"An hour. Maybe more."
She pauses with her shirt half-on. "You should have woken me."
"Why?"
She doesn't have an answer for that. But I know why I didn't — because she doesn't sleep easily, I know that, because the girls in those cabins get checked on and walked past and never fully let her rest, because out here there was no one to be on guard for and she let herself go under and I wasn't going to take that from her.
But I don't say any of it. I fold the blanket instead, put the embers out properly, and let her pretend she would have wanted waking.
We gather our things and step out into the aftermath.
The world is all washed stone and quiet dripping, the light that particular pale gold of late afternoon after heavy rain, everything smelling of wet earth and cold water and something green underneath it all. The river is running higher, louder. The path back to the settlement is going to be muddy and I'd liketo apologize in advance to Aislin's boots, which did nothing to deserve today.
She picks her way along the bank beside me, stepping around the worst of the mud, and I watch the way she moves — easy, the same economical precision she has on the training ground, nothing wasted — and I think about her moving beneath me in the firelight, that same efficiency entirely undone, and I have to look at the river.
This is going to be a problem.
I've wanted women before. That's not new. What's new is this — the specific, particular, maddening quality of wantingthiswoman, who I've spent weeks learning the shape of in an entirely different context, who I know how to make laugh and how to make furious and how to keep moving through a crowd that terrifies her, and who I now also know makes a sound low in her throat when I find the right angle, who digs her nails in and holds on and calls my name like I'm worth something.
I look at the river for a very long time.
She falls into step beside me when the path widens, close enough that our arms occasionally brush, and she doesn't move away from those brushes, which is something. It might be the most she's ever not moved away from me, and I'm aware that this is my new baseline — measuring everything in units ofhow much she didn't pull back.
"Your egg," she says.
I glance at her.
"The dare." She keeps her eyes on the path ahead. "You never told me what it said."
I take the folded paper from my pocket. I've been carrying it since the hollow log and thinking about it intermittently in the way you think about something you're not ready to act on yet. I unfold it and hand it to her without a word and watch the path.
She reads it. I don't look at her.
"Bold living," she says. "Tell your partner one thing you want."
"Yes."
"You didn't do it."
"I'm doing it now." I keep my eyes forward. "I want this again. Not just today. I want — I want to keep whatever this is. I want to not go back to whatever we were before it, where I was pretending I didn't—" I stop. Try again. "I want to not pretend."
I'm not even fully sure what I'm asking. To court her? To bring her to my bed? To have her admit she wants me?
All I know is I need her the way I've never needed anything.
A beat of nothing except our feet on wet ground.
"Alright," she says.
I look at her.
She's looking ahead, chin up, but there's something in her profile that is not quite the controlled blankness she deploys as armor. There's color in her face that wasn't there before my question. She holds the paper out to me and I take it and fold it back up and put it in my pocket.
"Alright," I repeat.
"Don't make it a thing."
"I'm not making it a thing."
