Bloodbound in emberfall

The Safe Kind of Love

Micah was waiting on her porch when she got back, which meant he’d probably been there a while — long enough for the coffee in the thermos beside him to have gone from steaming to lukewarm, judging by the lack of steam rising off it in the porch light.

“You weren’t answering texts,” he said, standing as she came up the walk. Not accusing. He never was. That was the whole shape of Micah, had been since they were fourteen and he’d walked her home from the bus stop every day for a month after her mother’s funeral without once asking her to talk about it. “I was starting to think about calling Dell.”

“I’m fine.” The lie came out easier than it should have.

He studied her the way he always did, patient and a little too perceptive for her comfort tonight specifically. “You don’t look fine. You look like you’ve seen something.”

She almost told him. It sat right there at the back of her throat — the marker stone, the man who’d known her name, the impossible amber of his eyes — and she could picture exactly how Micah would receive it: careful concern, gentle reasoning, a suggestion that grief made people see patterns that weren’t there. He wouldn’t be cruel about it. He’d never once been cruel to her in fifteen years of friendship, through breakups and her mother’s death and every version of Sena that had existed since they were kids trading snacks on a school bus. That was precisely the problem. He’d absorb whatever she told him into his steady, reasonable worldview and hand it back to her smoothed out, explained away, safe.

She didn’t want it smoothed out right now. She wanted someone to believe her exactly as much as she believed herself, and some instinct she didn’t examine too closely told her Micah wasn’t going to be that person tonight.

“Long day,” she said instead. “Search parties. Nothing new.”

“You went out to the ridge again, didn’t you.” It wasn’t really a question. Micah had known her long enough to read the mud on her boots, the specific tightness around her eyes that showed up whenever she’d been near those woods. “Sena, come on. Dell told you the department can’t keep clearing you to go out there alone. It’s not safe. You know it’s not safe — people don’t come back from that stretch.”

“Caleb didn’t come back from that stretch,” she said, sharper than she meant to. “So forgive me if I’m not interested in waiting around for the county to lose interest the way they did with the Marsh boys.”

Micah flinched, just slightly, and she felt the familiar guilt of having aimed something sharp at the one person who hadn’t given her a reason to. He sat back down on the porch step, elbows on his knees, and for a moment he just looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the late hour.

“I’m not trying to stop you from looking for him,” he said, quieter now. “I would never do that. I just — “ He exhaled. “I don’t want to lose you too. Is that so hard to understand?”

She sat down beside him, some of the fight going out of her at the plain honesty of it. This was the version of Micah she’d fallen for once, years ago, briefly, before they’d both decided — mutually, gently, without much drama — that whatever they had worked better as friendship than romance. He was the person who showed up. Who waited on porches with lukewarm coffee. Who would, if she asked him to right now, drop everything and go into those woods with her without a single question about why, and that unwavering, uncomplicated loyalty was worth more than she usually let herself admit.

“I know,” she said. “I’m not trying to lose myself either. I just can’t sit still with this. Not knowing is worse than anything I might find out there.”

“Then let me come with you next time. At least then it’s not just you out there.”

She thought of Ronan’s warning — don’t come out here alone again before then — and the way he’d said it like it mattered specifically that it was her, not like generic small-town caution about bears and old mine shafts. She thought about how easy it would be to say yes to Micah right now, to let him fold himself into this the way he folded himself into everything else in her life, steady and safe and utterly without complication.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, which wasn’t a yes and they both knew it.

Micah didn’t push, which was its own kind of answer about who he was. He stood, gathered his thermos, lingered a second too long at the top of the porch steps like he wanted to say something else and thought better of it.

“For what it’s worth,” he said instead, “I don’t think you’re being dramatic. About the woods, I mean. Something’s off about that whole stretch of forest and it has been for as long as I can remember. I just want you to be careful with it. That’s all this is.”

After he left, Sena sat alone on the porch a long time, turning the day over in her mind — the journal entries, the stone, Ronan’s face when he’d told her he didn’t know if her brother was alive, the particular ache of watching Micah walk back to his car and feeling, for the first time in years, like she was choosing between two entirely different versions of what her life could look like. One safe and known and warm, built out of fifteen years of history and a boy who’d waited on her porch more nights than she could count. One dangerous and half-explained, built out of amber eyes and a hundred and forty years of a secret her own family had apparently been keeping without ever telling her.

She didn’t let herself examine too closely which one her mind kept circling back to, unbidden, every time the porch went quiet.

Tomorrow night, she’d go back to the ridge. Alone, despite what Micah wanted, despite what was probably the smarter choice sitting right there in front of her, patient and steady and entirely hers if she let it be. There was a version of this where she picked safety and never found out what happened to her brother.

She was fairly sure, sitting there in the dark with her pulse still not quite settled from the woods, that she wasn’t built for that version.

She thought back to when they were seventeen, the summer after her mother died, when Micah had shown up every single evening for weeks with a different excuse to be there — homework he didn’t need help with, a movie he’d already seen, anything that gave him a reason to sit with her so she wouldn’t have to be alone with the house’s new silence. She’d loved him for it then, in the uncomplicated way you love the person who simply keeps showing up. Some nights she still did. That was the trouble with Micah; he’d never once given her a reason to stop.

But there was a version of tonight that kept surfacing unbidden — not Micah on the porch step with his careful concern, but Ronan at the tree line, close enough to touch, telling her the truth might get her killed and meaning it as a warning and not a threat. She hadn’t felt safe standing there. She’d felt awake, in a way she hadn’t since before Caleb went missing, like some part of her that had been dormant for years had suddenly remembered it existed.

She didn’t trust that feeling. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to. But she also wasn’t sure, sitting alone on her porch with the night gone fully dark around her, that not trusting it was going to be enough to make her stay away.