“You say that like it’s suspicious.”
“Everything is suspicious until it’s not.”
“That must be exhausting,” I say pleasantly.
Something moves through his eyes. Not quite amusement—Archer is not a man who leads with amusement—but adjacent to it, the thing that happens before amusement in people who’ve trained themselves out of easy reactions.
He sets the hardware down at the frame, crouches to fit it, and gets to work. He doesn’t make conversation. Doesn’t explain his continued presence. He just works, on the frame, within a distance that is close enough to be noticeable and far enough to be defensible.
I am very aware of him too.
This is a physiological reality I’m dealing with at an intellectual distance, which is the only way I know how to deal with it. He’s big—I knew this, it’s not newinformation—and he moves with the economy of someone physically capable who has nothing to prove about it. When he reaches to fix something at the upper frame his shirt rides up and I do not look at the sliver of his muscled abs. I am absolutelynotlooking at his muscled abs.
The smell of him has drifted into my space.
Cedar and snow. Plus that underneath thing, the thing I don’t have a category for, except—standing this close, with the afternoon warming up and the work generating heat—I think it’s something likepack.Like something that registers to some part of me that predates rational thought assafetyandhome.I have never in my life scented anything that made those words surface automatically and I cannot deal with that right now. It has to be because of the partial bond. Surely, it can’t be anything else?
I move to the other end of the prep table.
“Ingredient run?” I say to Tristan, because I need a task that involves being somewhere else.
“List is on the clip,” he replies, not looking up, and hands me a canvas bag.
I take the list and the bag. I don’t look at Archer and leave at a pace that is normal walking speed and is definitely not a retreat.
Jack finds me at the supply holding tent. Are these meneverywhere?
“You’re working the stall,” he says, appearing beside me with the breathlessness of someone whohas run here and is pretending they haven’t.
“Is that the only sentence anyone in this town knows?”
“It’s a recurring theme because you keep doing things nobody expected.” He falls into step with me, hands in his pockets, matching my pace effortlessly. “Tristan must be very pleased with himself.”
“Why?”
“Because you asked, he offered, and you said yes, which means you’re staying at least through the weekend, which means—”
“Which means I needed cash and it was available,” I say. “Don’t make it a thing.”
“It’s already a thing. You made it a thing by showing up.” He says this without cheek, just fact. “How are you finding it? The work, I mean.”
“Fine. Good.” I locate the items on the list and start collecting them. “Tristan knows what he’s doing.”
“Tristan was born knowing what he was doing.” Jack takes the heavier container from my arm without asking. I let him because it’s practical, not because I’m charmed by it. “Archer behaving himself?”
“Archer is… Archer.”
“That’s the most diplomatic thing anyone’s ever said about him.” He pauses. “He’s better than he looks.”
“He looks fine.”
“I mean, he seems harsh. He’s not, underneath it all. He’s just…” Jack searches for the word. “He cares a lot. About the pack, about the town. He doesn’t know how to dothat quietly.”
I don’t say anything. I’m not sure what to do with that information, so I file it next to all the other information I’m collecting about these men and trying not to do anything with.
“You’re not going to ask anything else about them?” Jack observes.
“No.”
