Page 17 of Winter’s Teeth

“But isn’t the cabin the other—”

“No.” He adjusted me slightly, hands sliding higher up under my thighs so I was brought even closer to him. As I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, locking my stinging hands together, I tried to ignore the pain that lanced through my ankle with every jostling step. I tried to ignore his warm hands, too.

I failed at both tasks.

“Are you sure?”

“Quite.”

My puffed exhale fogged by his ear, but I at last accepted that I was probably wrong. “So why did you let me go the wrong way for half a mile?”

For a few beats, he said nothing, and my focus drifted as I wondered about the exact scent of his hair. Through his hat, I thought I detected notes of coconut and sandalwood. His shampoo, maybe?

Then at last, he said, “Because I thought your sister could have had the same wrong hunch as you. I didn’t want us to leave stones unturned, I guess.”

I hadn’t expected that answer. What I had expected was a typical cocky male response about wanting me to feel stupid when he proved his point, but it sounded like Fox actually cared about finding Everly.

He was the only one out here with me, after all. Everyone else had given up so quickly, but the fiery need to find her still burned white hot inside me, making me wriggle with pent up energy refusing to dissipate. It probably never would until I found her.

There was nothing I could do now though, and as defeat washed through me, my chin fell upon Fox’s shoulder with all the weight of the world looming over us like a leaden shadow.

“Thank you,” I admitted weakly. “For coming out here with me. For...carrying me back.”

He hadn’t needed to do any of that, and yet he did it all wordlessly.

“Don’t mention it,” he said gruffly.

“Well, I want to mention it.”

“I guess I owed you.”

Memories of our first meeting in the stream flashed in my mind’s eye. His skin was far warmer than it had been that day in Penn’s Creek. His hands were practically burning through my leggings, and his back against my chest was warming me so thoroughly that my shivers were already waning.

I blew out another breath by his ear, feeling the ruffling of his feather-soft hair against my cheek. “You smell good,” I said distantly, my tongue thick and slow in my mouth. “You smell sweet, and like the brisket you were helping cook for the reception.” He said nothing, so I continued, “You don’t owe me either. I didn’t save you for recognition or anything. I just... I don’t know, it was instinct.”

“Funny instincts you’ve got,” he said drily. “I don’t know many animals with instincts that make them strip and get in freezing cold water. Or who don’t know their way around the woods.”

I rolled my eyes in the dark, hoping he sensed my snark in the air between us, which there was very little of. We were as close as we’d been in the back seat of my car that fateful day at the creek.

“So, you know your way around these woods pretty well?”

“You could say so.”

He wasn’t being rude anymore, but I could sense the secrets tense beneath every word he said. Even every word he didn’t say.

My next whisper was a stolen dandelion seed in the wind. Barely there, barely seen, barely felt. Soft and fragile. So easily snatched away. “What do you think happened to her?”

His shoulders stiffened beneath my chin, back muscles going taut as he marched atop the crunching gravel path.

I nearly leaned away from him when the silence stretched on too long, but then he said in a gravelly voice, “I wish I knew for sure. I wish I could help more.”

My shoulders sagged, and I sank back in against him. “Yeah. Me, too.”

Silence settled back over us like a rock at the bottom of a stream, heavy and certain not to budge unless someone kicked it up again. I was too weak to go kicking over more stones. Too drained by the day’s events to let myself talk hopeful strategy or dig into getting to know Fox. It didn’t seem like the right time, even if I found myself on his back like an old friend.

I turned my head, my cheek pressing into his shoulder as I stared out at the knotted, tree-thick woods, so dark I couldn’t make out any moonlight sneaking through the branches. I doubted that even if it was the clearest day, one might not notice the sunlight in the dense woods, untouched by man in almost two centuries.

I pondered how long the Winter family had tended the land. If they let it be and never ventured into it. They must have left it be for it to have grown so wild.