Chapter 5
Nina
The lights die at seven-forty.
One flicker, then another, then a hard black that swallows the cabin down to the red glow of coals behind the grate. Somewhere in the crawl space the generator kicks on and hums through the wall. Garrett crosses the room to check the fridge panel. He's been through this before. He stacked the firewood higher than usual when I came home. He filled two extra buckets from the tap. A man who expected the storm and prepared the way he prepares everything: ahead of time, in silence, without making it a thing.
He feeds the fire.
Bark catches. The flame crawls up the pine seams and pushes heat across the floorboards, I pull the quilt higher on the couch and watch him work. The firelight carves him in orange and shadow. His horns throw their own shape across the wall behind him, two curved arcs that lift and fall when he moves. He sets another split log on the grate.
He's been feeding me since I moved in. Roasted root vegetables at the end of his kitchen table while he pretends he isn't watching me chew. The woodstove ticking down to coals and his silhouette at the back window as he splits wood in the dark. My fingers finding the soft patch of fur between his horns when I pass the couch, the purr starting up under my touch and running through the whole frame of him.
Garrett settles onto the floor by the hearth, his back against the base of the rocker, a block of pale wood in one fist and a carving knife in the other. The blade moves. Small clean strokes, the shavings curling onto a folded cloth he's set across his knee. His grip swallows the knife. That should make the motion look clumsy but it doesn't; the blade cuts where he wants it to cut, the shape emerging out of the block a breath at a time.
I sit up.
The quilt slides off my shoulders and I let it pool at my waist. The fire pops behind the grate. Garrett doesn't lift his gaze, but the knife pauses against the wood. He knows the sound of me moving by now.
"Can I ask you something?"
He sets the knife down and looks at me.
The fire catches the amber in his eyes. He waits.
"Your horns."
His whole body locks. The shoulders set, the palms flatten against his thighs, the small inward tuck of his chin. I've seen the same posture twice this week in town. Once outside the hardware store when a woman crossed the street. Once at the diner when a toddler at the next booth looked up and started to cry.
He braces for me to be one more thing that hurts.
"I want to touch them." My voice stays low. The coals tick in the grate. "Properly. Not just here." I lift my fingers to the top of my own skull, where I've been grazing the safe patch of fur between his horns for the better part of a week. "The whole thing. I want to understand what they mean to you. And I want you to tell me if I need to stop."
He doesn't move.
Long enough that my thoughts start telling me I've overstepped, that I've read the room wrong, I ought to know better.
"I'm sorry. Forget I asked."
He reaches up.
His fingers close around my wrist. Not tight. Not even firm, for a grip that could shatter my arm without meaning to. He lifts my arm off my lap and guides my fingertips to the base of his right horn, where the bone pushes up out of his skull through a thick whorl of dark fur, and he presses my touch into the ridge there.
His eyes close.
His breath goes out of him in a long slow release, and the purr that's been humming low in his chest all night deepens intoheat under the bone, a vibration I register in my fingertips before I hear it.
His horn is warm.
Warmer than I expected, almost fever-warm, ridged along its length where I thought it would be smooth. The base at the skull is the softest part, a band of pale pink skin at the meeting point of bone and fur, and when my fingertip traces that join his whole body shudders under my touch. The sound climbs out of hischest and drops an octave. It vibrates through the bones of my wrist.
"Garrett." My voice shakes. "Tell me if this is too much."
He shakes his head. Once.
So I keep going.
My thumb finds the inside curve of the horn where it sweeps up and back, and I run it along the ridge. The bone isn't like smooth stone the way I imagined. It's layered, banded, a lifetime of growth laid down in subtle rings. I think of the trunks of old trees.
