Page 55

“Don’t be. He once accepted a park ranger’s granola bar and then stole her wedding ring in exchange.”

“Efficient,” Nash says.

Echo deposits something small and shiny into Nash’s palm—a button, silver—and then leaps away, chittering as he disappears into the brush.

After a lunch of instant noodles, we settle in to watch and wait. Objectively, it should be boring.

It isn’t.

We talk for a while. About the scouting reports, about Ramsey’s likely movement patterns, about whether the absence of activity means he’s truly abandoned this area or is simply being careful.

I tell him about Ramsey using Lexi as a double agent. Or trying to.

He tells me about his aunt Jenna. The rugged highlands of Ontario where he grew up. How he learned to trap rabbits from her.

After that, we stop talking and just watch.

An hour in, I notice he’s shifted slightly closer to me.

I don’t say anything.

Another hour and our shoulders are almost touching.

I look down at the supply route, forcing myself to focus on that instead of Nash’s closeness. But now, my shoulder is approximately two inches from his, and inside, my wolf is sitting up straight with an air of tremendous satisfaction that I am choosing to ignore.

He moved closer, she points out.

I know.

You didn’t move away.

I'm observing the route.

You haven’t looked at the route in eleven minutes.

I have, in fact, not looked at the route in eleven minutes. I’ve been looking at a fixed point in the middle distance that is definitely not Nash’s hands, which are resting on his knees, which are very close to mine. Hands that once touched me in places that drew noises from me not unlike that cooked rabbit I ate earlier.

My core starts to heat.

I force myself to think about other things. My father. His retirement. His plans to maybe leave town. The distraction only partly works, but I manage to even out my breathing.

Nash keeps shifting closer, though.

By the time the light starts to shift toward late afternoon, we are pressed lightly together from shoulder to knee, and neither of us has acknowledged it, and the supply route remains empty, and Echo is back and asleep in my lap, and I am losing a war I didn’t agree to fight.

Dinner is quiet. Not uncomfortable—the opposite, which is its own kind of problem. We’ve moved past the performed ease of people getting to know each other and into something more unguarded. The spaces between sentences have stopped needing to be filled. It feels dangerously like friendship.

That’s how I know I’m in trouble.

The only quiet ease I’ve ever felt with another human is my father and maybe Crow. Not that Grey and Dutch and the others don’t put me at ease, but those assholes never shut up. Especially Dutch.

Being with Nash is starting to feel safer than being without him. I’m starting to wonder if I’ve really fucked myself by spending these days alone with him out here. And I’m starting to wonder if he knows it. If that was his plan all along.

“I’ve been wondering about something you said the other day,” I say, mostly to distract myself from my own thoughts.

“Uh-oh. Why do I get the feeling I’m in trouble?”

“You said you envied Echo.”