Page 76 of Animal Tamer
The moon is high over the lot. The Big Top rolls and sighs in the wind, and forty feet from the trailer, out on the strip of grass where the peacocks hold court by day, Marek is playing fetch with a Labrador.
Beau. Harlan's dog, lifted from Harlan's yard threehours ago, is wearing a brand-new collar. My brother throws a tennis ball in a long, easy arc, and the dog gallops after it like he's been here his whole life.
Marek watches me come. His pale eyes go from my face to my hands to the trailer door behind me, and he doesn't ask a single question because Marek never has to.
Beau brings the ball back to him, tail swinging, and Marek scratches behind one ear with the tenderness he shows nothing human.
“The free hand,” he says.
I flex it in the moonlight. Open. Closed. Open.
“Yeah.”
He smiles then, serene as still water, and nods once in quiet approval before turning back to the dog. Behind me, muffled through soundproofing and steel, the past is ending without me, and I find I don't need to hear it.
I walk home.
I shower until the pine cleaner is gone. Until the lemon polish is gone. Until there is nothing on my skin but water and the faint cedar of the soap she picked out.
Then I lift the blanket and lie down beside her.
The mattress takes my weight without waking her. I settle onto my side, facing her, and the scream under my skin has nothing to say. Her breath moves the loose hair by her mouth. There's a crease in her cheek from the pillow seam. In the lamplight, she looks like every ordinary miracle I never believed I'd be allowed.
Twenty years, I thought a dead man would set me free. A woman with hay in her hair did it first.
Wren stirs. Her eyes drift open, find me on the pillow beside her, and her face goes soft.
“Hi,” she whispers.
“Hi,” I whisper back.
She doesn't reach for me. She never has to be told twice. She just tucks her hand deeper under her cheek, and smiles, and lets her eyes fall shut, and I lie in the bed I built and watch the woman I love sleep until my own eyes close on their own.
I don't dream of the Sanctum at all.
27
WREN
The new town is called Cedar Bluff, and the water tower has a rusted hole in the B, so from the highway it welcomes you to CEDAR LUFF.
We rolled in three days ago, and I'm shocked at how fast my body learned the rhythm. Convoy at dawn. Rome in his trailer with Lucy at the wheel and me in the truck behind, watching his ventilation gauge like a hawk. Setup. Chores. Show. Chores again. Sleep in the big bed with a careful two feet of air between me and the man I love, which shrinks to one foot by morning because he drifts toward me in his sleep and never once flinches.
Deke saves me the last cinnamon roll every morning. Jules texts me wedding fabric swatches at midnight. Nova has started calling me for pregnancy questions because “you deliver foals, how different can it be,” which is a sentence Teddy overheard once and had to sit down for. Marek walks Beau past the menagerie every afternoon, and the Labrador has decided Brutus is his best friend, which Brutus pretends to hate.
I have a family. It came with a lion.
This morning, I'm elbow-deep in Rome's foot bucket, filing a crack on his left front pad while he leans his weight politely away from me, and Rowe is forking hay two enclosures over, and we're arguing about the peacocks.
“They screamed at four-fifteen,” I say. “Four. Fifteen.”
“They scream at dawn. Dawn's their whole job.”
“Dawn was at six-forty. I checked. They screamed at a time that has no dawn in it, Rowe. They screamed at theconceptof dawn.”
“Take it up with Silas.” I can hear the grin in his voice.
“Silas said, and I quote, 'every morning should start with screams.' Your brother is not a well man.” Rome shifts his trunk and pats the top of my head like I'm the one who needs comforting. “One of the hens is shadowing Cleopatra now. She has a zebra-shaped crush. I'm going to have to write it in her chart.Patient exhibits parasocial attachment to equid.”
