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“It’s not smug.”

“It’s the smuggest sound in the valley. It’s insufferable. Don’t you dare stop it.” She propped her chin on her hands, and even in the dark I could see her eyes held the shine of a woman with no troubles in the world. “What woke you?”

“Don’t know.” That was the truth. “Nothing’s wrong. First time in my life I’ve woken in the night and found nothing wrong.”

I could tell she was working out what I’d meant.

She laid her head back down over the sound in my chest and pressed her palm beside it.

Then she went still in a new way. She’d noticed what her settling had done, and her mouth curved against my skin.

“Well,” she said. “I’ve made another discovery.”

“Hm.”

“Also academic.” She rose up on one elbow, her hair sliding off her shoulder.

I stroked her cheek, and she leaned into my palm like a cat and looked down at me in the low light. “It’s the middle of the night. No committee. No dawn plowing.” She bent until her mouth was a breath off mine. “No dressing changes due.”

Earlier that night, I’d been careful with her because I was afraid. Old fear, bone-deep.

The spring I outgrew my father, I hauled a lamb out of the mud in the creek field and snapped its foreleg doing it. My father splinted it and said nothing about it for two days. Then he walked me down to the same mud and stood there with me until I worked out what I should’ve done with the hands I had now.

The lamb lived. I carried its feed out to it until it died of old age, but it moved away a step every time I came through the gate.

I was large everywhere, and the world was breakable. I kept things whole by keeping still. I’d spent an hour of the evening learning that she wasn’t going to break, that a witch who tells you she’s thorough means it.

The fear was gone now. Somewhere in the dark hours it had left, and its opposite stood in its place.

I could be careful with her now because I wanted to be. Slow because slow was better, gentle for the pleasure of it and not the terror. That was a different country, one nobody had told me existed.

“You’ve gone quiet,” she whispered. “Even for you.”

“Quiet can be nice.”

“I’m learning your quiets. That one.” Her thumb traced the base of my horn. “That one’s my favorite. Say the rest with your hands, then. You’re better at that anyway.”

I put my hands on her. All the weight of them, without worrying about the strength first.

She noticed inside a breath.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, there you are.”

“Been here.”

“You have not. You’ve been holding that quilt like it owed you money.” Her voice had gone low and husky. “Do it again.”

I did as she asked.

“My turn,” I said.

“Yes. That. Say things like that.”

So I said things like that.

I went slow, a choice this time.

I laid her on her side and fitted myself behind her and worked into her an inch at a time with my hand spread over her belly. I could feel myself in her under my palm, and I had to stop and put my forehead down on her shoulder.