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“So.”

He can’t kiss me standing up without bending practically in half. So he puts his hands under my arms and lifts me, easily, and sets me on the edge of the workbench, so I’m sitting with my legs hanging down and my eyes almost level with his. Then he turns his head, tilting it, so his left horn goes up and away and doesn’t catch me, and he leans down and kisses me.

His mouth is wide and warm, and his muzzle is soft against my chin, softer than I expected. He kisses me slowly.

I put my arms around his neck. I can’t get them all the way around. I hold on anyway.

When he pulls back, his breathing’s gone deep and uneven.

“Okay?” he says.

“You’re going to ask me that every five minutes, aren’t you.”

“Probably.”

“Ask me in ten.” I reach up and put both hands on his horns, right at the base, where they grow out of his skull, and hold on.

He makes the sound he made in the suite yesterday, before everything happened. Low and rough and deep in his chest. His eyes close. His hands tighten on my hips, and then he catches himself and loosens them, carefully.

“You don’t have to be that careful,” I tell him.

“Yes, I do,” he says, with his eyes still closed. “You’re very small, Boss.”

“I’m five-four. That’s average.”

“Not in here.”

I rub my thumbs in small circles at the base of his horns, where the hard ridges meet the short soft fur on his head. He breathes out hard and leans into my hands.

“Is that...?”

“Yes,” Tav says. “Yes. Don’t stop.”

I don’t stop. I keep my hands on his horns while he kisses me again, deeper, and then he moves down to my neck, and his breath is hot through my shirt. His hand on my back covers my entire back, shoulder to shoulder. When he pulls me forward, closer to the edge of the workbench, he does it with one arm, and the whole bench shifts.

“Tav.”

“Mm.”

“Bed,” I say. “This bench is going to give me splinters.”

“It’s sanded.”

“Tav.”

He laughs, low, and picks me up off the workbench, one arm under me, and carries me across the room to the bed. He sets me down on it, and then he gets on it himself, and the frame takes his weight without a sound. Of course it does. He built it.

I pull my shirt off. Merek’s shirt. Tav looks at it, and then at me, and doesn’t say anything about whose shirt it is, and I like him for that.

“Your turn,” I say.

He pulls his work shirt over his head, careful of his horns, and drops it on the floor.

. I've been staring at him through that work shirt all week. Now that it's off, I realize just how much I've been missing. He’s covered in short, dark-brown fur, thick over his shoulders and chest and thinning down his stomach, and under the fur he’s solid muscle. His shoulders are wider than the bed I had in Fresno. There’s a long pale scar across his ribs on one side where the fur grows back lighter.

“What’s that?”

“1957,” he says. “A beam came down in the cellar.”