I snort softly. “You don’t waste time.”
“Nope,” he says cheerfully. “But I’m very motivated.”
I push myself up onto one elbow, towering over him again, and he looks up at me without a hint of hesitation. Without fear or doubt.
A quiet certainty settles over me—steady and irrevocable. “We’ll finish breakfast,” I say. “Then we’ll continue east. There’s another node to check before nightfall.”
“And after that?”
I consider him. The road ahead. The journey we’ve committed to together.
“After that,” I say, “we keep going.”
He grins, reaches for my hand, and laces his fingers through mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“Sounds perfect,” he says. “But we might want to get washed up before we do any of that.”
He’s got a point. Removing dried cum from my fur is more difficult than you’d think. What I won’t admit is that I’ve already drawn my cock back inside, and I’ve no intention of washing his cum away.
Not quite yet.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ELIAS
If I were a moreresponsible scientist, I would have been documenting the first few days of our journey with obsessive precision.
Dates. Distances. Environmental variables. The way Boone’s stride changes when the terrain shifts when we’re on foot. The subtle differences in wildlife behavior when he’s in cryptid form versus human. The fact that I’m pretty sure a mountain goat bowed to him on the second day, which I refuse to acknowledge out loud because that way lies madness.
Instead, my notes for the last three days consist of things like:
Shared dried apples. Boone pretended not to like them. Ate most of them anyway.
Music compromise: no “songs with feelings,” but apparently instrumental thunder is acceptable.
Woke up wrapped around him again. Zero regrets.
We’ve covered more ground than should be possible at the pace we’re moving, even with frequent stops. Boone navigateslike the land is a map he memorized centuries ago—which, based on what I’m learning, is probably not far from the truth. Trails appear where there shouldn’t be any. Shortcuts reveal themselves at his suggestion, shaving hours off what would have taken me days alone.
And the thing is… it feels easy—both in the truck and on foot.
Not effortless. Boone is still Boone—watchful, deliberate, occasionally gruff—but there’s a rhythm to us already. A wordless understanding. He slows when I need him to. I speed up when he grows restless. We share food, space, warmth, and long stretches of quiet that don’t feel awkward at all.
And I am absolutely the only person who drives. The one time I agreed to try to teach Boone did not go well.
Yesterday evening, when we stopped near a river swollen with snowmelt, I’d wandered too close to the edge while distracted by a cluster of glowing insects. Boone hadn’t raised his voice or snapped at me. He’d simply reached out, wrapped a hand around my wrist, and tugged me back against his side with a low, unimpressed sound.
“Eyes up,” he’d murmured.
I’d grinned up at him and said, “You like keeping me alive, huh?”
He’d paused, then replied, very carefully, “Yes.”
It had felt… significant.
Now, standing at the edge of a high meadow ringed with firs, I get my first real sense that we’re about to cross fromtravelintoworlds colliding.
Boone stops.
