3. Shepherd
Shepherd
Itook the watch at three in the morning, when the fire had burned down to embers and the storm had settled into a steady, relentless howl.
Calder was reluctant to leave her. I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way his eyes kept drifting back to the bundle of blankets by the hearth.
He'd been sitting there for hours, barely moving, watching her breathe like he could keep her alive through sheer force of will.
I understood the impulse. I just didn't share it.
“Get some sleep,” I told him. “I'll wake you if anything changes.”
He nodded, but he didn't move right away. Just stood there, looking down at her, his expression unreadable in the dim light.
“She grabbed my arm,” he said quietly. “While she was unconscious. Held on like she was drowning and I was the only solid thing in reach.”
I didn't know what to say to that. Calder wasn't the type to share observations about his emotional state. Four years of living together, and I could count on one hand the number of times he'd volunteered something that personal.
“People do strange things when they're hypothermic,” I offered. “The body seeks warmth instinctively. It doesn't necessarily mean anything.”
He looked at me then, and something flickered in his eyes. Doubt, maybe. Or hope. I couldn't tell which.
“Yeah,” he said. “You're probably right.”
He disappeared into his room, and I was left alone with the omega and the dying fire.
I added wood to the flames first, building them back up until the light danced across the walls and the heat pushed back against the cold seeping through the window frames. Then I settled into the chair Calder had vacated and let myself look at her properly for the first time.
She was sleeping now, not unconscious. There was a difference, subtle but unmistakable.
Unconsciousness was absence, a body running on autopilot while the mind checked out entirely.
Sleep was presence, the brain still ticking over beneath the surface, processing and dreaming and preparing for waking.
Her eyes moved beneath her lids. Her fingers twitched against the blanket.
She was in there, somewhere, fighting her way back to the surface.
I catalogued her features the way I catalogued everything, turning observation into a kind of meditation.
It was an old habit, one I'd developed during my academic years when watching and analyzing had been my primary mode of engagement with the world.
Easier to study people than to connect with them.
Safer to observe from a distance than to risk the messiness of actual relationship.
But somewhere between cataloguing and analyzing, I found myself simply... looking. And what I saw made something shift in my chest.
She had a strong face. Not conventionally pretty, but striking in a way that was harder to dismiss.
A stubborn jaw that suggested she'd argue with a mountain if it got in her way.
A nose that had probably been broken at some point and healed slightly crooked, giving her face character rather than diminishing it.
Short dark curls that were drying now into a wild halo around her head, and I found myself wondering what they'd feel like between my fingers.
There was a small scar cutting through her left eyebrow, a thin white line that spoke of some old injury, and I wanted to know the story behind it.
Her lips were slightly parted in sleep, soft and full, and I made myself look away from them before my thoughts could go somewhere they shouldn't.
Her skin had lost the terrible grayish tinge of severe hypothermia and returned to something healthier, though she was still pale beneath what looked like a fading tan.
Someone who spent time outdoors but hadn't seen much sun lately.
Beautiful.
The word surfaced before I could stop it. She was beautiful, in a wild, untamed way that I hadn't expected and didn't know what to do with.
Yet, even in sleep, she didn't look peaceful.
There was a furrow between her brows, a tension in the set of her mouth.
Her hands gripped the blanket like she was bracing for a blow.
Everything about her body language said fighter.
Everything said survivor. Everything said don't touch me, don't help me, I can handle this myself.
I wondered what had made her that way. What had taught her that letting her guard down was dangerous, that accepting care was a weakness to be avoided. I wondered if she knew how clearly it showed, even when she was unconscious.
The fire crackled and popped, sending sparks spiraling up the chimney.
Outside, the wind kept howling. I pulled my journal from my pocket and opened it to a fresh page, but I didn't write anything.
Just held the pen and stared at the blank paper and thought about the last time I'd sat vigil for someone.
Maya had been brilliant.
That was what everyone said about her, and it was true.
Her mind worked in ways that constantly surprised me, making connections and leaps that I couldn't follow until she explained them.
She'd come to my environmental philosophy seminar as a first-year doctoral student, and by the end of the semester, she was challenging arguments I'd spent a decade building.
I'd asked her to be my advisee. She'd said yes with a smile that made me feel like I'd won something.
For three years, I'd watched her grow. Watched her publish papers that made waves in the field.
Watched her present at conferences, fielding questions from scholars twice her age with a confidence I envied.
I'd been so proud of her. So focused on nurturing her intellectual development, on shaping her into the philosopher I knew she could become.
I never once asked how she was sleeping. Never noticed the shadows under her eyes or the way she flinched when her phone buzzed. Never wondered why she always stayed late in her office, why she never mentioned friends or family or anything outside her work.
Three months after she defended her dissertation, she was gone.
I found out from the department secretary. A brief email, clinical and detached. I stared at the words for a long time before they made sense. Even then, I didn't believe them. Maya was too alive for that. Too brilliant, too driven, too full of ideas she still wanted to explore.
At the memorial, her mother had found me in the crowd. She'd taken my hands and looked at me with eyes that were red-rimmed and exhausted and somehow, impossibly, kind.
“She admired you so much,” she'd said. “She didn't want to disappoint you.”
Those words had followed me here. To the mountains, to the cabin, to four years of solitude broken only by Calder's gruff silence and Bo's wild presence.
I'd run as far as I could from the world of ideas and argument, from the academic life that had seemed so important and had somehow missed the only thing that mattered.
I'd learned to observe more carefully after that. To watch for the things people hid, the pain they carried beneath their surfaces. It was a kind of penance, I supposed. As if noticing enough suffering could somehow make up for the suffering I'd failed to notice when it mattered.
The omega stirred in her blankets, pulling me back to the present. Her face contorted, brows drawing together, mouth twisting into something that might have been a word. A nightmare, maybe. Her hand came up, pushing at something invisible, and a sound escaped her throat. Protest. Denial.
“No.” The word was slurred but clear. “I don't need... let go...”
I leaned forward, uncertain whether I should wake her or let the dream run its course. Before I could decide, her eyes flew open.
She came up swinging.
I caught her wrist before her fist could connect with my jaw, closing my fingers around the delicate bones as gently as I could manage.
Her eyes were wild, unfocused, seeing something that wasn't there.
She twisted against my grip, trying to break free, and even in that moment of chaos, something in me responded to her.
The fierceness of her. The way she fought even when she didn't know what she was fighting.
This was not a woman who went quietly into anything. I found that unreasonably attractive.
“You're safe.” I kept my voice low and even, the way you'd talk to a spooked animal, though nothing about her seemed like prey. “You're at Calder's homestead. You made it through the storm. You're warm, your ankle is wrapped, and no one here is going to hurt you.”
She stared at me, panting, and I watched awareness slowly filter back into her eyes.
Amber, I noticed. A warm golden-brown that caught the firelight and threw it back like a challenge.
They were sharp eyes, quick, taking in everything about me and the room and the situation in seconds.
Intelligent. Assessing. The kind of eyes that saw too much and gave away too little.
The kind of eyes a man could get lost in, if he wasn't careful.
I was always careful. But I felt the pull anyway.
“Who...” Her voice came out rough, scraped raw. She swallowed and tried again. “Who are you?”
“My name is Shepherd. Shepherd Calloway.” I released her wrist slowly, making sure she could see that I wasn't a threat. “You collapsed on our porch about eight hours ago. Do you remember?”
Her brow furrowed. I could see her thinking, sorting through foggy memories, trying to piece together how she'd gotten here.
“The storm,” she said finally. “Wes on the radio. He told me to find...” She looked around the room, taking in the rough-hewn walls, the fire, the books stacked on every available surface. “This place. This is the homestead he mentioned?”
“It is. Wes didn't manage to reach us before the storm knocked out radio contact, but you somehow found us anyway. Or rather, you found our door and then fell through it.”