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“I could hear you from the dish pit,” he says. “Hitting the door. Kit said it was the ice machine. Grady’s been fighting with that ice machine for a year.” He turns the glass. “Then I couldn’t hear it anymore. That’s when I went.”

I remember the scoop. I remember my arm getting too heavy to lift it.

“When I got the door open, you were standing in the back with the ice scoop in both hands. Like you were going to take my head off with it.” A smile starts across his face and doesn’t stay. “Your lips were gray. You couldn’t work the zipper on the hoodie. I had to do it.”

“I remember.”

“I run at a hundred and twelve degrees, Trouble. On a slow night. I can strip paint.” He sets the glass down. “And I was holding you in that chair with your hands on my chest, and I didn’t know if it was going to be enough. I didn’t know how long you’d been in there. I didn’t know what twenty minutes at zero does to a human.” He shakes his head once. “I’ve been alive a long time. I don’t get scared. I didn’t know what it was for about a day.”

I get off the stool. I walk around the end of the island, in my socks, and stop in front of him. Up close, he’s hot enough that I can feel it on my face like standing near an oven door.

“You were enough,” I say.

“You didn’t know that either.”

“I knew it about five seconds after you put your hands on me.” I tip my head back to look at him, which is a long way up. “You kept saying ‘You’re doing fine.’ Over and over. Like a pilot. I almost laughed.”

“I was talking to myself.”

“I know.”

“I keep thinking about it,” he says. “Every time you go back there. Every time you go downstairs. Tonight Lenart hangs up and says William has you and you’re safe, and I’m standing in the security office, and it’s the freezer all over again.”

“I’m safe.”

“I know you are.” His voice is low. “I’m working on believing it.”

I put my hand flat on his chest, over his shirt, the way I did after the freezer. It’s like putting my hand on the hood of a car that’s been running.

He doesn’t move.

“I want the guy who rescued me and my dog. Who fixed a ramp on Tuesday and didn’t mention it. Who keeps making me laugh when I’d rather throw a chair through a window.” I swallow. “And I like your tail. And the horns. And that you’re too hot to sleep under a blanket. I want that too. Specifically you.”

The grin he’s been wearing since my boot hit his couch is gone. The ember lines along his throat go gold.

“Say that again,” he says.

“Which part?”

“Specifically.”

“Specifically you, Merek.”

He lets out a breath that I feel on my forehead, hot and rough, and then he puts both hands on my waist and lifts me up onto the island like I weigh nothing, so that I’m sitting on the butcher block and my eyes are level with his.

“Trouble,” he says. “I’ve been turning myself down since the day I met you.”

“Turning yourself down?”

“The heat.” He lifts one hand and holds it an inch from my cheek, not touching. I can feel it there, warm as sun through a windshield. “You’ve never felt it all the way up. Nobody human has. I keep it low around you. Every time.”

“Show me,” I say.

He lays his palm against the inside of my wrist, where the skin is thin.

It’s warm. Merek-warm, the way it always is, like a mug of coffee. Then I feel it rise. Not all at once. Slowly, the way bathwater climbs when you leave the hot tap running, warmer, and warmer, until it’s right at the edge of too much, and the ember lines under his skin brighten from his fingers up to his elbow, gold, pulsing.

“Tell me when,” he says.