ANNE
The ruts in the road made it a bumpy ride out of town, and my tailbone was complaining after the first mile.
I was focusing on that because if I didn’t, I’d focus on the giant monster sitting next to me. And that would be bad. Disastrous, even. Heat suffused me and I tried to tamp it down, but there was no way to ignore all the space he took up, the scent of him.
No touching, I reminded myself.
Looking isn’t touching, a slightly evil part of my psyche reminded me.
Great, the sexiest minotaur I’d ever seen was making me dissociate.
The problem with looking was where it led.
I’d start at his hands, one on the wheel and one on the gears, both big enough to make the controls look like a child’s toys, and then I’d picture them wrapped around my waist. Which was not a place a professional woman went at ten in the morning on a workday.
I went there anyway.
Then I got a grip. On myself, not on Remmen, though my imagination had a whole list of alternatives it was very eager to share.
The truck didn’t help. It had been built to a minotaur’s scale, which put the better part of a meter of cracked leather between us on the bench, and somehow I still felt crowded.
Every time he shifted, his shoulder came into my space.
His forearm was the size of my thigh. I was, once again, thinking about his forearm.
I looked out the window. Scrub, dirt, more scrub. It did nothing for me.
“You’re quiet,” Remmen said.
“I’m carsick.”
“I seriously doubt that.”
“I might be. The jury’s out.” The truck hit a rut that tried to rearrange my spine, and I grabbed the dash. “This road is a war crime. Somebody should tell the mayor.”
“The mayor knows.”
“Then the mayor should do something about it.”
“He’ll add it to his list.”
I laughed before I could stop it. He glanced over, and I turned back to the window, because the alternative was letting him watch me grin at him like an idiot.
We drove until the town was gone behind us and there was nothing out the windows but gold hills and a whole lot of sky. No pollution. No dome protecting us from the worst of it. Just weather doing whatever it wanted over land that ran on for miles.
It was beautiful. It also made me feel small and a long way from home.
“What brought you here?” he asked.
I’d known that one was coming. I had the answer ready, smooth from use.
“The Agency was hiring and the passage was free.” I shrugged, like that covered it. “I was on a mining colony before this. A nowhere rock called Perren. If you think this place is rough, Perren would’ve eaten it for breakfast and then asked for more.”
The description didn’t scare him off. “What was it like?”
Why did I bring up Perren? My throat got scratchy thinking about it.
“No sky. It smelled like metal and other people’s far—um, and other people, and the budget was less a budget than a rumor somebody kept repeating.
” I settled back. “When a posting came up somewhere with actual weather, I grabbed it.” No reason to mention any emotional breakdowns or life explosions in between the two events.
“Does a mining colony have much use for counselors?”
I shrugged. “People break the same everywhere. Miners break faster. Work a few hundred of them too hard, pay them too little, stack them under a dome, and sooner or later some of them can’t get out of bed in the morning.”
It came out a bit harsher than I meant. One of the perils of the trade: even the breeziest of stories was gut-wrenching.
He didn’t rush to fill the quiet. He didn’t tell me how hard that must have been, or make a noise about all the good I must have done. He just listened, all of his attention on me.
It’s a good trick. I’d know. I use it on people all the damn time.
The worst part was that it worked on me anyway. I wanted to keep talking. I wanted to tell him whose bed I’d been describing. I wanted to tell him about the contract I’d walked out on, and how you don’t do that, and how you beg, borrow, and steal for another chance at a job.
I didn’t.
I refused to carry my mess with me. It was back in my room, shoved under a pile of socks with the wedding invitation I still hadn’t managed to toss. I keep the proof of my worst decisions close. Maybe a better counselor could say why.
“Your turn,” I said. “How does a person end up mayor of a town like this?”
“They pulled my name out of a hat.”
“Be serious.”
His hands tightened on the wheel. I waited. I wasn’t going to pry. He wasn’t my client, and more than that, I wanted him to tell me because he wanted to, not because I knew how to wait a man out.
“No one else would take it,” he said finally.
“We got free, and there were things that had to be decided. Who lived where. Who did what. Someone had to say it, and everyone looked at me.” The road curved between two hills and he took most of the jolt on his side.
“I did the first term and the place didn’t burn down.
Then I waited for someone to stand for election when it was time. ”
“And nobody stepped up?”
“No.”
He said it flat. No pride in it, no complaint either.
Which meant, of course, that I found it attractive.
“I’m asking as a friend, by the way,” I said. “Not a counselor. Off the clock. I’m not going to trap you in a truck and start poking around your childhood.”
He looked over at me. “Is that what we are? Friends?”
My stomach flipped. “I’d like to be.” It came out more honest than I’d meant it to, so I kept talking. “You’re about the only person in this town who talks to me in whole sentences. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
The corner of his mouth moved. On Remmen that was a whole speech.
“Friends, then.”
Friends. Good. That was a thing I could manage. Friends went for drives and asked each other polite questions about work. Friends did not spend the whole ride taking inventory of the other one’s forearms.
I was going to be a disaster at this.
He pulled the truck off the track where the hills dropped away and cut the engine. Without it the whole cab went quiet, and about half its size.
“There.” He nodded out at a far ridge, gone gold in the light. “The steads are past that. What you wanted to see.”
I looked at the ridge for maybe a second.
Then I looked at him, and he wasn’t looking at the ridge either.
He’d turned toward me with one arm along the back of the seat, and it pulled his shirt tight across a chest I’d been trying not to think about since roughly the town limits. There was a whole meter of bench between us. It didn’t feel like anywhere near enough.
His eyes moved over me and came back to my face, slow, and everywhere they touched went warm. By the time they reached my face, I’d stopped breathing.
I could lean in. That was the honest, stupid truth of it. A few inches and my hand would be flat on his chest. A little more and I’d know for sure.
I curled my fingers into my own leg so they’d stop offering to help.
No touching.
The rule sounded very sensible and very far away with him looking at me like that.
He moved closer. Barely. It could have been the wind rocking the truck, except his eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed.
My heart was beating hard enough that he had to be able to hear it. Did minotaurs have good hearing? That would’ve been a useful thing to know before I climbed into a truck with one I wanted to climb.
I leaned in.
The gap closed. I could feel the heat coming off him. I tipped my chin, already most of the way into the kiss.
Something slammed into the side of the truck.
I jerked back and clocked my head on the window. “Ow. Damn it.”
A face filled the glass. Huge, wild, bigger than Remmen even, and one horn snapped off short with the stump gone rough and scarred. The whites showed all the way around his eyes. He hit the door again with a hand the size of my head and the cab rocked on its springs.
“Mayor.” The voice came through the metal, gravel dragged over gravel. “Mayor, I need some fucking help.”
His eyes landed on me and snagged. Then he looked back at Remmen.
“Mestyn’s hurt. Bad. Otho won’t come to us. You have to come.”
Beside me, Remmen went cold.
A second ago his stillness had been the warm kind, and I hadn’t wanted to break it. What came out of him now was low and flat, from somewhere I hadn’t heard him go before.
“Rauf. You know to stay out of trouble.”
“I got nowhere else to take it.”
There was history here and I didn’t have a second to spare on any of it.
“Is someone bleeding?” I asked.
They both looked at me like they’d forgotten I existed. Lovely.
“His belly.” Rauf swallowed. “There’s a lot of blood.”
I was already twisting around for the first aid kit I’d seen behind the seat. “How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Not too long. He’s still alive.”
Not useful, but the man was out of his mind with panic, and I’d get better answers moving than parked. “Then quit talking and take me to him.” I shouldered the door open into the wind and dropped down onto the road. It was a longer drop than I’d judged, and it jarred both knees. I didn’t care.
For a second nobody moved. Just me on the road with my kit, one regular-sized human standing between two enormous men and a history I didn’t understand. I had no idea what I meant to do about any of it. Then Remmen threw the truck into gear, following behind as Rauf led me to this Mestyn on foot.
The ranch sat in a low fold past the ridge, its buildings hunched down out of the wind.
Bulls everywhere, half a dozen, big even by the standards I’d started getting used to.
Every one of them went rigid when we came over the rise.
Ready to bolt or ready to swing, and I couldn’t tell which. Maybe both at once.
Rauf was waving them off before the truck fully stopped behind us.
Mestyn was on the grass behind the nearest building.
I’ve seen ugly things. Mining runs on old machines and worse rules, and I once kept a man chatting about his kids while his arm sat six feet from the rest of him. I don’t stop for much.
I stopped a half second for Mestyn.
His shirt was gone to red rags and the whole front of him was black and wet, the grass under him drinking it down. For a second my brain wouldn’t sort the shape of what I was looking at.
He was breathing. That was the only part I needed.
I went down on my knees in the blood.
“Hey. I’m Anne.” I had the kit open and the cleanest dressings I owned into my fists. “I’m going to help you. But you’ve got to stay with me. Can you do that?”
His eyes swam toward my voice and didn’t land on anything.
“Clean cloth. Anything. Now.” I packed the dressing down into the worst of it and put my weight behind it, and Mestyn made a sound low and broken in his chest. “I know. Hate me later. You’ve got my permission.”
A wad of cloth landed in my hands. I doubled the dressing and leaned in harder.
I observed the wounds while my hands worked, because I couldn’t help it. Four gashes, deep, dragged parallel across his belly and up into his ribs. A bite taken clean out of the meat of his side. I’d spent half the drive thinking about the size of a minotaur’s mouth. This was bigger than that.
I kept it to myself. The man on the grass didn’t need my running commentary, and the ring of men over me needed it even less.
“Stay with me. Eyes on me, not your stomach. What’s your name?”
“He knows his own—” one of them started.
“I know he knows it. I want to hear him say it.” His pupils were slow but they were tracking. “Name.”
“Mestyn,” he ground out.
“Good. Beautiful. Keep it up.” I found Rauf in the ring of faces above me. “You. Down here. Hands where mine are, and press like you mean it. Harder than feels kind. You can’t hurt him worse than he already is.”
He folded down and put his hands where I put them.
“Get something flat to lay him on. We need to put him in the truck bed, flat, and nobody folds him. Anybody drops him, they answer to me.” Which was not the most professional line I’d ever handed a yard full of men who could snap me over one knee.
They moved anyway.
It took every one of them to get him up without bending him in half, Rauf holding the pressure, the rest under his head and his shoulders and his hips and his legs. We got him into the bed without dropping him and without killing him. Best I’d hoped for.
I climbed up after and got my weight back over the wound. Blood welled warm between my fingers.
I braced and turned to shout it through to the cab.
“Remmen, drive! This man needs a doctor or he’s going to die.”