6. Rob
Rob
I kissed her like I had all the time in the world.
Which was new. Most of my life I'd moved like a man who'd learned to work efficiently because efficiency was what the work demanded, nothing wasted, nothing prolonged, keep the system running.
Even before I'd stopped expecting a mate, before solitude had become the architecture of everything, I'd had that quality of not quite allowing myself to linger.
Jessie Walker was teaching me to linger.
She kissed back with the same steadiness, and when we finally broke apart, the fire had burned down, and the cabin was dim, and she was looking at me with those clear, dark eyes that didn't bother trying to hide what they were thinking.
"I should tell you something," I said.
"Tell me."
"Mate bond. What you're — what I'm feeling. It's not metaphorical for shifters. It's real and it's specific and it's—" I stopped. "I don't want you to feel like it removes a choice. It doesn't. It's instinct, not compulsion. You can walk away from this."
She was quiet for a moment. "Can you?"
Honest answer: not easily. Not without cost.
"No," I said. "But that's my problem to carry, not yours."
"That's a very noble answer," she said, "and also slightly ridiculous, because I'm sitting here by your fire having just told you that I'm staying in Canada and I've thought about the Havenwood clinic and I haven't looked at my watch in two hours, which hasn't happened since—" She stopped. "Since before I can remember."
"Jessie."
"I'm not walking away," she said simply. "I'm telling you that clearly so we don't have to keep circling it."
Something in my chest, solid and certain, settled into place.
I stood, held out my hand, and she took it without hesitation, and I brought her up to the loft where the mattress was proper and the skylight over the bed showed mountains going dark against the last of the cloud.
What happened next was unhurried and warm and real.
Two people in their middle years who knew how bodies worked and weren't interested in pretending otherwise.
She was generous and particular in equal measure, told me what she wanted without apology, and when I pressed my mouth to the curve of her shoulder and felt her breath catch, I understood that we were both relearning something we'd each stopped expecting to find.
After, we lay in the dark with the rain finally gone and the stars beginning to show through the skylight, her head on my chest, her breathing slowing toward sleep.
"Tell me something about the northern corridor," she said quietly.
So I did. The winter migration patterns. The way the frozen lake looked in January when the light hit it right. The particular silence of high altitude at first snow.
Her breathing evened out somewhere around the lake.
I lay awake a while longer, one hand in her hair, listening to the mountain settle.