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Poet slides his hand along my jaw and scratches his fingers through my beard. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t need to—I hear him anyway.

I’m glad you’re here.

I am too, but I can’t stay. I need to go home before I meet Sol on the boat and I am already late.

At least, I will be if I don’t leave Poet’s bed soon.

He helps me up.

I don’t need him to, but it’s nice, so I let him, and I find I like his eyes on me as I retrieve my clothes and tug them on. I like the soreness in my body from what’s passed between us, and the tug in my belly as we go downstairs and emerge into the summer sun together.

My car is at home.

I need to make tracks back into town, but as I turn to leave, dressed in only my jeans, my shirt slung over my shoulder, Poet catches my hand in his.

He tugs me back to him. Into his arms, a smile that’s almost shy creasing his face. “Did I tell you I’m going to pick up a truck-load of chickens later?”

“I don’t think so.” Unless it was a conversation we had when I was wrestling with my blood sugar. “Are you getting a cockerel too?”

“I don’t know. Do you think Aras’s mum would mind the noise?”

“Hanna? No. She does not mind anything except rude old men in the supermarket.”

“I think I’d like her.”

“I’m sure you will find out soon enough. She walks past the gate most days.”

“So do you.”

“Hmm.” I think about kissing him, but out in the open, I’m abruptly aware Aras might see me from his bedroom window and I’m not sure how I feel about that. How he might feel, to see me in someone’s arms like this.

I brush my lips to Poet’s temple and draw back.

He lets me without comment, but however he feels about it is pushed aside by his labourer arriving for the day.

Dav.

I do not want to look at him. I angle my body so I don’t have to, something I have become good at over the years, until the one moment I wasn’t.

Annoyance flares in my veins. Waking up with Poet was everything I needed it to be and I am not willing to give Sol’s father a second of it. “I need to go.”

Poet holds my gaze, ignoring Dav as he passes us. Doesn’t speak until he’s out of earshot. “You really don’t like him, do you?”

“I don’t like how he makes me feel. I have not spoken to him since I punched him in the face last year."

Poet blinks, the violence of my confession surprising him as much as it does me—that the words exist for me to say.

And there’s more. “Sol thinks it was your brother or Saint, but it was me and I have never told him.”

“Does he need to know?”

I shrug, shadowed guilt threatening the glow I woke up with. “I would tell him if he asked. But I don’t think he ever would. It makes sense to him that it was Saint, or Cam, maybe.” Or Folk. But I don’t say that again. It was wrong of me to put that image in Poet’s head and the sensation of the day already slipping away from me isn’t a pleasant one. “I am sorry, my friend.”

Poet tilts his head, like Saint does sometimes. “For what?”

“For the bad energy. It matters, no? To the land?”

“That you believe it is enough for me. And don’t apologise for punching someone who probably deserved it.”