The Choice #2
"There's nothing tying you to me. No bond. No claim. No destiny. Nothing supernatural that makes this anything other than a choice." He pauses. "I need you to know that. When we land, if you get off that plane and you never call me, I'll understand. I'll always understand."
I look at him. At the scar through his eyebrow. At the careful set of his jaw. At the man who spent fifteen years making sure nobody had to pay for what he is, who has decided he's going to hand me the easiest exit he can build and call it a gift.
"You're an idiot," I say.
He blinks. "That's not the response I was expecting."
"You offered me freedom like it's a favor." I dig my phone out of my pocket and hold it out. "Put your number in."
He looks at the phone. Then at me. Then he takes it, slow, like he's not sure it's real, and he puts his number in, and he hands it back.
"That's it?" he says.
"No." I save the contact while he watches. "You're also taking me to dinner."
"In Chicago?"
"Portland."
He's watching my thumbs move, and something in his face does a slow, complicated thing.
"Wolf Boy," he reads.
"Don't make it weird, Wolf Boy."
"Never call me that again."
"Never's a long time." I pocket the phone, then pull it back out. "Text yourself. So you have mine."
He takes it, thumbs moving, and his own phone buzzes in his pocket. He looks at the screen, then at me.
"What'd you save me as?" I ask.
"14B."
"That's not even a name."
"It's where I found you."
I look at him for a long moment. The gate hums. The plane sits on the tarmac. And then something in his face cracks, just a little, and he says, "Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Okay. Portland. Dinner. I'll plan the whole thing. You just have to show up."
"Show up and eat. I can do that. I'm excellent at eating."
He laughs. It's the sound I've been trying to earn, the real one, and it lands in my chest like something heavy and warm.
Boarding is called.
The gate comes alive, coats and bags and the shuffle of people who have been waiting too long. I stand and pick up my bag, and Dean stands, and then he hesitates.
"I need to find the police liaison," he says. "One more signature on the statement. I'll be right behind you."
"Don't be long."
"I won't."
He goes. I watch him walk down the corridor and turn a corner, and I tell myself it's fine, it's a signature, it's nothing. I go through the door and down the jet bridge and onto the plane.
Row fourteen. 14A is empty.
I stop in the aisle and look at it. The window seat. The seat he sat in when he was a stranger with a safety card and a countdown in his chest. The seat where I decided he was arrogant and he decided I was loud, and we were both wrong.
I sit in 14B.
The plane fills around me. Passengers find their rows, stow their bags, settle in.
The aisle empties. The seat beside me stays empty.
I watch the door at the front of the cabin, and I don't watch it, and I watch it again, and I think about the speech he gave me at the gate, and the way he said "I'll always understand," and the way it sounded like a man saying goodbye.
The flight attendant closes the overhead bins. The engines start, a low building hum.
And then he's there.
Dean, at the end of the row, bag over his shoulder, slightly out of breath. He looks at me. Then at the seat beside me.
"You're in my seat," he says.
"No. I'm definitely not."
He pulls a boarding pass out of his pocket and holds it up. 14B. "The airline moved me. Twice."
I look at the pass. Then at him. "Still no." I settle deeper into the seat. "I've had a weekend. I'm not moving."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at 14A, empty and waiting, and I watch him decide something. He drops his bag overhead and sits down in the window seat, the seat he spent the first flight in, like he never left, and something in my chest does a slow turn.
"You disappeared," I say.
"I was talking to the police."
"You could've texted."
"My phone was in my coat."
"And?"
"The coat didn't survive."
I look at him. He looks at me. The coat that didn't survive is the coat that came apart in a Montana parking lot while I watched the man from 14A fold himself into a wolf, and he knows I know, and I know he knows, and neither of us says it.
"Right," I say. "The coat."
"The coat," he agrees.
Somewhere in my future memoirs there's going to be an entire chapter about that coat. It's the most expensive thing any man has ever lost for me, and I didn't even get a picture.
The plane rolls forward. The engines deepen. The snow-covered fields slide past the window, white and endless, and then we're climbing, and the ground falls away, and the seat beside me is full of him.
His hand settles on the armrest between us. Palm up. Open.
I look at it. The long fingers. The healing scar across the forearm. The way it waits, patient, not reaching.
I take it.
His fingers close around mine, warm and sure, and his thumb moves across my knuckles once, slow, like he's testing that I'm real, and the whole weekend settles in my chest like something finally put down.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey."
"Turns out 14B wasn't such a bad seat after all."
He looks at me. The grey-green eyes. The scar. The almost-smile. "No," he says. "It isn't."
I sleep on his shoulder this time. On purpose.
When I wake, the city lights are below us, a grid of gold in the dark, and his hand is still holding mine, and he's watching the lights the way he watched the moon on the first flight, like he's counting something, and I think maybe it's the same thing.
Chicago is cold and bright and enormous.
We land in the evening, the city a grid of lights under a clear sky, and I walk through the terminal beside him, and neither of us has said anything since the plane, and it's not an awkward silence.
It's the kind that happens when you've said everything that matters and you're both still deciding what comes next.
At the doors, he stops.
"Your ride's that way," he says. "Mine's this way."
"Portland's that way too," I say. "Eventually."
He looks at me. The terminal moves around us, people with places to be, and we're standing still in the middle of it.
"I'll call you," he says.
"You'd better. I have a city to learn."
"You'll like Portland."
"I'll like it better when you show me around."
He nods. Then he steps forward, and his hand comes up, and he touches my jaw, light, like he's asking permission. I don't move. He leans in and kisses me.
It's not the kiss from the lodge. That one was desperate, two people grabbing at something in the middle of a disaster.
This one is slow and deliberate and careful, the way he does everything, and it tastes like coffee and cold air, and his hand is steady on my jaw, and I put my hand on his chest and his heart is going fast. The man who counts minutes.
The man who never lets anyone close. His heart is going fast.
He pulls back. His eyes are grey-green and close.
"Portland," he says.
"Portland."
He goes. I watch him walk away through the terminal, tall and quiet, and he doesn't look back, and I don't need him to. I have his number in my phone under Wolf Boy and a whole city waiting for me.
Three months later, I know Portland better than I know Seattle.
That's what happens when you spend every other weekend driving down I-5, learning the exits and the coffee shops and the way the light comes off the river in the afternoon.
Dean comes up to Seattle too. He claims he likes the city.
I've caught him checking the moon phase on my phone more than once, and he pretends it's curiosity, and I let him, because I've got a lunar calendar of my own now and I'm not about to throw stones.
"You track the moon," he says.
"I plan around the moon. There's a difference."
"You have an app."
"I have an app that tells me when my boyfriend turns into a dog."
"Wolf."
"Dog."
He gives me a look, and I file it next to the others, the collection of looks that have become my favorite thing to earn.
The cabin is up a logging road that stops being a road about three miles before it ends.
We hike the last stretch in the afternoon, packs on our backs, snow crunching under our boots.
The air is cold and clean and smells like pine and snow and something older.
Spring comes late at this elevation, and the snow that fell last month is still deep in the shadows, and the sky is the pale blue of late afternoon, and I can see my breath.
"There's a wood stove," Dean says. "One bed. A porch that faces the sky."
"Sounds luxurious."
"It's a cabin. It's not luxurious."
"It's got a porch that faces the sky. That's luxury."
He almost smiles. I count it. Third one today.
"Four more and I win a prize."
"What prize?"
"I'm workshopping it. Something tasteful. Maybe dinner."
"We're already having dinner."
"Then I'll raise the stakes. You'll find out."
He's quiet on the trail in a way I've learned to read by now.
Not the counting quiet. The other one. The one that means he's braced for something.
He watches me out of the corner of his eye, and I understand, all at once, that this is the last door he has, and he's opened it for me, and he's waiting to see what I do with it.
The cabin appears around a bend in the trail, small and square and tucked against the trees, with a tin roof and a stack of firewood and a porch that does face the sky.
It's not a compound. No alarms, no traps, no fence.
Just a door and a window and a chimney, and a man who built himself a place where the thing he becomes has room and no witnesses.
"Dean," I say.
"Yeah."
"It's perfect."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he takes my pack and carries it up the steps, and I watch his shoulders come down an inch, and I understand that I passed a test I didn't know I was taking.
We get the fire going. We eat stew out of tin bowls. The light goes blue, then violet, then dark, and the stars come out, and the moon rises over the trees, enormous and white and full.
I've seen him shift three times now.