I pull off my boots. Lie down beside him, fitting myself against his side, my head on his chest, his good arm pulling me in. The cot wasn’t built for two people. I don’t care.
His heartbeat is steady under my ear. He smells like soap and timber and the creek we just left.
“You’re staying the night,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
We lie there. The cot creaks when either of us shifts. The wind moves through the valley outside.
“It’s quiet here,” he says.
“Too quiet?”
“Different quiet. The Hill Country at night sounds like insects and space. This sounds like water and trees.”
“The ridges hold the sound in. In winter, you can hear the creek from every cabin.”
He’s quiet for a while. His fingers trace a slow line down my arm.
“Willow.”
“Mm.”
“I don’t know how to do this. Be here. Be someone these wolves don’t want to kill.” A pause. “Wake up next to you and believe it’s real.”
I lift my head. Look at him. In the dark, his face is all shadow and the faint light from the window.
“It’s real,” I say. “The rest we figure out.”
“That simple?”
“Nothing about this is simple. But I’m here. You’re here. Let’s start there.”
He pulls me closer. Presses his mouth to my hair. The cabin is dark and small, and the cot is too narrow, and his shoulder is injured, and there are wolves outside who’d rather he wasn’t breathing. None of that matters right now.
What matters is this: the weight of his arm, the sound of his breathing slowing toward sleep, and the knowledge that tomorrow I’ll wake up beside him in a valley that smells like home.
I close my eyes. Sleep comes faster than it has in weeks.
Chapter 32
Conner
I wake with Willow’s hair across my chest and her breathing slow against my shoulder.
The cot is ridiculous. My feet hang off the end, my bad shoulder is wedged against the wall, and sometime in the night she threw a leg across mine that’s cutting off circulation to my left foot. It’s the best sleep I’ve had in months.
She shifts. Murmurs something I don’t catch. Presses closer, her face turning into my neck, and I tighten my arm around her because I can. Because she’s here. Because three days ago, I didn’t know if I’d ever touch her again.
When her breathing changes, I press my mouth to her hair.
“Morning,” she says against my chest.
“Morning.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me, and whatever she sees makes her mouth curve.