Page 46
His mouth parts. For once, no amusement comes quickly enough to save him. “That’s a big promise,” he says.
No.
“No?”
Promise is future. I hold his gaze through the skull sockets, letting him see as much as this face can show. This is already true.
He exhales and shakes his head, then settles onto the split boulder next to us, while I lower myself to the moss beside it. In this form, I am too large to sit as normal humans do, but his knee brushes my arm every time he shifts.
That matters even more than the first touch did. A first touch can be impulse. An unconscious second, third, and tenth touch is habit beginning to grow.
He grows quiet for a while, then, looking not at me but up through the black shapes of my antlers into the patch of sky beyond. I can feel the change in him before he speaks. Tiredness beginning to settle into his muscles. Tomorrow’s obligations flickering at the edge of thought. The small pull of his human life, the den and work and clock-time waiting to reclaim him.
I do not like that pull. I understand it, but I still do not like it.
“You know,” he says after a while, voice gone low and thoughtful, “there is somethin’ genuinely insane about this being the least stressed I’ve felt all week.”
Least stressed, I echo, and through the bond I taste what he means—less noise in the head, less gnawing loneliness, less old hurt chewing at the edges. Calm?
“Yeah.” He glances down at me, expression turning wry. “Which, for the record, is not a compliment to my previous coping mechanisms.”
I am not yet sure what coping mechanisms are, but from the feeling around the phrase, I gather they are the poor tools he used before finding me. I decide not to insult them directly because he is still tender in places where his old life cut him.
I am better, I say instead.
He snorts. “Subtle.”
Truth does not need to be subtle.
He gives me a look that says he wants to argue and knows he cannot do so honestly. That look pleases me far more than it should.
The night turns more noticeably after that as it cools and the bird calls go silent. The bond carries a faint flare of weariness now too, enough to tell me his body is preparing to pull him toward bed whether his mind wants that or not.
You go back now, I tell him. You need to rest. Work early. You are colder. I am not guessing; his body tells me all of this.
He huffs, rubbing his hands together. “You’re going to be deeply annoyin’ once you know all my tells, huh?”
Already know many.
That earns me a muttered curse and a reluctant smile. Then he sighs and pushes off the boulder, stretching until his spine cracks in three small places. The movement pulls his shirt tight across his shoulders, and the bond gives me a quick lick of appreciation before his embarrassment smothers it. I tuck the reaction away with care. It is mine to treasure, not to tease right now.
When he looks back at me, moonlight catches the freckles over his nose and the tiredness softening his eyes. “You don’t have to walk me back,” he says, the words coming before I have even moved.
I shift back because walking beside him in the true form would draw too much attention if another human came near the cabin road, and because he has taken enough of my first face tonight.
The return to human shape aches more after being seen, as if the true body resents folding away when his eyes have finally accepted it. When I stand again in the smaller body, Lucas watches every second with a focus that heats my blood.
“I need magic pants like yours,” he says, then clears his throat. “You’re still unfairly distractin’.”
I step closer, barefoot on wet leaves, shirtless because cloth on my chest feels useless and wrong. Cold air means nothing to my skin. Distract good?
His eyes narrow. “That depends on how smug you’re about to get.”
I smile, or try to. The expression pulls strangely at my mouth, but his breath catches, so I keep it.
Walking beside him in this form is a new kind of pleasure. In my true shape, I watch him from above, behind, or ahead. Here, I match his stride more easily, our shoulders almost level if not quite, our footfalls similar enough that, for brief stretches, the trail sounds as if only one creature walks it.
“You’ve really been here this whole time,” he says after a while, voice soft enough not to disturb the sleeping trees. “Watchin’ me.”
