Then Afon stops.
It is not a clean stop. That's what undoes me, actually—how painful the whole affair is. He pulls back maybe three inches and stays there, forehead nearly touching mine, eyes shut, breathing like he's just hauled the deer up the mountain again. His hand is still under my shirt, flat against my waist, and I can feel it trembling—the same fine tremor I felt the night he carried me to bed after his nightmare, the one that means the Satyrin Machine is running at redline. His jaw is clenched so tight that a muscle jumps in his cheek.
"Afon, are you okay?"
"Give me a second." His voice is gravel dragged over more gravel.
"You don't have to—we can?—"
"No." He withdraws his hand, slowly, and smooths the flannel down over my hip with a gentleness that is somehow filthierthan anything that preceded it. He straightens. Puts six inches of cold air between us.
I brace for it—that was a mistake,the jacket, the door, the firm terrible click.
Surprisingly, it doesn't come.
Instead, he looks at me. I don't know which part is most interesting to him. My kiss-wrecked mouth? His own shirt hanging off my shoulder? My heartbroken, lust-filled face?
Whatever it is, he doesn't look at it with regret. It's more likegrief.
"Not like this," he says. "Not while you don't know what I did."
"I don't care what you?—"
"You don't know enough to say that yet," he insists. "There's a version of me you haven't met. He's in the rest of the story." He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. "Not until you know everything, Caroline. Not until you can choose with your eyes open. I've taken enough from you without taking that, too."
He picks up his jacket from the hook—the heavy jacket, the one with the hard rectangular secret in its breast—and steps out into the snow.
But—another little surprise—the door doesn't slam.
It closes soft, with a careful little snick, like a man marking his place in a book rather than hurling it across the room. Through the rippled window, I watch him stand in the blue dark of the clearing, hands at his sides, head tipped back to the cold, doing whatever it is he does out there instead of feeling things indoors.
Wolf pads over and puts his head on my knee.
"I'm okay," I tell him. My voice is wobbly, but my mind, for once, is not. Because I understand now—finally, completely—what's standing between me and that man, and it isn't a wall, and it isn't a blanket border, and it isn't even a dead woman in a blue sundress.
It's a story.
"Tomorrow," I say to Wolf, "I'm getting more of it."
Wolf sighs against my knee.
This time, I don't tell him to shut up.
I should look away. Give the man his privacy, his snow, his feelings-avoidance ritual. Instead, I stay parked at the rippled window like a Victorian widow, watching his silhouette against the blue dark.
That's when Afon reaches into the breast of his jacket and pulls something out.
It's the rectangle. The heavy mystery object my forearm cataloged this afternoon. From here, through warped glass and twenty feet of darkness, it looks like a brick with a stubby antenna—too chunky to be a phone, unless we're talking about the kind of phone Gordon Gekko screamed into on a beach in 1987.
Maybe some kind of radio? A transponder? I truly don't know, which bothers me.
He doesn't use it. That's the strange part. He just holds it in one big hand and looks down at it, head bowed, shoulders set,like the thing weighs a thousand pounds. Like it's asking him a question he doesn't want to answer.
A full minute passes. Maybe two.
Then he slides it back into his pocket, tips his head to the cold again, and goes on standing there, alone with whatever that was.
18
