Chapter 39 #2
His hand curled protectively around my thigh as I climbed onto his back, firm enough to steady me without risking harm. The strength beneath the movement was ridiculous. Effortless.
Every instinct I had should’ve been screaming about the fact that I was willingly climbing onto the back of something capable of outrunning almost anything in these woods. Instead, my pulse kicked harder from anticipation.
“Ready?” Calder asked.
I tightened my arms around his shoulders automatically, fingers sinking into thick fur. “Sure.”
The world blurred a second later.
Calder launched into the air. Cold air whipped around us and stole the breath right out of my lungs. The forest dissolved into streaks of shadow and moonlight, branches flashing overhead while powerful movement rolled beneath me with terrifying smoothness.
I tightened my arms instinctively around his shoulders, fingers buried deep in thick fur as he moved through the woods faster than my eyes could properly track.
The speed should’ve terrified me, but adrenaline and exhilaration tangled together so hard in my chest that laughter almost broke loose anyway.
Calder never stumbled once.
Every movement felt precise and controlled. Massive strength contained so completely it somehow made me trust him even more.
Gradually, the pace eased.
The violent blur of trees softened into recognizable shapes again as Calder slowed near the edge of a rocky incline overlooking a wide stretch of forest below. His steps grew quieter there, more deliberate, until finally he stopped completely beneath a stand of old pines near the cliff’s edge.
For a second, I stayed where I was, breathing hard against the warmth of his shoulder while my pulse tried to catch up with the rest of me.
Then I laughed softly under my breath. “You’re making me feel like Bella.”
Calder glanced over his shoulder. “I do not know who that is.”
“Right.” I loosened one arm long enough to scrub a hand over my face, still grinning. “Okay. Twilight. Huge vampire craze when I was a teenager. Bella was the human girl.”
“The stories were about vampires.”
“And werewolves.” I slid carefully down from his back onto solid ground again. “There was this huge debate over which guy people wanted her to end up with.”
Calder watched me quietly. “You had a preference.”
“Oh, absolutely. Teenage me was fully Team Edward.”
“And now?” Moonlight caught silver along the dark fur over his shoulders as he looked at me.
Desire coiled low in my gut.
I smiled despite myself. “Now,” I admitted, “I think I’m definitely Team Jacob.”
Calder considered that for a moment. “He would be the wolf.”
“Yeah.”
A pause.
Then, in a completely serious tone, “That seems more practical.”
The laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. God. He was unintentionally funny sometimes.
The view behind him stole the rest of my thoughts before I could continue the conversation.
The forest stretched endlessly below us beneath the moonlight, dark pine canopy rolling across the landscape in uneven waves broken only by the silver ribbon of water cutting through the distance. Somewhere farther north, low fog drifted between the trees like smoke settling close to the ground.
Everything felt bigger from up here.
Quieter, but not empty–alive.
The kind of solitude layered with movement and sound so constant your brain stopped separating one thing from another.
Water rippling over stone somewhere below.
Wind pushing softly through pine needles overhead.
Frogs calling in uneven rhythms near the riverbank.
An owl deeper in the woods answering something I couldn’t hear.
Calder watched me instead of the landscape.
“You hear it differently now,” he said quietly.
I glanced toward him. “Hear what?”
“The forest.”
The answer stayed with me, as softly as the wind moving through the trees around us.
Calder stepped closer to the overlook, his gaze lifting toward the dark stretch of wilderness below. “Humans usually listen for one thing at a time,” he said. “A voice. An animal. Water, but the forest is never only one sound.” His head tilted slightly, listening. “And none of them are separate.”
I stayed quiet, listening.
Crickets chirped through the grass behind us. The river moved somewhere below the cliff in a constant low rush that almost sounded like breathing if I focused on it long enough. The wind rustled through the trees below us.
“If something changes,” he muttered, “the rest of the forest changes with it.” His attention remained on the darkness below.
I listened again.
The river.
The frogs.
The insects.
The wind.
A few minutes earlier I would’ve said they were separate sounds.
Now, I wasn’t so sure.
The frogs would go quiet for a moment and the insects seemed louder.
The wind shifted and suddenly I could hear the river more clearly.
Nothing stayed exactly the same for long.
One thing affected another.
I looked out across the moonlit forest and suddenly, I understood what he meant earlier.
Crowded sound.
Not because the sounds were competing, because they were all happening at once.
“You’ve always listened like this,” I hushed.
“Yes.”
There was no pride in the answer. Just truth.
Calder had spent centuries listening to a world most people moved through without ever really hearing.
Both of us stayed quiet for a while.
The wind whistled softly through the pines above us, carrying the sharp clean scent of cedar and cold water up from the valley below. Somewhere farther down the slope, frogs continued their uneven chorus.
Then Calder said quietly, “The Ho-Chunk people paid attention in ways many humans no longer do.”
I turned toward him. Moonlight reflected off the dark fur along his shoulders as he looked out across the forest instead of at me, his expression soft.
“They understood the woods differently from the people who came later. They moved through them carefully.”
The low calm of his voice blended so naturally into the night around us that for a second it almost felt like part of the landscape itself.
“I remember their drums. At night the sound carried for miles through the trees.” A faint pause. “Flutes carved from river cane. Some of the songs copied birds closely enough that the forest answered them.”
Something in my chest twisted.
Calder had seen all of it. Not in photographs or in history books, but with his own eyes.
“They danced too,” he added.
I smiled faintly. “Guess humans have always liked music.”
“Yes,” Calder said softly. “But they understood the silence.”
The words settled over me gently and for some time, we listened to the sounds of the forest.
Then, quietly, I requested, “Dance with me again.”
Calder looked down at me.
“There is no music. Not your kind.”
A smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. “We don’t need the speaker.”
His gaze searched my face for a moment, listening to the night around us again as wind moved softly through the pines overhead and water rushed faintly below the cliff.
“The forest is already singing,” I said. “We can dance to that.”
Something softened in his expression then, subtle but real. His gaze held mine for a long moment. “You hear it more now,” he said quietly.
My heart fluttered at the words, the deep meaning behind them an appreciation I’d never known.
Before I could figure out what to do with that realization, Calder added, his voice lower this time, “Milo Hart… You are changing the way I move through the world.”
My breath caught. Heat spread slowly beneath my skin, sudden and impossible to ignore. Nobody had ever said anything to me that felt quite like that before.
Not with that kind of quiet certainty. Not like it was simply the truth.
God. “You really don’t know how to say normal things, do you?” I murmured softly.
Something almost warm flickered in his eyes at that. “I do not think that was an insult.”
A broken laugh burst out of my throat. “No,” I admitted. “It definitely wasn’t.”
Then his hand settled carefully at my waist.
I slid my hand along his arm until my fingers disappeared into the thick fur near his shoulder, and together we moved slowly across the flat stretch of stone beneath the pines while the night sounds gathered around us like music of their own.
I could feel Calder’s heartbeat beneath my hand.
Slow.
Steady.
Real.
I leaned closer, my cheek brushing the fur near his chest as we swayed together beneath the trees.
And for the first time in a very long time, I didn’t feel restless.
I didn’t feel stressed or lonely, or like I was waiting for something in my life to start making sense.
I just felt safe.
Calder’s hand flexed slightly against my waist. “You are quiet,” he murmured.
“I’m listening.”
Something warm flickered through his expression.
We stayed there for a while after the dancing stopped, long enough that the temperature dropped lower and fog began gathering in pale ribbons between the trees below us.
Eventually Calder carried me back down the mountain, slower this time, one arm securing me beneath my legs while my head rested against his shoulder.
By the time the cabin came into view through the trees, exhaustion had settled comfortably through my body.
Calder lowered me carefully onto the porch, and I looked up at him and smiled softly.
“Thanks for showing me,” I murmured.
His expression softened, subtle enough that another person probably wouldn’t have noticed it. “I wanted you to hear it.”
My chest ached with the quiet enormity of what he’d just given me.
No one had ever shared the way they experienced the world with me. Until Calder.
And standing there beneath the porch light with the night air still clinging to both of us, I realized I wasn’t sure I would ever recover from that.