Page 73 of Hush

I do not deny it; there is no point. It takes you.

His mouth twitches, which means the answer pleased him despite himself. “It gives me a paycheck.”

Those words mean little to me beyond the fact that they somehow tie him to his world, not mine. I would rather take you.

His cheeks redden. “Yeah, I’m noticin’ a theme with you.”

There is no shame in that. You need your work, and my forest likes you there.

That quiets him for a second because he knows what I mean. He has always known this place better than most of his kind. The forest shaped him long before I found him. It was one reason the bond took hold so violently when his scent first cut across my path. A mate of the land for a creature of the land. The old knowing in my bones recognized him before my mind finished understanding why.

He stops walking and exhales hard, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I don’t want to leave, either.”

I stop walking as well and put my hand on his face. Touch has already become a habit between us. Jaw, cheek, hairline, the side of his neck beneath his ear. Places where he opens quickly and without fear. His skin is cooler today than it was under the sickness, but still warm enough to send a low pulse through the bond.

Lucas leans into my palm at once, eyes lowering for half a beat before he catches himself and lifts them again. “You’re makin’ this worse,” he murmurs.

For me too.

That draws a brief, helpless smile from him. Good. I like every shape his mouth takes. I am learning them all.

We continue walking to his den, the morning cool and washed clean from the storm that moved through before dawn. Lucas breathes differently today—I hear it each time he takes in air, each time the scent of wet pine and cedar and his own home reaches him.

He does not let much silence settle between us. Humans do this when they are trying not to feel the full weight of something. They fill the surrounding air instead, hoping to soften the blow when it comes.

“So,” he says after a while, stepping over a root polished smooth by years of boots and rain. “Hypothetically, if I show up to work lookin’ suspiciously like I spent the night bein’ ravished in a cryptid nest, how much of that do you think I can blame on seasonal allergies?”

I glance at him. He is already watching me from the corner of his eye, waiting for the answer. Learning my rhythm.

Not much, I tell him. You smell satisfied.

He chokes on his own breath. The sound he makes is worth every trace of the earlier irritation. He glares at me while heat floods under the skin of his throat and cheeks, and the bond catches all of it, pleasure and embarrassment braided together. “You can’t just say things like that.”

I can, and I did.

“That is not helping your case.”

What case?

“The one where I’m tryin’ to remain a functional member of society.”

I consider this as we pass through a stand of younger pines where the light goes striped and narrow between trunks. Why?

Lucas actually stops walking long enough to stare at me. “Because, unlike you, some of us have to maintain reputations.”

This word I know better now. Reputation. The shape others make of you in their heads. The thing humans spend too much time feeding and defending. I have never once envied it.

My forest knows you, I say. Enough reputation.

He blinks, seemingly surprised, then huffs out a laugh that softens before it dies. “That’s annoyingly sweet.”

I do not know annoyingly in this context except as a kind of affection he disguises as irritation. My speech gets better every day because of him, but his subtexts still carry extra teeth.

We reach the edge of his clearing too fast. It always feels wrong when the forest falls back, and the cut grass and hard lines of his human dwelling push up into the world.

The cabin squats there, familiar now, less threatening than it was when it first took him from me every night and more merely… annoying. The den-that-is-not-my-den. The small wooden beast that swallows him under a roof instead of roots.

Lucas slows too, feeling it. The shift from forest to clearing echoes through the bond as reluctance, a small tightening in his chest that mirrors my own. I take some petty comfort in that. He may need this place, but he does not enjoy leaving mine any more than I enjoy surrendering him to it.