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“Are you hurt?” he asked.
But everything right down to his scent was like a breath of air I hadn’t been able to draw until this moment.
I shook my head, fingers closing around his wrist. Then, before I could think about it, I’d flung myself into his arms.
He held me like that for a long moment, then drew me up and carried me to the couch in his room. Every step into the space calmed my nerves, the cool twilight grass sinking into my very lungs.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“I uh…” I swallowed. “I don’t know. It’s stupid. Just a bit of courage.”
Still, those texts were unread.
It was so much worse now, such a freefall after finally finding some true harmony in this pack. Some happiness with all of them there—even if I had been high.
“And you came to me?” He kept tucking non-existent strands of hair behind my ear mechanically, as if he wasn’t sure what else to do.
“Nightmares,” I whispered. Well, not exactly. It hadn’t started until I was awake. But sometimes it was hard to pretend this wasn’t one big nightmare.
“I thought the others were in your room,” he said.
“They are.”
“Aren’t they comforting you?”
“They would have,” I said. “I left.”
A part of me had been scared of coming here for this, expecting him to consider it all silly, but Ebony was fixated on me like a puzzle to solve.
When I was with him, there was nothing else in the world but us. It was already working, my nerves were already so much better.
“They can’t fix this.”
“And I can?” he asked.
I nodded.
“How?”
“I just wanted to be near you.”
He nodded, and I relaxed in his arms, content to sit in the quiet stillness of his strangely tidy room. Engulfed in twilight grass I felt safer than I ever had, and that was hard to reckon with.
“I don’t know why you’re coming to me today,” he said quietly after a long silence.
“What do you mean?”
He considered that. “It will be a few more days before I’m finished with my gifts.”
I peered up into those curious storm-silver eyes, considering that. “I liked the swan,” I said quietly.
“Is that why you’re here?”
“It’s not why. But I liked it.”
He nodded. “Explain why I can help and Love can’t.”
I felt a half smile on my face at those words. “It’s not really important.”
