Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Four — Silk and Self-Control

Kendra POV

I heard him before I saw him.

The hallway in our house had always had a specific acoustic quality — hardwood floors, no rugs, narrow enough that sound carried differently than in the open rooms. Footsteps were audible. Voices carried. I'd grown up knowing when someone was coming before they rounded the corner because the house told you.

I was distracted. That was the problem. I'd been running the folded clothes from the dryer to my room all afternoon in between packing, a task I could do on autopilot, which meant my brain was somewhere else entirely — specifically on the logistics of whether a second-year cheerleading scholarship could transfer to a new school mid-program, which it technically could but required paperwork and conversations I didn't have the energy for yet. So when I turned the corner from the laundry room, I was walking with the specific focus of someone who is looking at a mental spreadsheet instead of where they're going.

I walked directly into a wall.

Except it wasn't a wall.

It happened fast — that lurch of losing your footing, the instinctive grab for something that wasn't there, the split second of oh no before gravity made its opinion known. My arms went up reflexively, clothes scattering upward, and I braced for the undignified reality of landing on my tailbone in my own hallway.

It didn't happen.

Something caught me.

One arm — solid, immediate, not even rushed about it, just there — wrapped around my waist and stopped my backward momentum so cleanly it felt almost choreographed. The other hand came up and caught the folded clothes out of the air before they'd even finished going up. Both at the same time. Like he'd done the math on all of it before it had even fully started.

I was pressed against his arm for one arrested second, weight redistributed, completely stable, staring up at Bryan Montgomery's face from approximately eight inches away.

He smelled like sweat and something underneath the sweat that was — I was not going to think about what it was. I filed it away in the same mental folder as do not examine, do not revisit.

I straightened up. Cleared my throat. Took a step back and held out my hands for the clothes.

He handed them back.

I resettled them against my chest and I was about to say something — I'd already composed it, the specific tone of mildly annoyed, borderline bored, the register I'd been practicing for five years when it came to Bryan — when my eyes did the thing that eyes do when they're operating ahead of the brain's instruction.

They dropped.

Just for a fraction of a second. Involuntary. The kind of thing that happens when there's something to notice and your visual system notices it before you've given permission.

He was wearing silk basketball shorts.

Dark grey. Loose fit, falling to mid-thigh, the fabric moving slightly with his breathing. And silk basketball shorts were, as any woman with functional eyes was aware, deeply informative in ways that other fabrics weren't. They didn't hide things. They draped. They settled around what was there with a fidelity that was sometimes inconvenient and sometimes — in specific, unwelcome contexts — very much both.

Even relaxed.

Even in a completely relaxed, going-about-his-day state —

I bit the inside of my cheek. Hard. Focused immediately, deliberately, with great force of will, on his face.

That is your step-brother, I told myself, with the specific urgency of someone conducting an emergency internal press briefing. That is an irrelevant piece of information. You did not see anything. Move on.

My body, unfortunately, had not received the memo.

The heat came anyway — the bloom of it starting somewhere in my chest and moving south with an efficiency I deeply resented, settling between my legs as a soft, insistent throb that I clamped down on by gripping the folded laundry hard enough to wrinkle everything I'd just smoothed.

I said the thing about him being built like a tank. I said it at his face, looking directly at his face, which I was doing on purpose.

He said something back. Something about the hallway being for everyone.

I said something else. I was on autopilot at this point, the part of my brain running the conversation while the rest of it was handling the considerably more pressing situation of getting my own physiology under control. The exchange was sharp, familiar, the specific cadence of us — the push and pull we'd had since we were kids except sharper now, less playful, more defended. That was fine. Sharp was fine. Sharp was better than whatever the alternative was.

Then his eyes.

I caught the shift. His gaze — dark hazel, usually so frustratingly unreadable — went somewhere different for just a moment. Not toward angry, not toward warm. Something else. Something that sat below those categories, more elemental, more animal, and it was there and then it was locked down so fast I almost would have said I imagined it.

And then his nostrils moved.

Just slightly. Just a small, controlled flare — barely perceptible. The kind of thing you wouldn't notice if you weren't already paying close attention to a face you'd spent years studying without meaning to. I noticed.

I also noticed the sound.

It was low. Very low. Almost below the register of something you'd call a sound, more like a vibration in the air than an actual audible noise. A rumble, almost. Like something restrained. It was there for half a second and then it wasn't, and he said he'd watch where he was going in a voice that was completely flat and controlled, and then he was moving —

Past me. Through me. Around me and down the hallway with a speed and purpose that did not remotely match the casual energy of someone who had simply finished a conversation and was moving on. He was out the front door before I'd fully registered that he'd left.

I stood in the hallway.

Looked at the space where he'd been.

Had he just — did he just —

I shook my head once, hard. Blinked. Looked down at the laundry in my arms and tried to remember, with genuine effort, what exactly I'd been planning to do with it.

My room. I'd been going to my room. To pack. That was the task.

I went to my room.

Sat on the bare mattress for approximately fifteen seconds staring at the middle distance. Then I stood up, put the folded clothes in a box marked CLOTHES / KS, and continued what I was doing.

Bryan Montgomery was not a thing I was going to think about.

We finished packing by seven.

I know this because I had been watching the clock with the specific intensity of someone counting down to the end of a sentence, and seven o'clock was when my father finally did a walkthrough of the house, room by room, and came back to say we'd gotten everything. The moving company would handle the final transport in the morning. Tonight we were done.

The house looked like what it was: a place that used to be a home, now just a structure. Walls and floors and the pale squares where pictures had hung. I stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment and looked at it and felt the particular blankness that comes just before grief, when the reality of something hasn't fully arrived yet and you're just standing in the pause before it does.

My mother appeared beside me. She'd always had a way of doing that — showing up exactly when and where she was needed without making a production of it. She put her arm around me and squeezed once, and I leaned into her shoulder for a moment, and neither of us said anything because there wasn't anything useful to say.

"Food?" she asked finally.

"Please."

We found a place ten minutes from the house — the kind of casual, too-bright dinner spot that was perfect for five people in the specific exhaustion that comes after a day of moving, where the menu was long and nobody had to make interesting choices and the booths were the wide kind you could slide all the way into. My father took the outside seat. My mother beside him. Bryan at the opposite end, outside, because he took up too much physical space for middle seating without inconveniencing everyone around him.

Kyle appeared.

This was the appropriate word for it — not arrived, not joined us, appeared, the way a seventeen-year-old boy will materialize at the prospect of food with zero preceding indication that he'd been a functional member of the family for the entire day. He'd spent the move in his room doing something on his laptop with his earbuds in, and the fact that this had been allowed told you everything you needed to know about Kyle Smith's specific position in the household hierarchy.

He dropped into the booth beside my mother, reached across her for the menu, and looked up once at the full table. His gaze landed on Bryan with the minimal evaluation of a person who found most things broadly fine.

He nodded. One chin-dip, no expression, total commitment to the bit.

Bryan gave him the same back.

It was, somehow, the most communication either of them had managed all day, and it was completely without words, and I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing at the sheer absurdity of male interaction.

"Kyle," my mother said. "You want to say something to Bryan?"

"Hey," Kyle said, already reading the menu.

"Hey," Bryan said.

Done. Complete. A social interaction had occurred.

I ordered the pasta because carbohydrates were the appropriate response to the emotional content of the day, and I ate it, and I had a full two glasses of lemonade, and I let the conversation happen around me — my father and Bryan talking logistics about the truck, my mother organizing the hotel reservation on her phone, Kyle eating with the focused dedication of someone who had not eaten in a hundred years and was making up for it. I let it all wash over me and tried not to look at Bryan more than was required by normal table-sharing etiquette, which I mostly managed.

I didn't think about the hallway.

I was not thinking about the hallway at all.

The hotel was a Marriott off the interstate — nicer than it needed to be, because Aaron Montgomery was allergic to anything that wasn't comfortable, which was one of the things I genuinely loved about him. Two double rooms and one king, which meant my parents had the king, Kyle was on a double sharing with nobody because my mother had made that arrangement before Kyle had a chance to complain about being paired with Bryan, and Bryan had a double to himself.

And I had the room between them.

My father had given me my own room without me asking for it, which was very him — his logic was that Kendra doesn't share rooms unless she agrees to it first, which had been true since I was about fifteen and had started closing my bedroom door with some intention. The room between them, though. That was the detail my tired brain snagged on as I dropped my overnight bag on the luggage rack and looked around at the standard neutrality of a hotel room I'd be in for one night.

Bryan was on the other side of that wall.

I looked at the wall.

I looked away from the wall.

It's a wall, I told myself. There are walls everywhere. This one is not special.

I washed my face. Brushed my teeth. Changed into the oversized t-shirt I slept in — the old Sunridge one with the cracked logo across the front, soft from a hundred washes, the kind of shirt that was genuinely just about comfort and had no opinion on anything else. I turned the thermostat to sixty-eight because that was the correct sleeping temperature and anyone who argued about it was wrong.

I lay down.

The ceiling of the room was the same flat white as hotel ceilings everywhere. Somewhere outside I could hear the low hum of the interstate, constant and distant, and the air conditioning was doing its job with a white noise efficiency that should have been conducive to sleep.

I was not sleeping.

My brain, freed from the tasks of the day, had apparently decided this was an excellent time to revisit every moment of the last several hours with the kind of thoroughness it normally reserved for things I was studying for. The house, empty of everything. My mother's arm around my shoulders. Kyle's one-syllable contribution to dinner. The way the food had tasted exactly like every other meal I'd had at that restaurant, which was the specific comfort of the familiar — the last version of it before familiar meant something different.

And then, despite my extensive earlier commitment to not thinking about it:

The hallway.

The split second of catching me. The arm. The skin contact between his hand and my waist — which I had also felt, I could admit that to myself in the dark of a hotel room with no witnesses, the warmth of his hand on that strip of bare skin, the size of it, the way his whole hand had nearly spanned the width of my waist just on that one side.

The silk shorts.

I pressed my face into the pillow.

This was not productive. Bryan Montgomery in silk basketball shorts was not a medically relevant piece of information and I was going to need to let it go. He was annoying. He had been annoying since he hit puberty and something in his personality had recalibrated into something colder, something that kept me at arm's length without the courtesy of an explanation. He had been very hot about it, which was also annoying, and he had gotten hotter about it with the passage of time, which was almost offensive.

I rolled onto my side. Looked at the wall.

Tomorrow was Washington. A new house, a new city, a new school. Crestwood University and whatever version of my life was supposed to happen there. New squad tryouts — if they'd have me, and they would, I'd make sure of it. New people. New routines. A fresh start, which was what I was choosing to call it because the alternative was everything I had built has been dismantled, and that was not a thing I was going to lie here and think about.

I closed my eyes.

Bryan was on the other side of that wall.

It's a wall, I reminded myself. Just a wall. Go to sleep, Kendra.

Eventually, I did.