Page 19 of Into Ember

I should let go.

I do not let go.

And there’s still a gap. I can feel it — which is a sentence I hate — a missing piece off to my left, across the table, where Leif is still sitting with his forearms braced and his jaw set, holding himself outside the whole arrangement like somehow that’s helping.

“You too,” I say.

It comes out small. It comes out on the first air I’ve had to spare in a while, and I spend it on that.

His whole body goes still. Something moves through his face — fast, there and gone. And for a second he looks at me the way he looked outside the cabin door. Nothing cat about it at all.

Then he gets up, comes around the table, and pushes it out of the way. Like it was nothing. A full dinner table, dishes and all, moved the way you’d nudge a footstool.

He kneels in front of me.

Erik scoots out of the way without letting go of my wrist, and Leif’s palm comes to rest against the side of my neck. Warm. Heavy. Certain. He leans in, and his forehead touches mine.

“Breathe,” he says. Low. Just for me. “Just breathe.”

I do.

The engine under my sternum goes quiet. All the way quiet. Everything, all at once — pulse, breath, the shaking, the heat, the fist on my chest — settling like a house after a storm passes, and the room is so silent I can hear the fire and five other people breathing.

Nobody says a word.

And now that I’m not actively dying, there’s room in my body for a brand-new feeling, which is that I would like the floor to open. I just fell apart in front of five men for absolutely no reason. Full production. Gasping, shaking, yelling about a plant that grew legs. They had to assemble around me like sandbags around a flood, and now everyone is being very quiet and very kind about it, which is worse, and I am never getting out of this chair. I live here now. This is my chair house.

I don’t know what implications that might have on using the bathroom.

Deep breath. I’m fine. This is fine.

We stay like that. His forehead against mine. His breath and mine sorting themselves out until they’re doing the same thing.

“You’re a hell of a lot stronger than you look,” he says.

“Says the man who used me as a landing pad.”

The chuckle moves through him and into me, forehead to forehead. I feel it in my teeth.

“I’m not complaining.”

Oh.

That’s — he — okay. My face goes hot for an entirely new genre of reason, and there is no air in the budget for this, so I do the thing I do best.

I change the subject.

“How did you even know to —”

Erik glances at Leif. Leif looks back at him, and something passes between them that has weight on both ends.

“Later,” Leif says.

I add it to the pile. The pile is now load-bearing. Like the fireplace.

This is not cuddling, just so we’re clear.

Cuddling is voluntary and usually involves fewer tactical boots. This is medical. Probably. Some kind of group-administered nervous-system intervention that nobody put on a consent form, and I am participating in it the way you participate in a fire drill, which is to say completely, while maintaining the right to complain.