Chapter 4
Garrett
She sings in the shower.
Not well. Pitchy, breathless, lyrics she half-remembers from songs I don't recognize. Something about a bad idea and a right night. Something about shoes. She loses the tune at the bridge every time, hums the gap, picks it up on the wrong key, keeps going anyway.
It's the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
Worse than the pits. Worse than the muzzle that pinned my jaw for six weeks when I was twelve and the handlers decided a silent minotaur sold more tickets than a loud one.
Those things tried to break me and failed.
This woman sits inside my walls dismantling me with off-key pop music through a thin bathroom door, and the worst of it is that I'm letting her.
I could move. Step outside, split wood, find somewhere the sound of her doesn't reach but I stay at my kitchen counter and listen.
A rhythm has formed between us without either of us deciding it.
Her alarm sounds at five-thirty, muffled through the wall, and she hits snooze twice before she drags herself upright.
Water runs. She sings. She makes coffee badly, too strong with grounds in the bottom of the cup, and leaves my mug on the counter with the handle turned toward the place I stand when I pour.
Jess collects her at six-fifteen. Nina tugs her coat on while half-shouting see you tonight, Garrett, through the door like she's said goodbye to me every morning of her life.
I spend the day on club work. I cook. Not the way I cook for myself. I pull out cuts of meat I've had in the freezer since November because no one in this cabin ever needed them thawed. I braise. I roast.
She comes home at six. The truck door shuts, boots on the porch, and Nina pushes through with cold riding in on her jacket and her hair frozen at the ends. She eats at the end of the table and tells me about her day.
I listen.
Sometimes I nod. Sometimes the corner of my mouth lifts without my say-so, and she laughs like I've cracked a joke, her whole face opens and I have to look down at the coffee in my mug until my lungs find the rhythm again.
The cabin fills with the smells of winter. Woodsmoke, pine resin, the cold metal scent of snow that creeps under the door. It fills, too, with her. Some soap she uses. Some oil she works through her hair at night, green and herbal. The coffee she makes wrong.
I've lived here for seven years. I have never, in all that time, had to discipline my hearing.
Tuesday evening she drops a pot of boiling water.
I'm at the table re-lacing my winter boots, and she's at the stove draining pasta, a meal she decided an hour ago would be her turn because I've cooked every night.
Her left wrist is still wrapped. She reaches with the wrong hand, fumbles when the weight hits a tender spot, and the pot tips off the burner before she can right it.
She yelps.
I'm across the kitchen before the pot hits the floor.
My knee skids on the tile. My palms find her calves through the wet denim of her jeans.
Water has splashed across her shins. Her skin above the socks shows pink.
Hot, not burning. No welts. No blistering.
I press in to check the heat, and her breath catches above my head.
"I'm okay, Garrett."
I nod but I don't move.
The weight of her watching settles on the top of my skull where the fur grows thickest between my horns. And when I glance up her expression empties the air out of my lungs. Not fear. Something softer and more dangerous.
She lifts her hand.
Her palm settles on the top of my head. Light as snow. Fingers spread between my horns.
"Thank you."
I nod again. The word climbs.
It comes up from somewhere I keep bolted.
Past my ribs, past the place where the purr lives when it's waking, past the scar tissue at the base of my throat where a handler's chain rubbed the skin raw the summer I was ten.
It moves through all of it like water finding the one crack that's been waiting.
"Careful."
One word. Gravel and rust and fifteen years of unused voice.
Her eyes widen.
I stand. Too fast. My fingers close on the pot handle, and I turn to the sink and refill it without looking at her, because if I look at her now I'm going to do something I can't take back.
My heart hits my ribs hard enough to blur the edges of my vision.
I count the seconds until the noise inside me settles.
For the rest of the night she keeps looking at me like I handed her something fragile.
The word opened a door.
I lie awake and stare at the ceiling and try to close it.
I spoke normally as a calf. My mother said I never shut up, that she couldn't finish a sentence in her own kitchen without me narrating whatever my hands were touching.
My first word, according to her: more. My second: the name of the black and white dog that slept at the foot of the porch.
She used to tell that story laughing until her eyes watered.
Then the raiders came, the sale pen, and finally the pit.
The number they tattooed inside my left wrist, and the handlers who did not want noise from the new calf.
The first beating came for humming. The second came for asking what they'd done with my mother.
By the tenth I had learned to keep my mouth shut.
By the hundredth I had stopped volunteering anything at all, and by the time I grew into a body the handlers couldn't muzzle, silence was armor first, then habit, then the thing I answered to.
I broke out at twenty-five. Walked north for months and didn't say a word to anyone I passed, not the truckers who gave me rides or the bartenders who poured my drinks, because by then the silence had outgrown the reason for it.
I ended up here during the wildfire. The whole forest burning, the sky orange at noon, and I walked onto that fire line because it was the first thing in months that made more sense than running.
Knox fought beside me all night. Never asked my name until the flames died down, and when I gave it he nodded like he'd been waiting for me to get around to it.
After the fire I went quiet again. He never pushed me to keep talking.
I can speak. I could always speak. Fifteen years of silence has been a choice, not a wound, and the difference matters even if it only matters to me.
But tonight the door is open. The woman sleeping on the other side of the wall put her hand on my head and I let her. I don't know how to shut it.
Thursday night the storm comes in off the coast.
I feel the drop in pressure an hour before the first gust hits the clearing. The light at the windows has gone that flat, gray the coast gets before a heavy snow. The porch boards creak when the wind starts working on them. By eight the power has begun to flicker.
Nina has been on the couch since dinner with the quilt from the guest room pulled across her lap and a book propped against her knees.
A beat-up paperback with a shirtless cowboy on the cover that she reads openly and with no apparent embarrassment.
The fire is down to coals. I kneel at the hearth and build it back up, the bark catching and the flame crawling up the seams of the wood, steady and slow.
When I straighten, she's watching me.
The book rests face-down on her knee. The candle she lit when the lights first flickered sits on the side table, the flame tilting in the draft.
"Garrett?"
I turn.
"Will you sit with me?"
She's not demanding. She's asking. I could say no. I could shake my head and take the rocker by the stove as I have every night for seven years, and she would go back to her book and the storm would keep on being what storms are.
I sit.
Not on the couch. I can't. The couch is narrow, and she's tucked into the corner of it with the quilt over her, and if I put a body like mine onto that cushion I'm going to fold her against the arm of it whether I mean to or not.
I lower myself to the floor beside it, my back against the couch frame, my shoulder at the height of her knee.
Close enough that the quilt brushes my arm.
Close enough that when she shifts, her knee comes to rest against the side of my shoulder, a small warm pressure through the cotton of my shirt.
She goes back to her book.
Her free hand lifts. Slides into the fur at the top of my head. Settles between my horns the way it did in the kitchen, only this time she doesn't take it back. Her fingers curl a little. Her thumb strokes.
The purr starts.
It comes up without permission, from the low place behind my breastbone where it's been building since Monday. Deep and slow. It vibrates through my ribs and out into the couch frame. I feel her leg tense for a half-second with surprise against my shoulder, then relax.
She doesn't mention it.
She turns a page. Her thumb keeps moving, small and absent. The fire gnaws at the split pine and throws long shadows across the floorboards. The wind stacks snow against the north wall hard enough that I hear the pack shift when the gusts die.
Outside, the storm buries us.
Inside, my body hums with a sound I spent fifteen years refusing to make, and the woman with her fingers in my fur reads her paperback cowboy novel by candlelight. Somewhere between one page turn and the next I stop trying to name what's happening and let the purr be what it is.