Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Eleven — No Fries

Bryan POV

I noticed it first in her hands.

The small twitching — fingers curling against the blanket, the micro-movements of a body processing something behind closed eyes. I'd been watching the road. I'd glanced over the way I glanced over every twenty minutes or so, the specific vigilance of something that monitored without being able to stop monitoring, and I caught the first signs of it: her face slightly scrunched, brow pulled together, the expression of someone experiencing something with edges to it. Her breathing was elevated. Not dramatically, not enough that a person paying normal human attention would have noticed, but I wasn't paying normal human attention.

A bad dream. The body language was clear enough — the tension, the small flinching quality of her movements, the way her head pressed back into the pillow like she was trying to put distance between herself and something.

I looked at the road.

Looked back at her.

She was still, for a moment. Then she made a small sound — almost nothing, just a breath with a shape to it — and her body shifted. And then the change happened, and it was not subtle, not to me.

The tension left her.

All at once, like something had resolved, like the dream had shifted to different ground. Her face went smooth. Her shoulders dropped. Her breathing evened out but didn't slow — it stayed elevated, stayed moving at that same rate, but the quality of it changed so completely and so suddenly that I registered it before I'd even consciously identified what I was registering.

Not distress.

The opposite.

And then I smelled it.

It arrived the way her scent always arrived in enclosed spaces — already present, already layered into the air of the cab, already in my blood from hours of proximity — but it peaked. A sharp, sudden peak, warm and sweet and with that mint underneath and something else beneath that, something that sat in an entirely different register from the rest of it, something that my wolf catalogued with the speed and precision of an organ that had been specifically designed for exactly this information.

She was aroused.

The sound that wanted to come out of my chest was not a sound I was going to allow. I locked my jaw. My hands on the wheel went to a grip that was beyond what steering required — I felt the resistance in the material, the very slight complaint of it under my palms, the protest of something not built for this particular force of grip.

Control, I told myself. Right now. All of it.

My wolf had no interest in control. My wolf was operating in a completely different mode from control — it was vibrating, it was insistent, it was doing the MINE frequency at a volume I hadn't had to manage in a long time, and the source of it was three feet away from me in silk sheets dreaming of something that was making her scent do things her scent had no right to be doing in my truck.

I breathed through it. Four counts. Hold. Four out.

The wheel protested under my grip.

Let go, I told my hands. They didn't entirely comply.

Then she whispered my name.

Not — I want to be clear about the register of it, because it mattered, because I had heard my name from her in approximately every possible tone across twenty-three years and I knew every version of it. The annoyed one. The sarcastic one. The old, easy one from childhood that had stopped appearing sometime around when everything got complicated. The current one, which had a wall built into its pronunciation.

This was none of those.

This was soft. And close. And private in the specific way of something that never expected to be heard, something that lived in a register below daily life, something that came from wherever she kept the things she didn't say.

My name. My name, in that voice, in that tone.

The wheel cracked.

A small fracture — a hairline thing, the leather splitting along the pressure point of my right hand, the sound of it crisp and small in the quiet cab. I released the grip. Repositioned. Moved my hands to new positions where the damage wasn't under my palms and breathed.

She was dreaming about me.

She was dreaming about me and it was that kind of dream and her scent was telling me exactly how it was going for her and she had said my name in that voice and the windows were going down, all of them, right now, immediately, regardless of the fact that it was the middle of November and we were somewhere in central Oregon and the outside air was forty-two degrees.

I hit all four buttons.

The cold came in like a verdict.

She woke up. I felt the shift in the cab — the change in her breathing that meant consciousness returning — and by the time she was looking around I had both hands on the wheel, eyes forward, face doing nothing. The windows were roaring. The dashboard said forty-one degrees outside. My jaw was still set from six minutes ago and I hadn't fully unclenched it yet.

I looked at her.

She looked like someone who had surfaced from something and was trying to determine where they were and how much of whatever had just happened was showing on their face. The answer, from my vantage point, was some of it. Her color was up. Her breathing was still recovering.

"You talk in your sleep," I said.

I watched her face do a very specific thing. The color deepened. Something behind her eyes went through a rapid internal assessment — cataloguing, rewinding, calculating what I might have heard and what that meant and what she was going to do about it.

"What—" She cleared her throat. Attempted casual. Didn't fully get there. "What did I say?"

I looked back at the road.

"Mostly mumbles," I said. "Random stuff."

I was not going to tell her what she'd said. I was going to take what she'd said and put it in the same vault where I kept everything else — filed, locked, not examined in daylight. I was going to do that because I was a functional adult with a fully developed capacity for self-regulation, and also because the alternative was a conversation we could not have on this highway or any highway.

She turned toward her window.

I drove.

The temperature in the cab dropped to something manageable over the next twenty minutes.

The truck stop south of the Oregon-Washington border was where we stopped for breakfast — six in the morning, the kind of hour where the light was still deciding itself, the sky not quite dark and not quite anything else yet. Convoy pulled in together, dad's SUV and my truck side by side in the lot.

The place had the specific character of a truck stop that had been there for decades and wasn't interested in being anything different — vinyl booths, linoleum, coffee that was hot and black and right, a menu laminated enough times to have developed opacity. We took two booths pushed together. Maggie and dad on one side, Kyle perpendicular, Kendra and me at the end.

Kendra ordered eggs and didn't look at me across the table more than she had to.

I ate and didn't look at her more than I had to.

We were both doing the same thing and we both knew we were doing the same thing and neither of us acknowledged it, which was fine, which was the correct management strategy for the situation.

Kyle ate enough food for a construction crew and contributed nothing to the conversation, which was his steady, unchanging position in any group situation and one I had a certain respect for.

By six-forty we were back on the road.

Washington by eight in the morning. The last stretch of it — the trees getting familiar again in a specific way, the light having that particular Pacific Northwest quality that was different from any other place I'd been, filtered and green and old. I'd grown up in it. It was in my cells.

Kendra had her earbud back in. She was awake, and she was looking at the scenery, and she'd been doing that for the better part of two hours — watching the forest go by with an expression that was less closed off than it had been in Arizona, something in her face that was doing the thing that the Pacific Northwest did to certain people who encountered it for the first time with real attention.

It got to you.

I understood that.

We were twenty minutes out from the new property when I heard it.

Not from her. From her stomach. A quiet, low, betraying little sound — the kind that biology produced regardless of anyone's feelings about being heard.

She shifted slightly. Pressed her arm to her midsection in the way people did when they were pretending they hadn't heard it either.

I changed lanes. McDonald's coming up in four miles, according to the sign we'd passed.

I took the exit.

"I wasn't going to say anything," she said. Slightly defensive. Looking out the window.

"I know."

"I can wait until we get to the house."

"Yep." I pulled into the drive-through lane. The McDonald's was the large format kind, two lanes, the familiar yellow of it aggressively cheerful against the grey Washington morning. I stopped behind the car ahead of us. "What do you want?"

She thought about it. Which was interesting, because I already knew — had known since she was twelve years old and McDonald's on road trips was one of the reliable constants of family travel. Double cheeseburger, no pickles. Fries. Strawberry milkshake. Every time.

"Double cheeseburger," she said. "No pickles. And a strawberry shake."

I waited.

"That's it," she said.

I looked at her. "No fries?"

"No fries."

I raised an eyebrow. The car ahead moved up. "So if I get a large fry," I said, moving the truck forward, "you're not going to look over and ask for some."

"Nope."

"And then eat most of them."

"I'm not going to eat your fries, Bryan."

I looked at her for one more moment — the specific, direct look of a person who has relevant historical data — and then I looked back at the menu board.

"Okay," I said.

"I mean it."

"I believe you."

She settled back in her seat. I pulled up to the speaker.

"Forty-piece nuggets," I said, "two Big Macs, large fry, large Coke. A double cheeseburger with no pickles and a large strawberry milkshake," I paused, turned to her. "Last chance."

She was applying lip gloss in the visor mirror, the small precise movements of someone performing an extremely routine task. She caught my eye in the mirror. Shook her head.

"That's all, thanks." I said into the speaker.

She clicked the visor shut. "Forty nuggets and two Big Macs," she said.

"I'm a big guy."

The smile she bit back was brief but it happened. I caught it.

We pulled up to the window. I paid, collected the two bags, and handed them across to Kendra.

She organized things. That was the word for what she did — without being asked she sorted the bags, pulled out my food, set it in the cupholder situation I'd designated on the console, found napkins at the bottom of one of the bags and put one on my knee without comment. Straw in the drink. Everything positioned. She'd been doing that her whole life — the small organizational acts that her brain produced automatically, making order out of whatever space she was in.

I merged back onto the highway.

We ate.

I was on my second Big Mac, eleven nuggets in, making reasonable progress on the fry situation, when I felt it. The specific quality of a pause from the passenger seat that wasn't neutral. A small hesitation. The sound of someone exercising restraint.

I looked at the large fry container sitting in the console.

I looked at the road.

Four seconds passed.

"The fries smell really good," she said. To no one. To the windshield.

"Mm."

"I'm just saying."

"You said you didn't want any."

"I know what I said."

I picked up a fry. Held it out without looking at her.

There was a pause of approximately one second in which, I believe, some internal negotiation was concluded. Then she took it.

And then three more.

And then, by the time we were fifteen minutes from the house, she had established a consistent rhythm of reaching over and pulling fries from the container with the specific casualness of someone who had fully committed to the bit of pretending this wasn't happening. She didn't look at me while she did it. I didn't look at her while she did it. We operated on a mutual agreement of tactical blindness that allowed everyone to maintain their stated positions.

The fry container was two-thirds empty by the time the new property appeared through the trees.

I said nothing.

She said nothing.

The truck rolled down the long driveway and I could see the house ahead through the pines, and Kendra was eating my fries, and my wolf was quiet in the way it went quiet when things were, momentarily, exactly right — not resolved, not fixed, not any of the things that needed to eventually be dealt with.

Just this. Just the truck and the drive and her hand reaching over for another fry like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I let her have the rest of them.