Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
“No. Hold it like this. You’re holding it like it’s a weapon.” Polly’s small hands folded over Tess’s on the haft of the little knife, adjusting her grip. “Let the knife work with the stone.”
Njkall stood in the mouth of the healer’s cave with a basket of dried roots Cera had asked him to bring, and did not go in.
He’d meant to. He’d meant to set the basket inside the door and leave quietly, because he knew what the sight of him did in a room where a frightened female was learning to breathe. Instead, he stopped, and he watched, and the basket hung forgotten from one clawed hand.
Because the small dark-haired female bent over the knife, correcting a grip, and steadying a stranger’s shaking hands with her own hands was Polly.
This was Polly.
He carried the memory of another Polly in him always, the way a male carried an old wound that ached before storms. The one who’d crouched in a corner, filthy and naked, hiding from the world behind a tangle of dark hair.
The one who had made herself small in every doorway and who had watched every unfamiliar male the way a pikka watched a shadow with wings.
The one who had taken his hand and climbed into his bed and finally let him wash away the dirt.
The one who had needed him the way a drowning creature needs something it can climb onto, blind and desperate and without choice.
He had never resented that need. He’d have carried it gladly to the end of his days. But he’d have given a great deal, in those first months, to see her the way she was now—calm and patient, her whole attention poured out towards someone else’s fear instead of curled up around her own.
“There. See?” Polly held up the small bead, and the ghost of a smile crossed her mouth. “You did that.”
Tess grunted something that wasn’t quite thanks, and looked at the bead, and looked at Polly, and there it was—the thing that had rooted him to the doorway.
The way the escaped female’s eyes rested on Polly.
The way a person looks at the one solid thing in a shifting world.
The way, he thought with a strange twist beneath his ribs, Polly had once looked at him.
Someone was clinging to Polly now, and she was letting them. She was holding the weight of that need, keeping the promise she’d made without ever once making a show of it.
Pride swelled in him, sharp and sudden. Here was the result of every hard-won step she’d taken—a female who could offer another person safety because she had built enough of her own to have some to share.
Look at you, he thought. Look what you made of yourself, little one. And you’ll swear it was nothing. You always do.
Then, riding in close behind the pride, came the other thing. The colder thing. He made himself look at it, because he was not a male who flinched from what was true.
She was healing. And a healing creature does not always keep the shape of its wounded self.
She had needed him because everything else had been terror, and he had been the one fixed point in the dark.
But what happened to a fixed point when the dark thinned out?
When there were other lights? When she had learned to stand entirely on her own?
He wanted her whole. He had wanted nothing else, all this year, so fiercely that he’d throttled his own desire to a whisper rather than risk a single step of her healing. Give Polly whatever she needs to heal. He’d made that his one law. He’d kept it.
And now she was healing, and the honest question sat in his chest like a swallowed stone. When she no longer needs me, will she still want me?
The clinging had never been what he wanted from her. But gods help him, some low and selfish part of him had grown used to being needed, and did not know how to think about a Polly who might, someday soon, be able to walk clean away from him and not so much as stumble.
He would let her go if she did. He’d already decided that, long ago, in the dark.
Her freedom was worth more than his own happiness, and it was not a noble speech he told himself, it was simply the truth of what he felt.
But knowing a thing and standing ready to survive it were two different mountains.
Polly looked up and found him in the doorway. And instead of the reflexive step towards him for shelter, she gave him a smile—unhurried, certain, a little tired around the edges—and nodded at the basket.
“You brought Cera’s roots?”
“Cera’s roots,” he agreed, and set them down by the door, and his voice came out steady even as that swallowed stone sat heavily inside him. “I’ll leave you to your work.”
“You can stay.”
“You’re teaching.” He met Tess’s wary glance and stepped back, giving the female the room she needed. “I only carry things. I’ll see you in our quarters, little one.”
So he went, and let her be the strong one, and carried the stone all the way back through the glowing passages to their rooms—proud past speaking, and afraid in a way he had no words for, and telling himself, as he had told himself all these nights, that patience was the answer. Patience was always the answer.
He was still telling himself that, hours later, when she came to him.
The crystals had dimmed to their lowest evening glow. He lay on his back in the sleeping cave, waiting until he heard the small bare feet on the stone. She paused at the mouth of his sleeping cave, as though asking a question she already knew the answer to.
“Come,” he said quietly, and she came.
He felt the furs shift and felt her fit itself against his side, and he curved his arm around her, bringing her closer. His mate against him in the dark. His whole body eased around it, but he held every other part of himself absolutely still.
But she didn’t curl up.
That was the first thing his body noticed, before his mind caught up to it. She turned towards him as she’d done the previous night, and after a moment he felt her hand come to rest flat on his chest.
She’d done that before, but this time she didn’t leave her hand still. She spread her fingers slowly through the fur over his rapidly beating heart, and she moved her palm across the breadth of his chest, over the old ridge of a scar and back again, with a slow deliberate attention.
She was learning him. By touch. On purpose.
He didn’t move, even though it took everything in him not to move. He lay under her exploring hand and made himself remain patient and still, a fixed point she could measure herself against, holding his breath so she wouldn’t feel him fighting it.
Let her set the pace, he told himself, and it was less a thought than a prayer. Whatever this is. However far it goes or doesn’t. She sets the pace. I do not reach. I do not take. I’ve waited a year, I can wait a lifetime.
Then she leaned up over him and put her hand on his face.
Her thumb moved over his cheekbone, then traced the shape of his brow, the ridge of his nose, the line of his mouth, careful, unhurried, the way she handled a piece of bone she meant to make into something.
She read him with her hands the way she read everyone with her eyes.
His breath went ragged for one heartbeat and he mastered it.
He kept his own hands where they were—one cradling her, and the other open and still against the furs.
He did not close them. He would not close them.
“You’re holding so still,” she whispered, very close now. Her breath moved warm across his mouth. “You always hold so still. For me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So you always know,” he said carefully, giving each word its full weight, “that nothing here moves towards you unless you move it first.”
She went quiet after that, her thumb still on his lip.
And then she kissed him.
It was small. It was clumsy with newness and it landed a shade off-center and it lasted no longer than two heartbeats—but there was no mistaking it.
A kiss. Her mouth pressed against his, soft and uncertain and warm, and there was a tremble in it he felt all the way down through his chest into the deepest, hungriest part that he kept ruthlessly contained. His mate had kissed him.
And even though Hothians didn’t kiss, every instinct in his enormous body roared up at once and told him to kiss her back and return a hundredfold what she’d offered—
He did not.
He held still. He let her mouth rest on his for those two heartbeats, and when she drew back, he let her draw back.
He didn’t follow the retreat with so much as an inch of himself.
He lay there in the dark with his heart going like a war drum and his hands open and empty and every muscle locked against wanting her, and he let the space open up between their mouths and did nothing to close it.
Because it was hers to close. Or not. It would always, always be hers.
He heard her breath shake. She settled back a fraction, looking down at him in the dark and he could feel the weight of her gaze.
“You didn’t move,” she said. Her voice had gone thick, and unsteady, with something in it he couldn’t name.
“No.”
“I kissed you and you just—” A soft broken sound that was almost a laugh. “You just let me. And then you let me stop.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know,” she whispered, and now he heard the two things twined together in her voice and pulling opposite ways, “that that’s the safest I have ever felt in my whole life?
That you’ll never, ever take one single thing I don’t hand you?
” Her hand had found his chest again, over the war drum of his heart.
“And do you know how much I hate it? Right now? That you won’t—” The laugh cracked apart.
“You infuriating, patient… I kissed you, Njkall. I kissed you, and you lay there like a rock, and it makes me feel safe and it drives me out of my mind and I don’t know which one I’m feeling and I think it might be both at once and I don’t know what to do with that—”
“What do you want me to do with it?” he asked, his voice hoarse.