Chapter 6
Damon
Jo does the follow-up scan on day eight and confirms what we already know.
"The fusion held. The bruising has resolved.
The hardware is intact. You got incredibly lucky.
" She sets the tablet down on the exam stool in her clinic and turns to face me, and she says it in the surgeon's voice, the one she uses when she is about to tell me something I do not want to hear.
"Damon. Listen. One more impact like that and the polymer composite fails.
I do not care if it is the worst feral break in the eastern corridor and the President of the United States is in the audience.
I am telling you that the next blow to that vertebra ends your life.
The wolf in you cannot accept this. I know that.
But you and I, the human parts of us, are going to make a deal. Are we?"
"We are."
"You are out of contact training, permanently.
You are out of dominance challenges, permanently.
You are out of any situation in which you could plausibly take a hit to the cervical spine.
You can shift recreationally. You can run with your wolf.
You can spar in ways that involve no contact above the shoulders. That is the box. Stay in the box."
"Yes."
"Damon."
"Yes, Jo. I hear you. I'm in the box."
"Good. Now get out of my clinic. I have a kid in cabin nine with a UTI and I do not have time for fighters who almost killed themselves."
I get out of her clinic.
I walk out to the yard.
The yard is the open packed-earth space between the lodge and the woodshed, and there is a stump and there is the splitting axe and there are three cords of unstacked wood the prospects have not gotten to yet, and I take off my cut and I pick up the axe and I start splitting.
I split for four hours.
This is what I do. This is what I have always done.
When something in me has to be metabolized, I metabolize it through the body, because the body is the only language I have ever fully spoken.
My grandfather split wood. My father split wood.
I split wood. There is a discipline to it that quiets the wolf.
The wolf does not need to pace if my shoulders are working, my back is engaged, my hips are turning, the steel is finding the grain and the wood is opening clean.
I split for four hours, until my shoulders are screaming and my hands are blistered and the three cords are stacked, and somewhere in the third hour I am no longer thinking about the box.
I am thinking about what fits inside it.
Inside the box: my wolf. My body. My job. My pack. My grandfather's books. My bike. My cabin. The pit, as coordinator. The mine shaft, as the man who runs it. The Sinners, as a brother. Petra, as — Petra.
Inside the box is enough.
Inside the box is, I am realizing, more than I had three years ago when there was no box and I thought there was no life.
I set the axe down. I drink water from the tap at the side of the lodge.
I am soaked through with sweat. The sun has moved across the yard and the shadow has changed.
I look up and Petra is on the porch of the lodge with a tin coffee mug in her hand and she has been there, by the look of it, for at least an hour.
"How long have you been watching me."
"Long enough."
"Find anything you like."
"Yes."
She walks down the porch steps. She crosses the yard. She is in jeans and a t-shirt and her hair is pulled back and she has not bothered with anything fancy because Petra does not do fancy, and she stops in front of me and she looks up at me and she says:
"Jo offered me the job."
"I know. She told me."
"I told her yes."
I look at her. "When."
"This morning."
"And you didn't tell me first."
"I wanted to tell her first. I wanted to tell her before I told you, so that the answer to her was about the work, and the answer to you was about you. I am telling you now."
"Tell me now."
"I am taking the job. I am staying at Bone Hollow.
I am going to build out the trauma wing.
I am going to run the field medicine training.
I am going to publish the prediction work through Hex's analysis pipeline.
I have already drafted the first three months of curriculum.
I will be busy. I will be tired. I will not be leaving. "
I set the water cup down.
I look at her.
I say, "Why."
"Because I had a career that defined me and it was a career of leaving.
And I was good at leaving. And leaving stopped feeling like a career and started feeling like an excuse, and I do not want to leave anymore.
I want to stay. The job is the work I should be doing.
Bone Hollow is a place I want to be. The man in front of me is — Damon.
The man in front of me is the first person in eleven years that I have met who has made me think if I stop running this is who I would stop running for.
And I do not want to give you that responsibility.
I want to give it to me. I am stopping. The man in front of me is part of why. But the stopping is mine."
The wolf in my chest is — there is no word for what the wolf is doing.
There is, in the wolf, a sound. A low one. It is not a growl. It is not a whine. It is the sound a wolf makes when it has been alone too long and is no longer alone. It vibrates in my sternum. Petra hears it. I see her hear it.
"Was that you," she says, "or him."
"Him. Mostly him."
"Tell him I heard him."
"He knows."
I close the distance.
I get my hand on the back of her neck and I bring her up to me — careful with my own head, careful with the way I move, but not careful with the kiss — and the kiss is not the medical-suite kiss and it is not the overlook kiss and it is something different.
The medical-suite kiss was we both almost lost something.
The overlook kiss was we are seeing what this could be.
This one is yes. This one is yes the way a contract is yes.
Two adults who have read the terms and signed the line and are now in agreement.
When I let her go she steps back and her hand is in mine and she says, "Come up to your cabin with me."
"Yes."
"Now."
"Yes."
— —
My cabin is at the end of the western row.
I take her there in long strides through the late afternoon.
The light is gold across the compound and the air is hot and dry and smells like pine and the river that runs along the eastern boundary.
Petra walks beside me. Her hand is in mine.
We do not talk. There is nothing left to talk about that the next hour will not handle.
The cabin is one room with a bedroom and a small bath and a kitchen along the back wall and a porch along the front.
The bed is made. The floor is clean. The weight rack is on the porch, where it lives.
The books are stacked on the small desk in the corner — Meditations, the spine cracked and held with tape; a stack of military histories; a tournament logbook from 2017 that I keep because I beat the Atlanta alpha that year and I like to remember what that felt like.
The bedside table has a glass of water from this morning, half-full.
The window over the bed is open. The mountain air is moving through.
I lock the door.
She is already taking off her shirt.
"Slow down," I say.
"Why."
"Because we have time. And because I want to do this slowly. Last time was fast. Last time was — we were both adrenaline. I would like to do this the other way."
She looks at me. She lets her shirt drop on the chair beside the door.
"Then do it the other way."
I do it the other way.
I cross to her. I put my hand at the small of her back — flat, the whole palm, the way I have wanted to put my hand on her every time I have watched her work — and I pull her in.
Not fast. Slow. I get my other hand at her jaw, fingers along the line of it, thumb at the corner of her mouth.
I do not kiss her yet. I look at her. The freckle on the left side of her upper lip.
The faint scar along her jaw, two inches, white, that I have not asked her about yet.
The way her gray-brown eyes have a thin ring of darker gray around the iris. The pulse at her throat moving fast.
"What," she says.
"I am looking at you."
"Damon."
"I have been looking at you for nine days. I am going to do it now without pretending I am not."
She lets me look.
She is not used to being looked at. I can tell.
Petra has spent eleven years being a function, and the people around her have responded to the function, and they have not looked at her the way I am looking at her now.
She holds still. She does not look away.
But there is a flicker at the corner of her mouth — not a flinch, but the cousin of one.
A vulnerability that she does not yet have a habit for.
I kiss her.
Slow.
I take my time. I find her mouth and I let the kiss build the way the slow rounds of a long fight build — testing the range, then closing, then deepening, then settling into the rhythm that is going to last for the next forty minutes.
Her hand comes up to my chest, flat, over the cotton of my shirt, and her other hand finds the back of my neck — and even here, even now, her thumb finds the surgical scar and rests there.
Lightly. The medic in her cannot stop being aware of the C4, and I do not want her to stop being aware of it, because being aware of it is part of how she takes care of me, and being taken care of is what is happening here, and that is also new.
I move my hand from her jaw to her shoulder.
Down her arm. To her hip. Up under the hem of her undershirt.
Her skin is warm. The flat plane of her stomach contracts when I touch it — the abdominal muscles of a woman who carries thirty-pound kits up bleachers — and she makes a small sound against my mouth and I am undone.
"Bed," she says.
"Yes."