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"They won't care," Halver said, quietly against my hair.

"You don't know that."

"I do, actually. Ask Alex what he thinks about any of this later, if you want to feel worse about it."

"That is not reassuring."

"It should be. Nobody in this camp is going to think less of you for wanting something." He drew back enough to see my face, He made it easy to hold his gaze instead of my usual instinct to look anywhere else.

"We can stop. Right now, whatever you want. I don't need anything from this except being close to you."

The offer sat there, no weight behind it pushing me in either direction.

"I don't want to stop."

"Then stop worrying about the horses."

I laughed before I could catch it. He kissed the sound off my mouth like he'd been waiting for exactly that, and this time when the world outside made noise, I let it stay outside.

We stayed like that a long while, learning the shape of each other one careful discovery at a time, until my mouth felt swollen and my body ached from something that had nothing to do with injury.

Eventually he eased back, resting his forehead against mine, breathing hard enough that I could feel it.

"Getting warm in here," he said.

"That's your fault."

"Entirely my fault. I'll take full responsibility."

We shed our outer layers without ceremony, down to our underwear. I’d stopped being embarrassed about this days ago, and when he drew me back against his chest and settled us both onto the bedroll, I felt, for the first time in a body that rarely let me forget its every measurement, genuinely small.

Not diminished. Not vulnerable.

Just small, the way a person got to be small against something larger and steady and entirely on her side. His arms alone could have circled me twice over, and some distant, practical part of my mind noted the difference in our proportions the way it noted everything, automatically, clinically. But the rest of me had stopped keeping that particular ledger somewhere in the last hour, and what remained instead was simpler. Room enough to fit. Nothing about him ever made that room feel like a cage.

His arm came around my waist, and even there, wrapped in something that could have crushed me without much effort, he never once made me feel like something breakable. Just held. Chosen, in the specific and uncomplicated.

"You're thinking loud," he said, voice rough with sleep already creeping into it.

"I'm always thinking."

"Think quieter. Sleep sooner."

I might have argued that on another night. Tonight, I let my eyes close instead, his heartbeat slow and even against my back, steadier than my own for once.

The tent flap stirred a few minutes later, and Ashter poured himself through the gap, resettling into his usual shape and curling against my side with a small, satisfied huff, close enough that his warmth reached both of us.

Halver's hand found him without looking, scratching behind one ear, and Ashter's low, rumbling pleasure filled the quiet.

I lay there between the two of them, and let myself have this one uncomplicated thing without picking it apart for what it might cost me later.

Halver's hand moved along my back, palm flat, tracing the same steady path over and over, up between my shoulder blades and back down to the curve of my waist, patient in a way that asked nothing of me beyond letting it happen.

I could have fallen asleep like that. Some drowsy, distant part of me fully intended to.

"Tell me about Ashter," he said, voice already thick and slow with sleep creeping into the edges of it.

I froze.