Page 421 of Pucking Feral: Part Two

"My legs are asleep and I've been sitting for thirty minutes. I'm coming."

It’s dark.

“I like the dark.”

He glances around at the haunted fucking forest closing in around us and sighs the way only he can sigh, with his entire body, and gets out.

I hop down after him through the same side, taking his offered hand.

It’s dark AND cold, he signs, gesturing around us. He’s already shrugging off his warm, heavy hooded canvas jacket and draping it over my shoulders, leaving him in a black henley that clings to his frame.

“It’s fine,” I reassure him, but when I stop talking, the silence hits me.

There’s nothing out here.

Just the idling of the engine and crickets somewhere in the underbrush, fog pressing in on all sides, glowing red around the taillights.

I stretch my arms over my head and roll my ankles out.

Wraith is already at the back, hauling the spare and the jack out like they weigh nothing, his henley sleeves shoved up over his forearms. His breath fogs out between his teeth in the cold. In the headlights, the lingering ferality in his eyes flashes a soft ghostly blue, like there are mirrors in his eyes.

I don't mention it because he might not even be aware of it, and he doesn't need to know he has another feature he might think scares me when it's doing the exact opposite.

He slides the jack under the frame and cranks it with a couple of pumps of his arm.

"Okay, that's genuinely unfair," I say.

He glances up. What?

"You're doing that like it's a bicycle."

He huffs, shaking his head, and gets the lug wrench.

I wander a few feet down the shoulder, hugging my arms, and look out into the trees. The fog just ends the world about fifteen feet in.

There's just gray, and then black, and then… whatever's in the black.

Something cracks out there.

I don't jump. But I do maybe walk kind of briskly back toward Wraith.

He's crouched with one knee in the dirt, spinning lug nuts off and dropping them into the upturned hubcap. He doesn't look up, but the muscles across his shoulders shift, and I know he heard it too.

"You know," I say, planting myself beside him, "this is exactly the kind of place where a couple gets murdered in a horror movie."

He sets the wrench down in the dirt and lifts his head, his blue eyes coming up to mine, deadly serious.

No one will ever hurt you.

Oh.

He took that literally. He heard horror movie and went full protector mode.

"I know," I say, and I have to work to keep my voice level, because if I say what that just did to me, he'll get embarrassed and stop doing it. "I know you wouldn't let anyone hurt me."

I lean in and kiss his jaw.

He stares at me in soft bewilderment, then nods, satisfied, and picks the wrench back up.