Chapter 5
Nina
The lights die at seven-forty.
One flicker, then another, then a hard black that swallows the cabin down to the red glow of coals behind the grate.
Somewhere in the crawl space the generator kicks on and hums through the wall.
Garrett crosses the room to check the fridge panel.
He's been through this before. He stacked the firewood higher than usual when I came home.
He filled two extra buckets from the tap.
A man who expected the storm and prepared the way he prepares everything: ahead of time, in silence, without making it a thing.
He feeds the fire.
Bark catches. The flame crawls up the pine seams and pushes heat across the floorboards, I pull the quilt higher on the couch and watch him work.
The firelight carves him in orange and shadow.
His horns throw their own shape across the wall behind him, two curved arcs that lift and fall when he moves. He sets another split log on the grate.
He's been feeding me since I moved in. Roasted root vegetables at the end of his kitchen table while he pretends he isn't watching me chew.
The woodstove ticking down to coals and his silhouette at the back window as he splits wood in the dark.
My fingers finding the soft patch of fur between his horns when I pass the couch, the purr starting up under my touch and running through the whole frame of him.
Garrett settles onto the floor by the hearth, his back against the base of the rocker, a block of pale wood in one fist and a carving knife in the other.
The blade moves. Small clean strokes, the shavings curling onto a folded cloth he's set across his knee.
His grip swallows the knife. That should make the motion look clumsy but it doesn't; the blade cuts where he wants it to cut, the shape emerging out of the block a breath at a time.
I sit up.
The quilt slides off my shoulders and I let it pool at my waist. The fire pops behind the grate. Garrett doesn't lift his gaze, but the knife pauses against the wood. He knows the sound of me moving by now.
"Can I ask you something?"
He sets the knife down and looks at me.
The fire catches the amber in his eyes. He waits.
"Your horns."
His whole body locks. The shoulders set, the palms flatten against his thighs, the small inward tuck of his chin.
I've seen the same posture twice this week in town.
Once outside the hardware store when a woman crossed the street.
Once at the diner when a toddler at the next booth looked up and started to cry.
He braces for me to be one more thing that hurts.
"I want to touch them." My voice stays low.
The coals tick in the grate. "Properly. Not just here.
" I lift my fingers to the top of my own skull, where I've been grazing the safe patch of fur between his horns for the better part of a week.
"The whole thing. I want to understand what they mean to you.
And I want you to tell me if I need to stop. "
He doesn't move.
Long enough that my thoughts start telling me I've overstepped, that I've read the room wrong, I ought to know better.
"I'm sorry. Forget I asked."
He reaches up.
His fingers close around my wrist. Not tight.
Not even firm, for a grip that could shatter my arm without meaning to.
He lifts my arm off my lap and guides my fingertips to the base of his right horn, where the bone pushes up out of his skull through a thick whorl of dark fur, and he presses my touch into the ridge there.
His eyes close.
His breath goes out of him in a long slow release, and the purr that's been humming low in his chest all night deepens into heat under the bone, a vibration I register in my fingertips before I hear it.
His horn is warm.
Warmer than I expected, almost fever-warm, ridged along its length where I thought it would be smooth.
The base at the skull is the softest part, a band of pale pink skin at the meeting point of bone and fur, and when my fingertip traces that join his whole body shudders under my touch.
The sound climbs out of his chest and drops an octave.
It vibrates through the bones of my wrist.
"Garrett." My voice shakes. "Tell me if this is too much."
He shakes his head. Once.
So I keep going.
My thumb finds the inside curve of the horn where it sweeps up and back, and I run it along the ridge. The bone isn't like smooth stone the way I imagined. It's layered, banded, a lifetime of growth laid down in subtle rings. I think of the trunks of old trees.
He grips the edge of the couch cushion on either side of my knees.
The tendons in his forearms stand out under the dark fur. His knuckles have gone pale. He holds himself still, every muscle locked against movement.
I slide my touch down to the base again. I spread my fingers through the fur where the horn meets his skull. I press, gently.
A sound breaks out of him.
A low raw wounded sound. His forehead drops against my knee and stays there, and his shoulders shake once, and the purr thickens until I can feel it pulsing where his skull meets my kneecap.
"Garrett."
I cup his face.
I tilt it up. The heat of his jaw fills my palms. His eyes are wet. Not crying, holding the way he holds everything, the tears balanced on his lashes and refusing to fall because fifteen years of silence taught his body how to keep anything in.
"When was the last time," I ask, and my throat closes, and I have to start again. "When was the last time someone touched you like this. Without hurting you."
He shakes his head.
The answer is never. Not once in his life has anyone put a hand to the base of his horns with any intention other than to drag, or leash, or break. I've put my fingers on the most sensitive part of his body and he has no reference for what it's supposed to feel like when it doesn't mean harm.
My chest cracks open. Clean and right down the centre.
This is what I came here to avoid.
This exact thing.
I kiss him.
I don't decide to. My mouth is on his before I know I've moved. His lips are warm and chapped and he freezes against me, not pulling back, not returning it, holding still. His body that learned a long time ago that the safest response to a new sensation is to wait and see whether it turns on you.
Then his grip shifts to my waist.
He lifts me off the couch.
Not carries, not pulls; lifts, like a man picking up something weightless, and sets me down on his lap on the floor with my knees bracketing his hips and my feet barely touching the floorboards on either side of him.
His thighs burn hot through the thin cotton of my leggings.
His palms span my ribcage, thumb to middle finger, and every one of his fingertips has found skin through the hem of my shirt.
He kisses me back.
Careful. The way he does everything. His mouth soft against mine, his tongue sliding past my lips with a slowness that borders on reverence, his whole body rigid underneath me with the cost of holding back.
The purr has not stopped. Pressed this close it doesn't sound like sound anymore; it's warmth, a low steady current moving through his skin into mine, a frequency my system reads as safe even when every other part of me is screaming too far, too close, too much.
I break the kiss. Rest my forehead against his. His horns frame my vision on either side, dark curves against the firelight.
"You won't hurt me," I tell him.
"You don't know that." The voice drags out of him, gravel-and-rust. His hold on my ribs trembles. "You don't know what I was."
"I'm a trauma nurse, Garrett." My palms cradle his face. My thumbs find the scar that runs along his jaw. "I know what damage looks like. I've seen it my whole career. You are by far the gentlest man I have ever met."
His breath leaves him.
I kiss him again. Deeper this time. I take his lower lip between mine, and the sound he makes into my mouth shivers down my spine and lands hot between my legs.
I reach for the hem of my shirt. Pulling it up and over my head, dropping it on the floorboards beside us.
The firelight finds my ribs, my bra, the dip of my waist above the leggings.
Garrett's gaze tracks down my body but he doesn't move, still locked on my waist. His face cracks open in front of me.
"Touch me." I guide his palm up my ribs. His hand covers half my torso. "It's okay. I want you to."
His thumb brushes the underside of my breast through the cotton of the bra.
One stroke.
I arch into it.
His free hand comes up. He unhooks my bra, and the fumbling, the way his fingers shake at the clasp. The strap slides down my arm. He slips it off me and sets it on the floor next to my shirt. Folded. I love him a little for folding it.
His palm closes over my breast.
The heat of him. The size of him. His whole hand covers me, his thumb drags across my nipple in one slow pass, and the sound that comes out of me is not one I recognise.
I grip his shoulders. His skin under my palms is latticed with old scars; the white raised lines along his collarbones, the round puckered circle in the meat of his shoulder, the long seam that runs from his throat down past the neckline of his shirt.
I pull his henley up and over his head.
He lets me.
I run my fingers down his chest, over every scar I can reach. The round one at his shoulder is a bite. The long seam is a blade. The latticework across his ribs I don't want to name: cages, the pattern of bars pressed into skin over years, and I pause there and he watches my face.
"You don't have to stop," he says. My chest cracks wider.
"I'm not stopping."
I lean down and put my mouth on the bite. I kiss it. The blade, the latticework, every scar my lips can reach, and when I lift my head his eyes have gone wet again and the purr has gone so low I only know it's there because my lips are tingling where they touched his skin.
His touch slides down my stomach.
Slow.