Chapter 13 #2
When he came back to shore, he was just Enslak. Wet, with the scratches from the creature's claws already beginning to close, his gold eyes finding mine across the distance between us.
He knelt beside me and his hands moved to my calf with a gentleness that was hard to square with what I'd just watched him do.
He examined the wound carefully, his brow drawn together, and I saw the moment he made a decision, because he rose and moved to the tree line and came back with broad leaves from a plant I didn't recognize.
When he pressed them against my wound, they were cool and faintly sticky, and within a minute a numbing sensation spread through my leg like something releasing.
The pain receded to a manageable throb.
He worked quietly and efficiently, layering more leaves over the wound, then tearing strips from his own clothing to bind them in place.
His hands were steadier than mine would have been.
I watched the concentration on his face and thought about all the things that must have happened to him that had given him this particular set of skills.
When he finished, he sat back and looked at me directly, a question in his eyes.
"I'm okay," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "You got there in time."
He watched my face like he was checking the statement against something internal.
"I mean it. I'm okay." I held his gaze. "Are you?"
He glanced down at the claw marks on his arms, already healing faster than any human wound would, and made a sound that meant yes, these are minor.
He lifted me carefully, mindful of my injured leg, and carried me back toward the cave.
I let him. My leg was throbbing through the numbness, my whole body had the shaky aftermath quality of an adrenaline crash, and the warmth of his chest against my cheek was one of the more stabilizing things I'd felt in recent memory.
The walk back passed in a quiet that felt companionable rather than empty.
When we reached the cave, he settled me onto the bedding and retrieved the medi-kit with the ease of someone who knew where everything was, which he did, because he'd organized the supplies on our second day here and had never once rearranged them.
He cleaned the wound properly, applied antiseptic, ran the scanner over it, and wrapped my calf with careful, even pressure.
I watched him work and felt the thing that had been building in my chest since he'd walked out of that river start to push against my ribs.
"Thank you," I said.
He looked up from the bandage.
"Not just for today," I said. "For all of it. The hunting and the fire and the flowers and the way you've been so patient with me when I needed space even though it clearly drove you insane."
Something shifted in his expression, a warmth that he didn't yet have the words to explain but that came through regardless.
And then, without planning it, without a single moment of rational deliberation, I was crying.
Not quietly. Not the graceful kind of crying that looks bearable from the outside. The full, body-shaking, completely undignified kind that starts somewhere deep and takes everything with it on the way out.
"I'm sorry," I managed, pressing the back of my hand against my mouth. "I don't know why I'm—"
But I did know. I knew exactly why. The fear I'd been carrying since the creature appeared, the older fear underneath it that had been waiting for an unguarded moment since the day I'd gotten shot in Hell's Kitchen, the grief for Danny that I'd never fully processed because I'd been too busy becoming a cop and then too busy surviving this entire impossible situation.
All of it had been sitting there waiting for a moment exactly like this one, when someone had just saved my life and the danger was past and my defenses were completely down.
"I thought I was going to die," I said, the words rough in my throat.
"When I saw it coming at me, I thought this was it.
And it was like Hell's Kitchen all over again, that exact moment when the bullet hit and I knew.
And I kept thinking about Danny." I pressed my hands over my face briefly.
"My brother. He died the same way. Shot and bleeding, and I wasn't there.
I couldn't save him, and then I almost couldn't save myself, and if you hadn't been—"
Enslak moved without hesitation, gathering me carefully into his arms and holding me against his chest. One hand came up to the back of my head, his fingers threading through my wet hair with a gentleness completely disproportionate to his size.
He didn't try to speak. Didn't try to redirect or fix or explain.
He just held me and let me fall apart against his chest and kept one hand moving in slow circles between my shoulder blades until the worst of it passed.
I talked through most of it. About Danny and what had happened to him, about the cop I'd become trying to give his death some meaning, about waking up on an alien ship and learning that everything I'd been was gone and I'd have to figure out something new.
Enslak listened to all of it, his arms steady around me, his presence so completely and specifically itself that eventually the words ran out and I was just breathing against his pelt, spent and quiet, feeling lighter than I had in a very long time.
He leaned forward slowly and pressed his forehead to mine, his eyes closing.
The simplicity of it undid something inside me. Just that, the warmth of his forehead against mine, his breathing steady and careful. An offer of contact without any demand attached to it.
I thought about what I was about to do. Actually thought about it, not for long but with intention, wanting to know my own mind before I acted.