I stand very still, because I have the strange sense that if I move too fast, I'll scare it back into him, this true thing, this real thing, the one I've been clawing for since the bunkhouse.
"And that scares you," I infer. "More than Reznik, or dying."
"More than anything."
"Why?"
"Because…" His hand goes to the ring. I watch it go, watch his thumb find the band like it always does, the worry-stone of him,the rosary. But this time he catches himself. He looks down at his own hand like it belongs to a stranger.
And then, deliberately, he lets go of the ring. He lets his hand fall open at his side.
"Because you've come to mean more to me than you ever should have," he explains. "It's not safe. I keep trying to put you down and walk away from you, and I can't fucking do it. I look at you laughing at some idiot in a canvas coat and I want to beat him senseless for fuckingdaringto come near you. I haven't wanted anything that bad in twenty years." His breath fogs, ragged. "But now, suddenly, I want everything. All this shit that I have no business having. And the only way I knew how to keep us both safe was to keep deciding things for you. So you wouldn't have to choose me. So I wouldn't have to find out you didn't."
I've been waiting all this time for the truth, for secrets to come to light. Here it is now, suddenly, out of nowhere. There's nothing between us hiding it anymore, no more cans of beans or walls of emotional concrete. It's justhere,so much worse and so much better than I ever imagined.
The terrible secret at the center of Afon Satyrin isn't that he hates me.
It's that he doesn't.
It's that he's been falling, all this time.
"You're such a dumbass," I whisper in disbelief.
His mouth twitches, just barely. "That's all?"
"No, you don't understand." I take a step toward him, ankle screaming, snow up to my shins, and I don't care. "You want to know what I couldn't survive?This.Wondering. Lying nextto you every night with my hand on your chest and your arm around me and thinking,He hates me, he wishes I'd never come, I'm an inconvenience he can't wait to get rid of." I feel hot tears on my cheek "You stood in that diner and saidwe're not togetherlike it was a fact, and I went home in my head and cried about it on the inside of my own face. Do you have any idea—you could have justtoldme. You could have told me on day one!"
"You wouldn't have been able to handle that," he says.
"No, don't you fucking dare." I close the last of the distance. I have to tip my head back to look at him; that's how it's always been, this man, this mountain. "I didn't change my mind. Not once. Not concussed. Not kidnapped. Not freezing. Not when you put me on a bus, not when you said we weren't together, not even thirty seconds ago when I called you a coward and meant it." I reach up to put my cold hand flat against the stone of his jaw. "I'm still here. I keep being here. When are you going to believe that I picked this on purpose? That I pickedyou?"
For a long moment, he doesn't move. The fire throws orange light across half his face, while the other half stays in shadow. The snow comes down on both of us, and Wolf, lounging behind me, lets out a long sigh as if to say,Finally.
Then Afon's hand comes up and covers mine where it lies against his cheek. His fingers are freezing. They tremble, that fine, familiar tremor I've felt a hundred times, the one I'd look past if I weren't pressed right up against him.
"If I let you in," he says, very low, "I don't think I'll ever be able to put you down again. You understand that? I'm not built for halfway. If I do this, you're mine, and I am the most dangerous, most ruined, least sensible thing you will ever choose, but I will never once let go."
"Good," I say. "I'm tired of the Berlin Wall blanket anyway."
And that's what breaks him.
He makes a sound—a grunt, a grunt, a laugh, I'm not sure—and then his mouth is on mine.
I grab the front of his jacket for balance. He walks me backward, careful even now, even like this, his hand cradling the back of my head so I don't catch it on a branch, until my back hits the rough bark of a spruce and his whole body presses into mine.
He's so warm. How is he always so warm, when everything else up here is ice?
"Your hip," I gasp against his mouth.
"Don't care."
"You'll reopen it?—"
"So what?" He pulls back just enough to look at me. His dark eyes are blazing with heat. "I've bled more for less worthy causes. Let me have this one."
There is no arguing with that. There is no arguing with any of it, really. Especially not when his hands stop being so damn careful with me and start being certain and authoritative instead. They slide under the flannel—formerly known as His Flannel, though we both know it stopped being his days ago—to find the bare skin of my waist and drag a moan out of me that gets lost in the wind.
I blink and he's transported me onto the blanket with the fire snapping beside us and Wolf relocated to the far edge of the camp with the wounded dignity of a chaperone betrayed. Afon strips the flannel off me and his eyes go dark looking at me in thefirelight, and then he covers me with his body, the bulk and the heat and the gray-threaded chest hair looming over my palms.
