Page 80 of Animal Tamer
Jules laughs, bright and cheerful, and the tent laughs with her, and when Elias slides the ring on her finger, Logan whoops from the front row loud enough to spook the peacocks outside. Rome trumpets an answer from the menagerie like he's been waiting for a cue his whole life. Marek stands at the edge of the ring with Beau sitting patiently at his heel, and when the kiss happens—long, theatrical, Elias dipping Jules while her boot kicks up—Marek smiles at his cards like they told him so months ago.
Dinner is Deke's finest hour. Long tables get dragged into the ring, with lanterns down the center, and more food than a town could eat. Nova holds court with her belly leading the way now, one hand permanently resting on it while Teddy and Silas orbit her with plates and water and arguments about whether the baby can hear music yet. Jonah gives a toast that starts as a joke and ends with him wiping his eyes with a napkin the size of a pillowcase. Jules dances with every single one of us in turn—for me, she holds her palms up, and I press my fingertips to hers, and we turn a slow circle at arm's length. She grins at me with wet eyes and says, "Look at you, Holloway," and doesn't make it a thing, which is why I love her.
Wren dances with everyone too. I watch Logan spin heruntil she shrieks. I watch Deke shuffle her through something that might be a waltz. I watch her laugh with her head back under the string lights, hay-country girl in a green dress, and my chest gets so full it starts to hurt.
Two months since Thistlewood. Two months of a bed built for two and a careful two feet of air that keeps shrinking. Her fingers on my forehead, brushing hair back. My palm at the small of her back when we walk. Last week, her cheek against my shoulder for the length of one whole song on the radio, my heart slamming and then, minute by minute, going quiet. Every day, an inch. Every inch, a country.
And every night, I lie beside her and want more than inches.
The band Elias hired—actual musicians, in the Big Top, playing something slow and old—starts another song, and Wren drops into the chair beside me, flushed, glowing, a strand of hair stuck to her temple.
"Your family," she pants, "does not pace itself."
"They don't know how."
She reaches for her water glass. I watch her throat move when she drinks, the lantern light on her collarbones, the crease of her smile still lingering from whatever Logan said, and the decision that's been building in me for weeks has never felt more right.
"Wren."
"Mm?"
"Come with me?"
She sets the glass down. Something in my voice must alert her, because her eyes search my face, and whatever she finds there makes her breathing change.
"Okay," she says. No questions. She never needs to be told twice.
We slip out the performers' entrance into the night. Behind us, the music follows—the canvas holds nothing in, it never has—and the lot is dark and quiet, the trailers sleeping, the moon fat over the menagerie. She walks beside me with her hand swinging close to mine, and halfway home, I take it.
Her fingers go still in mine. Then they curl, carefully, and hold on.
Neither of us says anything. Her thumb moves once over my knuckles, and we walk the rest of the way like that, hand in hand under the moon, and it's the first time, and she knows it's the first time, and she keeps her eyes forward and lets it be ordinary because she understands that ordinary is the whole prize.
At the trailer door, I stop.
"Close your eyes."
She narrows them instead. "Rowe Holloway."
"Trust me."
Wren closes her eyes. I open the door and guide her up the steps with my hand on her back.
"Okay. Open them."
She gasps. “Candles…”
They're everywhere. On the shelves I built, in the kitchenette, lined along the window ledge in glass holders, a few dozen small flames lighting our four hundred square feet. One of our mechanics, Jack, did it—I asked him at dinner, slipped him the lighter and the bag from town, and he nipped out between toasts and set every one of them where nothing can catch because Logan trained the whole crew in fire discipline out of pure self-interest.
Wren's hands come up over her mouth.
"When did you—" Her voice wobbles. "We were togetherthe whole?—"
"Jack."
"You planned this," she breathes.
"For two weeks."
