Page 44 of Animal Tamer
Our.
“Oh no,” Cole says, reading my face. “You've got the look. Go. I'll set it up. I'll even angle it tastefully.”
“Do not angle it tastefully. Lean it against the wall and leave.”
“Lean it against the wall and leave, he says, aftereverything we've shared.” But he's already positioning it in the corner, out of the immediate sightline of the door, with more care than he gives his own knives.
I wash the sawdust off my hands and forearms at my sink, scrubbing like I'm prepping for surgery. In the little mirror, there's wood dust in my hair, and my eyes look different than they have in twenty years. Lighter. I don't have a word for it.
Cole watches me from the doorway.
“Rowe.”
“Yeah.”
“Be sure about her.” No grin now. His brown eyes are steady, and underneath all the flippancy, there's the boy who slept two bunks over from me in a dormitory that smelled of ash. “Because you don't have practice at this. Which means when it hits you, it's going to hit you like a truck with no brakes.”
“It already did.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Then the grin comes back, and he thumps the doorframe twice on his way out.
“Then go meet your truck.”
I go.
Across the lot, past the mess area, past Jonah hauling coils of rope who takes one look at my face and starts smiling for reasons I refuse to investigate. My boots crunch in the gravel, and the sun is high, and the wind is moving through the tents, and her car turns onto the access road trailing a plume of dust.
I'm in the parking lot before she's cut the engine.
She steps out with her kit over her shoulder, ponytail today, work clothes, and something in her expression I can't read at this distance—something careful, watchful, that wasn't there yesterday.
I don't care. She's here.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say, and my heart is racing like it’s a show night, and there is a board with a hole in it leaning against my trailer wall, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to survive any of this.
15
WREN
Something is off about him.
I notice it before I've even shut my car door. Rowe Holloway stands in the gravel with his hands jammed in his pockets, and his weight keeps shifting like the ground is moving under him. He's smiling—actually smiling—but there's something tense beneath it.
I came out here to watch him. That was the plan I made at the clinic sink with the water running over my clean hands. Watch his face. Watch for a flicker when the town comes up. Reconcile the gentlest man I've ever met with sprayed words on a stranger's door.
Except now that I'm standing in front of him, my careful investigative plan is having trouble competing with the fact that he'slit up. Not guilty-lit. Not caught-lit. Something else.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah. Good.” He clears his throat. “You?”
“Good.”
We stand there being good for a second too long. Then Inotice sawdust on his shirt, more trapped in the wavy strands of his hair.
“You have sawdust in your hair.”
