
I grab his wrist. "If you do that one more time, I swear to God?—"
"It's not broken," he interrupts. "But you've made it worse."
"Yeah, no kidding. I figured that out when my entire leg caught fire."
He exhales through his nose. In the faint light, I can see a sheen of sweat on his forehead and the rapid pulse in his throat, right where the star tattoo sits. Whatever he was dreaming about, he hasn't fully come down from it. His hands are steady on my ankle, but the rest of him is vibrating at some panicked frequency I can almost feel.
"Can you stand?" he asks.
"Probably not."
"Hm."
And then—because this is just what Afon does now, what he defaults to whenever I become horizontally inconvenient—he scoops me off the floor.
This time, I don't fight it. Partly because my ankle genuinely feels like it's been visited by a medieval torture device, and partly because it's something like 2 A.M. and I'm too tired to be outraged.
But mostly because his arms, when they close around me, are shaking. Ever so slightly. A fine tremor running through the muscles of his forearms and shoulders, so faint that I'd miss it if I weren't pressed against his chest.
It's almost like he needs this as much as I do.
Which begs the question:
Who exactly does he think he's saving?
He carries me to the bed and lowers me down carefully. He arranges the spare pillow under my ankle, pulls the quilt over me, and straightens up.
"Stay off it," he orders.
"Afon. Afon,wait."
He stops in the doorway. His back is to me, one hand braced on the doorframe. I can see the tension in his shoulder blades through the thin cotton of his shirt. The muscles are bunched up around his spine like they're bracing for impact.
"You were screaming," I say.
He sighs. "Go back to sleep, Caroline."
"I can't sleep now! You scared the hell out of me. I thought there was a bear in the cabin. I thought you were being murdered."
"Well," he says to the doorframe, "there wasn't. And I wasn't."
"Could've fooled me."
He drops his hand from the frame and turns around. The firelight catches the planes of his face—the crooked nose, the deep-set eyes still glazed with something he's trying to blink away. He looks exhausted.
"It was a dream," is all he says. "It's done now."
"Okay. That's fine. But you don't have to go back out there to greet it again."
His brow furrows. "What do you want me to do?"
I scoot over toward the wall and pat the empty side of the bed. "Sit. Just for a minute. Watch out for Wolf, though."
