Page 49

But nothing has happened. No kissing, no hands under clothes, no full surrender to the fact that my body goes stupid every time he looks at me for too long. The need is there, though. Pretending otherwise would insult both of us because the touching doesn’t get easier.

It hangs in every pause that goes a second too long. It lives in the way his eyes sharpen when I lick my lips without thinking. It claws at me when he changes from his cryptid form to the human one right in front of me, the whole process still strange enough to stun and familiar enough now that my body responds before my brain catches up.

Every touch still hits the same way. Heat first, immediate and impossible, my skin lighting up around the contact point as if his body runs on some other temperature scale entirely. Then the bond goes warm and bright under that, carrying his reaction back to me and mine to him until one touch turns into this loop of sensation that makes my pulse jump and my thoughts go a little slippery.

One Tuesday night, we’re sitting by the creek on a fallen cedar log, close enough that our knees keep brushing whenever one of us shifts. He’s in his human shape because I suspect he likes the way I look at him.

The moon’s not full anymore, but there’s enough light filtering through the trees to turn the water silver. I say something about how this whole situation feels less like a haunting and more like being aggressively courted by a very patient apex predator, and his answer comes through the link with such dry certainty that I nearly choke on my coffee.

Patient because prey is worth patience.

“You cannot call me prey and expect me not to react to that,” I say, flustered.

You are not prey, he corrects, and I feel the weight of his attention settle on me, hot and low. You are why prey gets ignored.

“You can’t just announce things like that,” I tell him, voice strained while he studies me with calm interest.

I did not announce. I sent.

“That’s worse.”

Why?

“Because it’s inside my head, Onyx.”

He gives me that small almost-smile he’s been practicing because he knows it ruins me. Inside is where true thoughts live.

The bastard. It doesn’t help that his mind-link speech has been improving so quickly, too.

Every night, when I head back to the cabin, Onyx walks me to the edge of the clearing and stops. Every night, that invisible line gets heavier.

At first, it comforts me that he doesn’t cross or test the boundary. He stands where forest becomes packed dirt and porch light, arms loose at his sides, hair lifting faintly in the wind, and waits while I climb the steps. Sometimes he’s in human form. Sometimes he stays hidden in the trees but lets me feel him there. Either way, he respects the cabin like it’s an extension of my body.

A threshold is a threshold, he once told me.

He gets jealous in the weirdest ways, too.

Not of people, really. There hasn’t been anyone for him to get jealous of in that sense. Though I have a feeling if there were, I’d know about it immediately. No, what he’s jealous of is the cabin.

My den, as he insists on calling it, with the same tone a man might use for a rival who keeps cheating by technically being a building and therefore impossible to challenge directly.

The first night he walked me back, I thought he was joking when he bristled at the porch light turning on and muttered into my head that it takes you every night. Then he did it again the next evening, and the evening after that, and by the time Friday rolled around, I’d realized he is, in fact, genuinely offended by the concept of me going indoors and not being immediately accessible to him until morning.

It would be ridiculous if it wasn’t also kind of endearing.

Tonight, for example, we’re taking the long trail back from the ridge because I had to stay late checking the far boundary after some asshole dumped trash near the old north entrance, and dusk bled fully into night before I was done.

Onyx met me without me asking, appearing silently beside the trail in his human form as if he’d always been there. He’s wearing a dark Henley and black jeans combination he’s favored the last few days, which I still haven’t asked about because I’m not sure I want the answer.

Either he’s stealing clothes from somewhere, which opens a whole new set of questions, or he’s somehow acquired them through means I probably also don’t want explained. Like the magic pants that stay intact when he shifts into his Death-Deer form.

Already the den calls, Onyx says dryly.

“You sound like you’re about to lose me to another man.”

He looks down at me, all dark hair and blue eyes and impossible calm. I lose you to walls and roof and a bed.

“It keeps rain off me.”