Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Seventeen — Five Minutes

Kendra POV

Thanksgiving in my mother's kitchen was a full-contact event.

It had always been this way — some mothers cooked with serenity, moving through the kitchen with the measured ease of someone following a process they had complete confidence in. My mother cooked with the energy of someone conducting an orchestra in a space slightly too small for the orchestra, moving between the stove and the island and the double oven with the focused intensity of a woman for whom the preparation of a holiday meal was not a casual undertaking but a statement of intent. She had been awake since six. She had been in the kitchen since six-fifteen. By the time I came downstairs at seven-thirty the turkey was already in the lower oven — all forty pounds of it, which had required a brief engineering consultation about rack placement — and the kitchen smelled like butter and sage and the specific warmth of a house that had been cooking since before most people had opened their eyes.

"Apron's on the hook," she said without looking up from the cutting board.

I found the apron. Tied it. Washed my hands.

"What do you need?"

She gestured at the sweet potatoes on the counter with the knife and I understood this as the beginning of a negotiation about tasks, and we worked out the division of labor in the way we always had — without much talking, with the small adjustments and course corrections of two people who had been in kitchens together long enough to move around each other without collision.

Kyle had appeared briefly around eight, surveyed the situation, accepted a piece of cornbread from the batch my mother was making for the stuffing, and retreated. I watched him go with the specific feeling of someone who had been voluntarily drafted into something her brother had successfully avoided and was choosing to find this funny rather than annoying.

The ham went into the upper oven at nine. The sweet potatoes got peeled and cubed and went into the pot I'd designated for them. The green beans — three pounds of them, fresh, because my mother had opinions about green bean casserole that involved fresh beans or it didn't happen — got cleaned and trimmed in a process that took forty-five minutes because there were three pounds of them, and I did this at the island while my mother managed the stove and talked to me about the neighborhood and the grocery store and the things she'd noticed about Seattle in the few days since we'd arrived.

I listened to her and worked and let the rhythm of the kitchen settle around me like something familiar.

By eleven the house smelled extraordinary. The kind of smell that was specifically Thanksgiving — the layering of multiple different things cooking at different temperatures in different stages, combining into something that registered less as individual components and more as an experience. Turkey and ham and butter and sage and brown sugar from the sweet potatoes and the cornbread and the green bean casserole and the rolls proofing on the counter and the pies that my mother had prepared the day before sitting on the cooling rack. The whole thing was almost aggressively comforting in a way that I hadn't realized I'd needed until it was surrounding me.

I was stirring the gravy — real gravy, from the turkey drippings, which my mother considered a non-negotiable — at noon when I thought about Sunday.

Bryan had come back sometime Sunday morning. I knew this only because the guest house had a light on when I'd come downstairs for coffee, the first sign of life from that building since Friday night. I'd seen his shadow move past the window once in the afternoon. He had not come to the main house. He had not appeared at the pool or the path or anywhere visible from the interior. Whoever the camping trip was with and whatever it involved, it had left him horizontal for the better part of a day.

I had not gone over.

That was the correct decision and I had made it with full confidence and I had also thought about it approximately six times throughout Sunday while maintaining complete confidence that it was correct.

"Kendra." My mother appeared at my elbow. "Gravy."

I looked down at the gravy.

I'd been stirring it at full speed for an indeterminate amount of time and it was considerably thicker than it had been.

"I've got it," I said.

She gave me the sideways look of a woman who had watched her daughter drift in and out of the present moment for twenty years and had gotten very good at reading the drift without commenting on it. She added a ladle of the reserved turkey drippings to the gravy to bring it back to the right consistency and resumed her position at the other counter.

"Relax," she said quietly. "You're home."

I didn't ask what that meant, specifically.

By two in the afternoon the food was in its final stages and the house was in the state of readiness that preceded guests — the kind of clean that said someone had made an effort, the good dishes on the dining table, the additional leaf that Aaron had put in that morning extending it to its full length, which was longer than I'd realized a table could be while still fitting in a dining room.

I heard the cars before I saw them. The first arrived at five past two — a dark SUV coming down the driveway, parking alongside Aaron's on the far side of the garage. Through the dining room window I watched three people get out, and my father went out to meet them with the ease of men who knew each other well.

Marcus Reed's family. Aaron's business partner's family, was what I'd been told — Marcus Senior, his wife, and their son Marcus Junior, who was apparently a university student. I watched them through the window for a moment: a compact, steady-looking man with close-cropped grey at his temples and the specific quality of someone whose baseline was quietly assured. His wife, small and warm-faced, moving around the front of the car with a covered dish in her arms and the energy of someone who had brought food because the alternative hadn't occurred to her. And behind them, their son — Marcus, my age or close to it, broad-shouldered, easy smile visible even from the window, the kind of person who looked like they'd been comfortable in their own skin since approximately birth.

Aaron came back inside with them.

Introductions. Maggie came out from the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel and became immediately absorbed in a conversation with Mrs. Reed about the pies. Marcus Senior and Aaron disappeared in the direction of Aaron's study with the ease of men who had established trajectories in each other's company. Kyle materialized from somewhere and shook Marcus Junior's hand with the wary assessment of one young man evaluating another.

Marcus looked at me.

"Kendra, right?" He had one of those voices that was warm without working at it. "Marcus. My dad talks about this family constantly."

"Good things, I hope."

"Mostly." The smile widened. It was a good smile. Uncomplicated. "You just moved from Arizona?"

"Last week."

"How's the weather treating you?"

I looked at the window, at the November grey pressing flat against it. "I've seen rain four out of the seven days I've been here."

"Sounds about right. You'll adjust." He said it with the confidence of someone who had grown up in this and considered it normal rather than a thing to be endured. "Bryan coming for dinner? Haven't seen him in a while."

I opened my mouth to answer.

"Kendra." Aaron appeared in the doorway from the hall, his voice carrying the same easy authority it always did without raising it. "Can you go get Bryan? Tell him we're eating."

I closed my mouth.

"Sure," I said.

The path alongside the pool was quiet. The waterfall was off. The pool surface was still and dark grey, mirroring the sky above it, and the air was cold in the way that Pacific Northwest cold was specific — not Arizona cold, which was sharp and dry and decisive, but damp cold, the kind that settled rather than bit. I pulled my sweater tighter and crossed the stone path to the guest house entrance.

The door was unlocked.

I pushed it open slowly. "Bryan?"

Nothing.

The interior of the guest house was dim and quiet and very clean — cleaner than I kept my own space, which felt like a personality reveal I hadn't been expecting. Everything in its place, surfaces clear, the kind of order that suggested an ingrained habit rather than a recent effort. It smelled like him — that specific scent that I had apparently catalogued somewhere in my nervous system without consulting my preferences on the matter, the earthy-pine undertone and something darker and more specifically him underneath it.

I stood in the entryway for a moment.

"Bryan?" Louder this time.

Still nothing.

The stairs.

They were narrow and dark-finished, and I took them carefully, not because they were difficult but because the whole guest house had the quality of a space I hadn't been invited into and I was moving through it with the awareness of that. At the top, a short hallway. One door, standing slightly open.

I reached the top of the stairs and stood outside the door.

"Bryan." I knocked on the doorframe with two knuckles.

Not even a shift of sound from inside.

I pushed the door open slowly with my fingertips.

The room stopped me.

I recognized it.

That was the first and most disorienting thing — the specific, physical recognition of walking into a space and knowing it, knowing it from somewhere that wasn't a previous visit because I had never been in this room, had never been in this guest house at all until this moment. The black geometric accent wall facing the bed — angular, fractured panels in matte black with lines of rose gold running through the seams, veining the darkness with something warm and metallic, catching the low ambient light in a way that made the whole surface look like something alive. The platform California king centered on that wall, sitting low, dark silk sheets in deep charcoal pooled across it. The globe lamps on the nightstands casting their dim warm circles. The floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side with their curtains drawn against the daylight, the curtains heavy enough to reduce the November afternoon to a thin seam of grey light along their edges.

I knew this room.

I had been in this room — not physically, not with my feet on this dark hardwood, not standing in this doorway with my hand on the frame — but somewhere else. In sleep, maybe. In the specific way that a dream you can't fully remember leaves a residue that lingers through the day after, a shape-without-detail that your brain can't name but your body can.

I stood there for a moment longer than I should have.

Then I stepped inside.

The room smelled like him, the same way the rest of the guest house did but concentrated here, warmer, pulled into the space by the warmth of his sleeping body. I crossed toward the bed and my feet were quiet on the hardwood and then the rug that ran beneath the bed — dark, deep pile, absorbing the sound of my steps completely.

He was on his stomach.

The dark grey sheet was pulled up to approximately the middle of his lower back and stopped there, the remainder of him bare above it. He was turned slightly toward the near side of the bed, one arm tucked under the pillow beneath his head, the other at his side with his hand relaxed open. His shoulders were broad in the way that filled the full width of the pillow above him. The line of his spine from the base of his neck to where the sheet started was a specific geography that I was aware I was mapping with my eyes in a way that I wasn't actively choosing.

Then I saw his back.

They were faded to almost nothing — pale lines, barely visible, the kind of marks that would be completely invisible in better light. But in the low warm glow of the globe lamp they caught just enough to be present, tracing across the skin of his upper and lower back in long diagonal paths. Too parallel to be accidental. Too consistent to be anything except what they were.

Something had put those there.

Camping, my brain said flatly.

The rest of my brain did not engage with this because my hand had moved before I'd finished the thought — my fingertips reaching out and grazing the lightest possible touch along the first line, following it across the plane of his skin with a contact so light it barely qualified, just the pads of my fingers reading something that my eyes were already processing.

He shuddered.

Full-body, from the point of contact outward, a visible movement running through him the way a stone moved water. A sound came out of him — low, rough from sleep, somewhere in the register between a groan and something I didn't have a name for — and he shifted. His whole body adjusting, moving slightly toward the touch before he was even conscious of doing it, before whatever mechanism was responsible for that response had cleared with the rest of him.

I pulled my hand back.

My heart was doing something complicated in my chest.

"—the hell." He said this into the pillow. Muffled, without accusation, the slow reconnection of someone returning from very deep sleep to the surface of a world they hadn't entirely decided to rejoin. "What do you want."

I cleared my throat.

"Dinner," I said. My voice came out at a completely normal volume and I was unreasonably proud of this. "It's done. Your dad's guests are here."

A pause that was long enough to suggest he was weighing the merits of the situation.

"Five minutes."

"They're all waiting."

"Kendra." My name in that voice, flat and sleepy and carrying a specific this-is-not-a-negotiation-but-also-I-am-not-moving quality. "Five minutes."

"Bryan. Get up."

Another pause. Then he turned his head on the pillow. Just enough to look at me — one eye open, the other still pressed into the pillow, his face carrying the specific configuration of deep sleep interrupted, which on his face was less soft than it probably was on most people and more the look of something large and unhappy being roused from hibernation ahead of schedule.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

"You let yourself in," he said. Less accusatory than observational, like he was filing it.

"The door was unlocked."

"In most jurisdictions that's not the same thing as an invitation."

"In most jurisdictions Thanksgiving dinner is the invitation. Get up."

Something that was not quite a smile appeared in the corner of the visible eye. "You always this pushy in the morning?"

"It's two in the afternoon."

"Not for me it isn't."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means —" He paused, "It means five minutes."

"Everyone is literally sitting at the table."

"Then they have each other to talk to."

"Bryan."

"Kendra." The same flat register I'd used, mirroring it with the specific ease of someone who had arrived at this exchange with more patience in reserve than I'd been prepared for and was prepared to wait me out.

I stood at the side of his bed and looked at him looking at me from the pillow and tried to identify which one of us was going to move first.

He closed his eye.

"Oh my God," I said.

The not-quite-smile was fully visible now, the corner of his mouth doing the thing it apparently did when he had decided to be difficult and was enjoying it. He reached up slowly with one hand and pulled the edge of the sheet up another two inches, a movement so deliberate it was its own sentence.

I picked up one of the throw pillows from the armchair near the window.

Threw it.

It hit him in the back of the head with a soft thump that expressed exactly the feeling I needed it to express.

There was a brief silence.

"That," he said into the pillow, "was a mistake."

"Move."

He moved.

In one motion — the kind of motion that only existed on people whose bodies were built for it and had been built for it for years — he pushed up from the stomach-down position and swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up in a single fluid sequence that took less than two seconds and involved the sheet falling away from him entirely as he rose.

I had not thought about what standing up would involve.

I thought about it now.

He was in boxers. Dark grey, the same shade as the sheets, fitting close, leaving absolutely nothing structurally ambiguous about the situation. And the situation was — the situation was that Bryan had apparently woken from deep sleep in a state that was entirely standard for that physiological circumstance and had apparently given exactly zero thought to its visibility before standing up.

The boxers did not hide it.

The boxers were not built to hide something like that and were not succeeding in the attempt. The fabric was pulled taut and the outline was — present was the word, emphatically and completely present, the length and weight of it impossible to not register when he was standing directly in front of me at a distance of four feet in a room with low light and dark sheets on the floor.

My entire mouth went dry in one instant. Not gradually. Instantly. Like something in my body had reallocated all available moisture to a different process entirely and my mouth had been the budget cut.

I looked at the window.

At the curtains.

At the very specific curtains that were doing an excellent job of blocking the afternoon light and deserved my complete and sustained visual attention for as long as physically necessary, which was going to be a while, because my brain was currently processing information it had not been warned about and needed a moment to file it appropriately, and appropriate was not a word that fit anywhere near what I was currently doing with that information.

He was big. That was the thought that my brain produced, stripped of all the careful social scaffolding I would normally apply, delivered plainly and without commentary like a simple factual assessment. Big, and hard, and right there, and I was standing four feet away at two in the afternoon on Thanksgiving with forty pounds of turkey in the oven across the yard and the Reed family in the dining room and all of that was completely irrelevant information because my body had apparently decided to catalog something and had done it thoroughly.

I pressed my lips together.

Looked at the curtains.

The curtains continued to be curtains.

"You're very interested in those curtains," he said.

His voice had the specific quality of someone who was aware of the situation and was choosing to say nothing direct about it and was also not rushing to address it. Completely, infuriatingly unhurried.

"They're good curtains," I said. To the curtains.

"Mm." That syllable. That single syllable he deployed with surgical precision, carrying the exact right amount of amusement without a degree past it. "Hand me the shirt on the chair."

I turned back toward the chair — looking at the chair, only the chair, reaching for the shirt folded over the back of it with the focused attention of someone defusing something — and held it out in his direction without adjusting the angle of my gaze by a single degree past the arm I was extending.

He took it from my hand.

Our fingers didn't touch.

He pulled the shirt on. I found something to do with my eyes on the far wall — the geometric facets of the black panels, the rose-gold seams catching the globe lamp light — until I heard the shirt settle and looked back to find him standing at the foot of the bed pulling it down over his chest, the boxers situation now partially but not entirely resolved by the hem of the fabric.

I exhaled.

At approximately the volume of someone trying not to exhale audibly.

Not successfully.

He looked at me. The half-asleep quality of his expression had finished clearing and what was there now was more awake and more specifically reading the room than I wanted it to be — that particular quality of attention he brought to me sometimes, the kind that landed like he was processing several more layers of the situation than he was letting on about.

The corner of his mouth moved.

"I'll grab sweatpants," he said, conversationally.

"That would be great," I said, at the exact same register. "Thank you."

He disappeared into the closet. I turned back to the window and put both hands flat on the cool glass and addressed the lower forty-eight seconds of my life with the honest acknowledgment that they had occurred and the firm professional intention to never revisit them or discuss them in any context with any living person for the remainder of my natural life.

He came out in grey sweatpants and a clean shirt and had the audacity to look well-rested.

"Ready," he said.

"Great," I said, with the specific brightness of someone performing functional normalcy at an Olympic level.

I walked to the door.

He followed me.

At the doorframe I stopped and turned, because something had caught and refused to release and I needed to ask it from across the room rather than facing him directly.

"Bryan."

"Yeah."

I didn't ask about the marks on his back. I didn't ask about the camping trip, or Sunday when he hadn't left the guest house, or what kind of camping involved the kind of marks I'd touched with my own fingertips and hadn't been able to stop thinking about since. I filed all of those things in the folder with the parking lot feeling and the dream of a room I hadn't been in.

"Happy Thanksgiving," I said.

There was a beat. Then something in his expression softened by a degree that the rest of him didn't acknowledge.

"Happy Thanksgiving, Kendra."

We went downstairs.