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“My side will survive.”

“That’s not an answer, Bisbane, that’s a boast.”

“Then here is the answer. It will hurt, I don’t care in the slightest, and if it opens I’ll let you sew it shut again. Then complain about your stitching the entire time.” I brought her knuckles up and put my mouth against them. “Ask me the other question.”

She didn’t pretend not to understand.

“I’m not in heat.”

“I know. I’d know.”

“It’s coming. Two days, perhaps less.” Her chin came up the way it does when she expects to be argued with. “But I am entirely myself, and I know exactly what I am choosing, and I will not have you deciding for me on the grounds that my body is going to make demands of me later this week.”

“I have no intention of deciding anything for you.” I kept my voice level, because this was the hinge the whole of it turned on and I wanted her to hear it clearly. “Which is also why there will be no bite tonight, and no bond. Not because I don’t want it, and you should assume that I want it the way a drowning man wants the surface. But what your body is going to ask of you in two days isn’t the same as what you want right now. I won’t take something permanent from you in a week where you cannot tell those two apart. When you ask me for that, you’ll ask me with a clear head, and I’ll say yes, and we will both remember it.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “You rehearsed that.”

“I have thought of little else since yesterday afternoon.”

“It shows.” Her hands went to the fastenings she had done up for me that morning, and she began, with great care, to undo every one of them. “Tell me to stop.”

I looked down at her. “Do you want to?”

“Not for a moment.”

“Then why would I?”

“Because I need to know you’re certain.”

She touched my face. “Guy, I’ve spent three years running from you.”

“I remember.”

“I’m tired of running.”

My chest went tight enough that I had to breathe around it. “Then stay.”

She smiled against my mouth. “Make me want to.”

What followed was not graceful but I wouldn’t trade one second of it.

She got my shirt off my shoulders and I got the belt off her waist, and her father’s old linen came down off her and I had the rest of what the spring had shown me, this time within reach of my hands. I had not permitted myself to look properly at that pool. I looked now. She let me, and she watched me do it with her chin lifted and the firelight going up the whole length of her, and I had never in my life been so thoroughly undone by being allowed something. Her thighs were already shiny with slick. It ran down the insides of her legs in thick, glistening trails, the scent of her so strong it made my mouth water and my dick throb hard enough to ache.

“Say it,” she said.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I have no idea what to do with the fact that you’re letting me look at you.”

“Try touching me instead.”

I put my hands on her waist and lifted her onto the bed, which my side had opinions about, and I ignored them.

Then I slowed down, because I intended to remember all of it.

I learned her by degrees.

I found the compass rose inked over her ribs beneath her heart, which no one living had seen. When I put my mouth to it she made a sound I’ll hear until I die. I found the old crescent scar on her forearm from the night her house fell and kissed that too, and she told me to stop being sentimental in a voice with nothing left in it.

I found that the place beneath her ear undid her utterly, and that she laughed when she was overwhelmed. She said my name differently when she had stopped thinking about saying it.