Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BOONE
By the time five days have passed, I’m fully healed and absolutely ruined.
Physically, the wound is gone. No pain, no stiffness, no weakness. If I part the fur along my ribs, there’s only a faint line of newer skin, a pale crescent that will probably be invisible by next week. Sasquatch biology does good work.
Mentally? I’m a disaster.
Because those five days have all gone more or less the same way:
Morning: I swear I’m going to stay away from Elias.
Midday: I tell myself I’m simply checking the perimeter, as any responsible forest guardian would.
Afternoon: Elias shows up at my cave with a spring in his step, a backpack full of food, and thirty-seven questions about everything.
Evening: I realize I’ve once again spent half the day hovering near him like a moth around a lantern.
It’s pathetic.
And those first hours after he helped me…
the memory is a problem all on its own. The way he leaned over me, face intent, brows drawn in concentration, hands steady and gentle on my side.
The way his scent surrounded me up close—clean sweat, forest air, a hint of campfire smoke in his clothes, and the unmistakable note that’s simply Elias.
I kept my breathing measured. I kept still. I didn’t lean into his touch or drag my nose along the curve of his throat. That feels like an accomplishment now.
When he left, though—when his footsteps faded down the path and the cave went quiet again—I lay there staring at the ceiling for a long time, my body humming like I’d swallowed a storm.
It didn’t take a genius-level intellect to understand what that meant.
I’m not just curious about him. I’m not just protective. Nor am I simply fascinated by his work and his clumsy courage and the way his laugh sneaks out like he’s surprised by it every time.
I’m attracted to him. Infatuated.
Ridiculously, inconveniently, embarrassingly into him.
After that realization settled into my bones, I did the only thing I could do: I took care of the problem before I napped.
In private.
Quickly.
Thoroughly.
And that’s nobody’s business but mine and the moss on the far wall.
You’d think that would have helped. It didn’t. If anything, it made the next five days worse.
Elias has come by every day since then, just like he said he would, bright and earnest and so full of questions they spill out of him in overlapping waves.
Questions about my healing, my biology, my sense abilities, my language, my cave.
Questions about what I eat, what I do during the winter, how I deal with boredom.
The kind of questions that would normally annoy me if anyone else asked them. From him? They’re… endearing.
He sits cross-legged on one of my woven mats, notebook open, pen moving a mile a minute until he forgets to write because he’s too busy gesturing with his hands as he talks.
Sometimes he stares openly at the glowing screens in my “office” with a kind of horrified fascination, like I’ve committed a cosmic crime by connecting a server cluster to a cave.
Each time, I tell myself I’ll let him go about his day alone, and each time, I end up escorting him anyway.
“I’m just making sure he doesn’t walk into another bear,” I inform the ferns.
The ferns don’t believe me.
And now?
Now I’m hiding in the tree line like a coward while he sets up a small grill in front of his station and hums to himself.
He invited me to eat.
“Come by around sunset,” he said yesterday, grinning. “I have a portable grill. I can make something that isn’t dehydrated or from a packet. As a thank-you. And, you know… because I like your company.”
Because I like your company.
I’ve replayed those five words more times than is healthy.
From my spot between two cedars, I can smell the food already—meat sizzling, spices warming, vegetables charring just enough to be interesting. The scent of smoke curls through the evening air. My stomach growls. My nerves twist.
I shouldn’t go.
I should stay in the shadows and let him eat in peace. It’s dangerous, getting this close so often. Dangerous to me, to him, to the careful walls I’ve built between my world and his.
But the thought of not going—and of the disappointment that would surely crease his brow when I don’t show—makes my chest cramp.
“Just for a little while,” I mutter. “You can handle a little while.”
I take a deep breath. Then another, triple checking that no one human is within a two-mile radius. Then, before I can talk myself out of it, I step out of the trees.
Elias sees me immediately. His head comes up, his eyes brighten, and that smile—wide, open, stupidly radiant—blooms across his face like the sun decided to live there full-time.
“Boone!” he calls, waving me over as if I might miss where he is. “You made it.”
My heart aches with an emotion too complicated to name.
I walk into the clearing, trying to look calm and normal and not like I almost turned around three different times in the last ten steps.
Up close, the scene is… cozy.
He’s dragged his small folding table out onto the patch of ground in front of the station.
Two mismatched camp chairs sit on either side.
The grill hisses quietly, lid open, heat shimmering above the grate.
There are skewers lined up on a plate: chunks of meat, bell pepper, onion, and what smells like mushrooms. A second plate holds foil-wrapped parcels, probably potatoes.
A third plate holds… utensils.
Tiny utensils.
“Hi,” he says, his voice a little breathless as I stop near the table. “I, uh… I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”
“I said I would,” I reply, more gruffly than I intend.
His smile softens. “I know. I’m just still recalibrating to… all of this actually happening.” He gestures vaguely at me, the forest, the sky. All of reality.
I huff. “You and me both.”
He laughs, then reaches for a small cooler at his feet.
“Can I get you something to drink?” he asks. “I have water, juice, some fizzy flavored things, and a couple of beers I promise I won’t tell Gladys about if you don’t.” He holds up a can in one hand and a flimsy metal cup in the other.
I eye the cup.
I could crush that thing with a twitch. I could also, if I’m not careful, spill its contents all over myself, him, the grill, or all of the above. The idea of proving that level of coordination failure in front of him is… not appealing.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I had water before I came.”
“You sure?” he asks.
“I don’t need a drink,” I answer, perhaps a little too firmly. “Thank you.”
He blinks, then nods and sets the cup aside. For a second, guilt nips at me—he’s trying so hard to make this normal—but then he turns his attention back to the grill.
“So I have absolutely no idea what Bigfoot dietary preferences are,” he says cheerfully, “but I figured: omnivore. This is some kind of marinated steak thing, some vegetables, potatoes, and I have fruit inside if this all offends you.”
“You cooked for me,” I say slowly.
He glances over his shoulder. “Well. For us. I’m not a short-order cook, you know.”
Warmth slides through me. “Thank you,” I murmur.
“Of course,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Least I can do after you saved my life and then let me poke a bullet out of your ribs.”
“You made it sound very glamorous there,” I say dryly.
“Everything is glamorous when the patient survives,” he replies.
He moves around the little grill with practiced ease, turning skewers, checking the foil packets, occasionally fanning away a puff of smoke with a dish towel. He talks while he works, because Elias always talks when his hands are busy.
He asks about my healing, about whether the area is tender, about whether my biology reacts badly to gunpowder. He asks if hunters have been a problem for my kind for long. He asks about how many of us there are.
To most of his questions, I give short, careful answers.
“Yes, it’s fine.”
“Yes, we heal fast.”
“Yes, hunters have been a problem for centuries.”
“No, I’m not telling you exactly how many of us there are.”
He pouts a little at that last one. It shouldn’t be as charming as it is.
When the food is done, he loads up the plates. And that’s when the utensil problem presents itself.
He hands me a plate piled high with food… and a fork. The fork looks like a child’s toy in my hand.
We both stare at it for a second.
Then his eyes flick from the fork to my fingers, to my face, and I can see the realization crash into him like a wave. “Oh,” he says. “Oh no. I didn’t—I’m so sorry, I didn’t think about—”
“My hands work,” I say, more defensively than I mean to. “I have perfectly good manners. I don’t eat like a dog out of a bowl.”
His eyes go wide.
“That isn’t what I meant,” he blurts, horrified. “I swear that’s not what I meant. I’m just now realizing that everything in your world has to be sized differently, and this is—God, Elias, use your brain—”
He’s chastising himself now, cheeks flushed pink, eyes darting everywhere but my face. The rush of his embarrassment radiates off him.
My defensiveness cools instantly, replaced by guilt. “I know you didn’t mean it that way,” I say, softening my tone. “I’m just not used to… this. Eating with humans. Being handed cutlery the size of a twig.”
His gaze flicks back to me, brow creased. “I really am sorry.”
“I know,” I say. And I do.
I look down at the fork and then at him. At his small, neat plate and his small, neat utensils. At the table and the chairs and this attempt at something almost like a… date?
The thought hits me hard enough to rattle my bones.
I can’t believe I’m about to do this.
“Do you… want me to shift?” I hear myself ask.
He frowns. “Shift?”
“Into my human form,” I clarify.
He drops his fork. It clatters against the plate and bounces onto the ground. He just stares at me.
“You can do that easily?” he whispers, as if this is somehow more shocking than everything else that has happened.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s… complicated. But yes.”
His eyes are huge.
“Only if it will make you more comfortable,” I add quickly. “I don’t need it. I can eat like this.”