Page 2 of Into Ember

The corner of his mouth goes up.

And I know that look. That is the exact look that came attached to the belly this morning, the this-was-my-idea-the-whole-time look, and it is currently on a person, and the math does itself before I can stop it. The missing one. The fourth one. The name Gunnar kept yelling into rooms he wasn’t in.

“Leif,” I say. “You asshole.”

And then he moves. Down, not up. His nose grazes the side of my neck and he inhales — slow, deep, like I’m something worth memorizing — and a sound comes out of his chest that no person should be able to make. Low. Rough. I feel it more than hear it, everywhere we’re touching, which is currently everywhere.

My whole body answers it before I get a vote.

Traitor.

He comes back up. Smirks.

He looks comfortable, which is insane, because he’s lying on top of me in the middle of the woods and he is —

Oh.

Oh no.

He’s naked.

There is no fabric anywhere on this man. I know this with astonishing certainty, because I can feel it — all of it, every warm inch of him lined up against every mortified inch of me — and some of those inches are reacting to the situation in a way that is definitely just physics. Impact physics. Bodies do things when they fall out of the sky. That’s science, and I am not going to be weird about science.

My face catches fire anyway. Neck first, then everything, and I can’t even cover it, because my arms are pinned under a very large, very naked man who spent the morning as my cat.

“Ohhh my god.” Gunnar has arrived above us, and I don’t have to see him to know the grin. “Seriously? Commander?”

Leif’s head comes up, unhurried. He looks at Gunnar the way Muffin looked at Kyle — like an annoyance in his kingdom — and then he looks back down at me.

“Commander?”

It comes out at a pitch I’ve never produced in my life, because no. No no no. The cat being the missing one, fine, I was nearly there, I’d have gotten there on my own. But the missing one is their commander, which means their commander sat in my lap.

I did the psspsspss at their commander.

In my hallway.

Out loud.

I rubbed his belly and called it emotional warfare. I fed him cream out of my good ramekin. I told him —

I told him everything.

I have spent the entire day narrating my inner life to their commanding officer, and he purred.

“Up,” Erik says, and it’s not a suggestion.

Leif takes his time about it, because of course he does, he’s a cat — cats don’t have shame, and apparently they don’t get issued any when they turn into people either. He comes up off me in one motion like the ground was his idea, and cold air rushes into all the places he was, which I’m not thinking about, and then Erik’s hands find mine and I’m upright before my knees get briefed.

He doesn’t let go right away. His eyes do a fast lap of me — head, shoulders, ribs — checking for damage.

“I’m fine,” I say.

He doesn’t look convinced. He also doesn’t look away from my face. Everyone else in this clearing has located somewhere neutral to put their eyes and I have —

I look.

I don’t decide to look. There is no decision anywhere in the process. My eyes just go, all on their own, straight to the naked commander standing in the starlight like this is normal, like clothes are a thing that happen to other people, and —