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That's all. Okay. She's been in my house four hours and she's already stopped arguing with me about the important things. I don't know what to do with how much I like that.
I walk the house. Every window, every latch, the cellar hatch, the back door with its ridiculous rubber flap. Behind me she gets up and starts closing doors, one at a time, apologizing to each one under her breath.
The last one is the guest room.
She stops in it with the quilt around her shoulders.
"I forgot a pillow," she says.
"I've got pillows."
"You have a bed. Singular. With pillows on it. Those are your pillows."
I go get one anyway and hold it out. She takes it and doesn't step back.
Her knuckles brush my chest and electrifies it. Neither of us moves.
She smells like my soap. Like my house. Like woodsmoke and cider and under all of it, warm and stubborn and entirely herself. This was what my wolf decided on in April before even asking.
Mate.
Not tonight.
Ours.
She isn't. Not while she's frightened and living in my guest room because her own front door has been compromised.
"Gage?"
"Yeah."
"Thank you for not saying I told you so." She looks up. Bruises fading under her jaw, hair a disaster, eyes too bright. "About the doors. You could've made it all about the doors."
"It's not about the doors."
"What's it about?"
Everything I can't say yet. The word Evelyn breathed on my porch. The word the mirror hasn't finished writing. My father's voice telling me they get used to it.
"Sleep," I say.
She looks at me one second too long. Then she closes the door between us, and I stand in my own hallway like a man who's been dismissed.
The cat is sitting on the hall table, tail curled over his feet, watching me with those gold eyes.
You're leaking.
I go still.
The voice isn't a sound. It lands behind my ribs, dry as chalk, and it’s unmistakably the cat.
"What?" I say out loud.
Your desire. It's all over the house.
I choke on nothing at all and cough. Air, gone the wrong way. Behind the guest room door Maren calls, "Are you okay?"
"Fine."
