ANNE
The sign outside the tavern was hand-painted and a bit sloppy from the warp of the wood. I’d stopped in every morning for the brew that passed for coffee, but I’d never come at night.
Unfortunately, I had a feeling that if I didn’t show up for the drinks that Chloe had invited me to, I’d find myself hunted for sport by the brides of New Knossos and I didn’t need that.
And after the week I’d had, a drink would be welcome.
I’d even managed to rope Chelsea into going with me.
When I’d asked Giles if he wanted to come, he’d pressed a hand to his arm’s cast and made a face so heartbroken, he would have won an acting award if he were on stage.
One friend was better than none, and we steeled ourselves to head inside.
Inside was a wall of heat and noise and the biggest men I had ever been packed into a room with, which, these days, was saying a lot.
The place was built for minotaurs and full of them, so it was like standing in a crowd of doorframes.
Beams low enough the bulls ducked. A fire I could’ve fit my apartment inside.
And down one end, obviously an afterthought, a cluster of stools sized for people who weren’t seven feet tall.
Somebody had remembered the humans existed. Bless them.
Chloe found me before the door fully swung shut.
“You came.” She had a mug in each hand and pushed one at me without asking what I drank. “Maisie owes me. She bet you’d chicken out.”
“I did not,” said the woman behind her. Human, dark curls, an easy grin. “I bet you’d come and hate it. I’m Maisie. Ignore about half of what Chloe says and you’ll be fine. Sit.”
So I sat. Chelsea got tucked in on my other side with a mug she also hadn’t ordered, and that was that. We were in. No say in the matter.
I tried the drink. It was sweet and strong and hit me somewhere around the knees.
“Oh no,” I said. “This is dangerous.”
“That’s the point,” said Chloe.
They were good, the brides. Better than me, and I did this for a living.
Ten minutes in and I knew Maisie had married the big red one with the orchard and that his name was Kazan, that she’d come out here off some nightmare of an ex, that Chloe had chased her across actual space because she’d been to Maisie’s wedding and decided on the flight home she wanted one too.
I knew the fire smoked when the wind came from the east. I knew who was sleeping with who, and who wasn’t and was sour about it.
They knew nothing about me. Which was how I liked it. I asked, they answered, everyone went home happy, and nobody got a good look at me.
The women I’d flown in with were scattered around the near end, and Chloe pointed me through them like a tour guide.
“Briar.” A little bright one basically in her husband’s lap, lit up like she’d swallowed a coal. “Disgusting, right? Two weeks and they still can’t keep their hands off each other.”
Briar heard her name, beamed at us with her entire face, and went right back to her husband. Good for Briar.
“Alexis.” Cooler, down the end, nursing one drink and watching her assigned bull across the room with a look I couldn’t read. I didn’t think she could either. Not happy, not sorry. Just waiting to find out which one she was going to be.
And then there was the one who ended up next to me.
Julia came over for the pitcher and forgot to leave. She had a lovely smile screwed down tight, and I’d sat across a table from that exact smile enough times to know it was holding up the roof.
She asked me polite little questions about nothing at all. I answered a couple and lobbed one back, nothing, just where’d she grow up. And somewhere before the bottom of her cup the smile slipped, and she started talking, and didn’t really stop.
Nothing dramatic. Her husband was kind. That was the whole problem.
Kind, careful, gave her room, asked her opinion — and she sat across from him every night feeling like a guest in her own house, waiting to feel the thing everyone at this table so clearly felt, and it wasn’t coming, and she didn’t know if that was him or her or the entire insane idea of marrying a stranger across a galaxy.
I didn’t fix it. You don’t fix it. I let her put it down, turned it over with her a little, asked the couple of questions that made a person hear their own answer.
By the time Chloe hauled us both back into the loud part of the night, Julia was sitting up straighter and laughing at something, lighter than she’d sat down.
Which was great.
Except I had an office forty feet from here with my name on the door and a couch built for exactly that conversation, and it had been empty since the day I landed.
Not one man in this whole town of walking bruises would come sit on it.
And a woman I’d known for an hour handed me her marriage over a shared pitcher because I asked where she grew up.
Apparently I could work anywhere but the room they paid me to work in.
I decided to be depressed about that later, and had more of the dangerous drink instead.
Which is when the jokes started.
Somebody’s husband said something about horns, and the whole table leaned in, and Chloe helpfully translated for the newcomer, and I was told, in loving detail, in front of everyone, exactly what the horns and the tails were reputed to be good for.
I went red. Instantly. Roots of the hair.
The table lost it.
“She’s blushing.” Chloe was delighted, like she’d won money. “She counsels these men. She’s their therapist and she’s blushing.”
“I work with them,” I said, with all the dignity a woman that color can scrape together. “This is wildly inappropriate. Please, go on, I’m taking notes.”
They went on. I didn’t take notes. But a professional kept herself informed.
And under the heat in my face there was the other kind, the kind I’d walked in with and had zero intention of putting down on this table.
Because as of a few nights ago I actually knew a couple of things about the size of them. About the warmth. About what it felt like to get scooped up like you weighed nothing and carried through a dark, sleeping town against a chest the width of a door.
I knew it and I planned to go right on knowing it, privately, forever. That part they didn’t get.
Then the door opened, and the whole room dropped a few degrees.
I felt it before I understood it. The noise didn’t stop so much as drain out, table by table, till the loudest thing in the place was the fire.
Chloe’s hand went still on her mug. Behind the bar, the keeper who’d been trading insults with everyone all night suddenly needed something very badly from a crate under the counter.
Rauf stood in the doorway with the dark behind him.
I knew him right away. The one who’d pounded on the truck door with a hand the size of my head and begged for help through the metal.
He looked worse in the light, or just more, rougher than the town bulls, road dust on him, braced like he already knew how the room would go. He had a list crushed in one fist. He’d come to trade at the quiet end of the night, and it hadn’t been quiet enough.
Nobody said hello. A whole warm room full of found family, and every one of them found something to look at on the floor.
I honestly didn’t know what got me up. Some of it was the drink. Most of it was a week and a half of my empty office and the way his hands had shaken on that door. I put my mug down and walked over.
“Rauf, hello.”
His head came around fast, ready for something. When it turned out to be his name, in a friendly voice, he didn’t seem to know where to put it.
“How’s Mestyn?” I walked right up into the open space the whole room had left around him and pitched it like the most ordinary question on the planet, because it was. “Is he still at Otho’s? That was a hell of a wound.”
Rauf’s gaze flicked to the silent room, then back to me, like he was hunting for the catch. “He’s being a mean asshole. Won’t stay down.”
“Good. Mean means he’s got the energy to heal.” I nodded at the list wadded in his hand. “You trading? I think Karl’s just about done hiding behind the bar.”
The keeper’s head came up, caught out. A beat. Then, gruff: “What d’you need, then?”
Rauf handed over his list, conversations started up table by table, and I went back to my stool with my heart going like I’d sprinted there.
They let me sit down before they started.
“Anne.” Chloe wasn’t laughing anymore. “Honey. Those men are not safe.”
“That one hauled a bleeding friend ten miles to a doctor who won’t touch him,” I said. “How not-safe is he?”
“That’s exactly how not-safe.” Maisie, gentle, which was worse than sharp. “Kazan won’t tell me what happened out there when they all got free. Nobody will. There’s a reason those men live past the ridge and not in here with us. You’re new. You don’t know yet. We’re not being mean.”
“I know you’re not.” That was the trouble with it. Every warning was kind and every warning meant it. “I’m not going to fight you about it. I’m also not going to unsay hello to him.”
Nobody had a comeback for that. Chloe huffed and topped up my mug, which I took as us agreeing to disagree, and the night stitched itself back together over the top of it.
Later, loose, warm, three drinks past smart, Chloe came around to the only thing she actually wanted to talk about.
“So.” She parked her chin in her hand. “You and the mayor. He gave you the whole tour. Drove you out to the steads.”
“He’s the mayor. Showing new people around is the job.”
“Mm.” She didn’t buy a word of it, and she was right not to, and I couldn’t hand her the real thing for love or money. So I gave her a different real thing.
“He walked me to breakfast the other morning,” I said — true, and also nothing, which was the best kind of thing to hand a table.
“Very gallant. Held the tavern door like I was made of glass. Told me to wear boots because it might get muddy.” I rolled my eyes for the audience.
“Deeply romantic. I nearly proposed over the terrible coffee.”
They laughed. It landed, because it was true. It just wasn’t the true part. The near-kiss over the fields, the weight of him carrying me home, his mouth a breath from mine at my own dark door while I stood there wide awake and chose not to move, none of that was for the table.
I walked home under a sky with way too many stars in it, pleasantly drunk and not the least bit reassured, chewing on the one thing I couldn’t put down.
Four gashes, dragged. A bite bigger than any mouth in that room. And I’d just spent a whole night in a room full of the biggest mouths I’d ever seen.
Nothing a man did to another man left marks like that. And not one person in this warm, kind, hand-holding town would say out loud what did.