I'd known it before she said it. I'd known it the first morning in the clearing when Aislin had moved like she was conducting something, all controlled edge and forward intent, and I'd thought:yes, there it is,the thing that had been visible from the first day I'd clocked her watching me from the cabin threshold like I was something to be assessed and neutralized.
If I'm being honest, I noticed it her second day here when she was cleaned up and I was viewing her as a person who needed help instead of a vicious warrior.
What I hadn't expected, in any of it, was this. The walking. The quiet that feels like something between us rather than the absence of something.
I break it.
"You were fierce out there." I don't look at her when I say it, I look at the path ahead. "Impressive. The balance beam especially — you made the correction before it had fully gone wrong. You have great instincts."
She doesn't answer immediately. I listen to four footsteps before she does anything.
She stops.
I stop half a pace after her and turn, and she's standing on the path looking at me, and the expression on her face is the one that means she's about to ask the question she's actually been carrying, not the surface version.
"Why did you do that?" Her voice is level. Genuinely asking.
"The walk back?—"
"At the course." She watches my face. "You came out on the outside. You ran alongside me." A beat. "You pushed me."
I hold her gaze. The green of her eyes is very particular in this light, catching something in the birch-filtered afternoon that makes them more themselves somehow.
"You were in your head," I say. "You'd gone somewhere that wasn't the course. I know what that looks like on you."
"So you insulted my pace."
"It worked."
She makes a sound that is almost something and isn't quite. Her arms have crossed, not the defensive fold, the one that means she's thinking. "You do that. You read me and you find the thing that—" She stops. "Why?"
"Because I'm your friend." The word sits simply. I mean it simply. "That's what it is. You've got enough people watching you to make sure you're safe. You don't need another pair of eyes tracking you, inspecting you. I want—" I pause, finding the exact edge of what I mean. "I want you to run the course. I want you to hit the balance beam at pace. I want you out there, not standing at the start line." I look at her. "That's what a friend does. I'll always push. That's the offer."
The silence comes back, but it's a different silence now, weighted differently.
"I don't understand." She's looking at me like she can't grip what it means for someone to want you to let down your walls for no reason in return. To just know that you feel safe enough to.
"I've worked," I say, and I hear something rougher in my own voice, something I hadn't quite planned on, "to earn your trust. Two weeks of mornings. Sparring sessions that have shown you every one of my intentions." I don't move toward her. "Have I not earned it yet? Do you not believe I can just want the best for you? That that's all this is?"
She's studying me.
It's the most complete assessment she's ever run on me, and I've had a few. This one moves through everything, slow and thorough, and I hold still for it the way I've learned to hold still in the mornings when she needs to take the measure of something before she'll commit to it. I don't perform patience, I just actually wait, because she's earned that from me as much as anything goes the other direction.
Whatever she finds, it doesn't seem to be lacking.
Because she moves forward and she kisses me.
It takes me a full second — a full, genuine, lost second — to understand what's happening, the warm press of her mouth against mine and the small movement it took her to close the remaining distance, and then I understand, and I stop being still.
I pull her in.
Both arms, all the way, the same hold as before except nothing like before, nothing like physics and momentum, this is entirely deliberate and she comes with it and kisses me harder.
She tastes like cold air and exertion and something underneath that I can't name yet, and I am very thoroughly not thinking about anything except this — her hands finding the front of my shirt, the way she fits against me, the specific quality of kissing someone who does nothing halfway.
I lose myself in it. Completely. The birches and the afternoon and the sound of the settlement are somewhere extremely far away, and what's here is her, the press of her mouth and the grip of her hands and the warmth of her in my arms, and I hold her closer because she's here and she chose this and I am absolutely not wasting a second of it.
12
