“Why are you here?” I ask. “Really. You say research, you say data, you say you love the forest. That’s all true. But there’s more underneath.”
He goes still, fork halfway to his mouth. “That’s a big question,” he says.
“I’m a big person,” I reply. “I can handle it.”
He snorts, then winces—probably because he’s just snorted at Bigfoot in a towel.
“Okay,” he says, lowering his fork. “Fine. I’m here because I’m a little selfish.”
I tilt my head.
He fidgets with the edge of his plate, gaze dropping to his food.
“I love the forest,” he says slowly. “I love data and patterns and being able to prove what everyone else has to guess at. But I also… don’t fit very well in cities. Or in offices. Or on campuses. I tried. For a long time. I did the lab work, the teaching, the committees. I went to the conferences. I smiled at people who talked to me about networking like it was oxygen.”
He wrinkles his nose.
“I was good at it,” he adds reluctantly. “But I wasn’t… happy. Out here? Even when it’s hard, even when I fall on my face, I feel… more like myself.”
He glances up at me, quick and shy.
“And then there’s the selfish part,” he says. “Because if I can understand this place—really understand it—I have an excuse to keep coming back.”
There’s a tenderness in my chest I don’t know what to do with.
“You don’t need an excuse,” I say quietly. “You belong here more than half the humans I’ve seen stomping through.”
His cheeks color. “That’s a very nice thing to say.”
“It’s also true,” I reply.
The air between us shifts slightly, the easy banter ripening into quiet intimacy.
He smiles, small and a little crooked. “Well. You certainly make it feel… safer. Knowing you’re out there.”
My throat goes dry. “That’s a dangerous amount of trust to put in a big, grumpy cryptid you barely know,” I manage.
“Maybe,” he says, and now his voice is soft. “Or maybe I’m a good judge of character.”
He holds my gaze, and there it is again—that flutter in my stomach, that pull in my chest, the awareness of every point where our lives have already intersected.
He’s flirting.
He may not realize it. It might be unconscious, spilling out of that part of him that has never quite learned how to separate enthusiasm from affection. But the effect is the same. His eyes are warm. His body is angled toward me. He keeps saying things that sound suspiciously likeI like youin different costumes.
And I’m sitting here in a human skin he seems very comfortable looking at.
The thought lodges in my mind like a splinter. Is this what he’s drawn to? The human shape. The human face. The human voice. Would he still look at me like this if I were fur and claws and too many teeth?
But hehasseen me like that, I remind myself. Even injured, bleeding, and half collapsed in the dirt. He didn’t run.
He also didn’t get this close when not feeling compelled to help me. He didn’t sit in a chair facing me while wrapped in a towel, while my shoulders fit the shape of his expectations, while my eyes looked just enough like his to make it easier to forget what I am.
The doubt slithers deeper. My responses grow shorter.
He doesn’t seem to notice at first, too caught up in telling me about the time he accidentally scared off a moose by tripping into a shrub, or how his brother keeps sending him photos from other parks with captions like “Do you think this blur is a ghost or my thumb?”
I should be laughing. Instead, my jaw’s tight.
