When he left, though—when his footsteps faded down the path and the cave went quiet again—I lay there staring at the ceiling for a long time, my body humming like I’d swallowed a storm.
It didn’t take a genius-level intellect to understand what that meant.
I’m not just curious about him. I’m not just protective. Nor am I simply fascinated by his work and his clumsy courage and the way his laugh sneaks out like he’s surprised by it every time.
I’m attracted to him. Infatuated.
Ridiculously, inconveniently, embarrassingly into him.
After that realization settled into my bones, I did the only thing I could do: I took care of the problem before I napped.
In private.
Quickly.
Thoroughly.
And that’s nobody’s business but mine and the moss on the far wall.
You’d think that would have helped. It didn’t. If anything, it made the next five days worse.
Elias has come by every day since then, just like he said he would, bright and earnest and so full of questions they spill out of him in overlapping waves. Questions about my healing, my biology, my sense abilities, my language, my cave. Questions about what I eat, what I do during the winter, how I deal with boredom.
The kind of questions that would normally annoy me if anyone else asked them. From him? They’re… endearing.
He sits cross-legged on one of my woven mats, notebook open, pen moving a mile a minute until he forgets to write because he’s too busy gesturing with his hands as he talks. Sometimes he stares openly at the glowing screens in my “office” with a kind of horrified fascination, like I’ve committed a cosmic crime by connecting a server cluster to a cave.
Each time, I tell myself I’ll let him go about his day alone, and each time, I end up escorting him anyway.
“I’m just making sure he doesn’t walk into another bear,” I inform the ferns.
The ferns don’t believe me.
And now?
Now I’m hiding in the tree line like a coward while he sets up a small grill in front of his station and hums to himself.
He invited me to eat.
“Come by around sunset,” he said yesterday, grinning. “I have a portable grill. I can make something that isn’t dehydrated or from a packet. As a thank-you. And, you know… because I like your company.”
Because I like your company.
I’ve replayed those five words more times than is healthy.
From my spot between two cedars, I can smell the food already—meat sizzling, spices warming, vegetables charring just enough to be interesting. The scent of smoke curls through the evening air. My stomach growls. My nerves twist.
I shouldn’t go.
I should stay in the shadows and let him eat in peace. It’s dangerous, getting this close so often. Dangerous to me, to him, to the careful walls I’ve built between my world and his.
But the thought of not going—and of the disappointment that would surely crease his brow when I don’t show—makes my chest cramp.
“Just for a little while,” I mutter. “You can handle a little while.”
I take a deep breath. Then another, triple checking that no one human is within a two-mile radius. Then, before I can talk myself out of it, I step out of the trees.
Elias sees me immediately. His head comes up, his eyes brighten, and that smile—wide, open, stupidly radiant—blooms across his face like the sun decided to live there full-time.