Page 52 of Beds and Blades

He reached for the leather. Dark and fitted, worn soft at the joints and edges from years of use. Reinforced across the chest and shoulders, scarred where blades had glanced and weather had bitten in. Belt. Bracers. Straps pulled tight by hands that knew every buckle, every notch, every familiar sequence.

The hunter’s hook came off the wall first. He turned it in his hand once, testing the weight, then held it out to me.

“The small axe,” I said.

“Hunter’s hook,” he said. “The long version is used on the wall. The short version is used in close combat. Wide blade. One purpose.” He met my eyes. “You know what the purpose is.”

I knew what the purpose was. I had watched soldiers carrying them since the briefing. I had understood, with the clarity of a military historian encountering a purpose-built tool, exactly what it was designed to do at close range to an anatomical target.

“Show me,” I said.

I got out of bed and retrieved the linen nightgown from the floor where it had ended up the previous evening. I pulled it on.

The morning light was doing something to the linen, which was pale enough and thin enough that it was conducting itself with much lower opacity.

Skip gazed upon me with hunger. He was taking a moment to register this fact. He made a low sound.

“The nightgown,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. His voice was slightly rougher than it had been thirty seconds ago.

“It is somewhat transparent in direct sunlight.”

“Yes,” he said again.

He did not appear to consider this a problem.

He moved the furniture.

The chair went back with one hand. He moved the solid oak table as if it weighed almost nothing. I would have needed to empty it first, brace both feet, commit my entire body to the effort, and still would have considered two feet a respectable achievement.

He did not appear to notice that he had done this. His attention was already on the cleared floor, assessing the available space.

I had noted, on multiple previous occasions and in increasing detail, that he was strong. I was revising strong upward. The table had been, by any reasonable structural analysis, heavy. He had moved it the way I moved a cup of tea.

He handed me the hook and stepped back. He watched me hold it, his gaze sharp, as if he was running a rapid diagnostic test.

“You are gripping it like someone who has never held a weapon,” he said.

“That is because I have never held a weapon.” I looked at my hands on the handle. “My prior experience with bladed implements is limited to a box cutter I kept in my apartment for opening packages.”

“A hunter’s hook is different from everything,” he said, stepping behind me. His hands came over mine. He adjusted my grip.

His thumbs repositioned my fingers on the handle.

“Lower. The arc is tighter. You are not driving forward. You are driving down.”

I was paying full attention to the instruction.

I was also paying full attention to the fact that he was directly behind me, his chest against my back, his arms around mine, his hands over mine, and the warmth it produced was not something I could ignore.

“Elbow in,” he said. His voice was close to my ear. “The motion is short. You are not building momentum. You are placing weight.”

He guided the arc once, slowly. My arms moved with his. The motion was tight and purposeful. This was a finishing tool rather than a fighting one, built for one specific job in one specific set of circumstances.

I understood it immediately. Pattern recognition.

He stepped back. “Again.”