Page 62 of The Cowboy and the Stray

She glared at me. “That was not funny.”

“I didn’t do it,” I said, grinning.

She plopped back down, cheeks red, but she was laughing. “I have a thing about bugs.”

“I noticed.”

She threw a piece of sandwich at me. “Don’t make it weird.”

“It’s already weird,” I said, and she nodded, agreeing.

We ate the rest of the muffins in silence. When we finished, she lay on her back and watched the stars. I stretched out next to her, side by side, close enough that our arms touched.

After a while, she whispered, “Can I tell you something?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to ruin this,” she said. “But being happy is scary as hell.”

I thought about all the times I’d bailed on something good because I was waiting for it to burn down. I said, “Yeah. It is.”

She rolled over to face me, eyes clear. “Don’t let me fuck this up.”

“You won’t,” I said.

She tried to smirk, but her mouth was shaking. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

She scooted in, her head tucked under my chin, and I wrapped my arm around her like it was the most natural thing in the world.

We stayed like that until the stars blurred out and the crickets got so loud, I couldn’t hear myself think. I almost said something then, something real and dumb, but I didn’t.

Instead, I kissed the top of her head and said, “No one’s leaving you now.”

She shivered, just once, but didn’t pull away.

30. CALDER

After we went back to the house, I tried to sleep, but it was a losing fight. I was wound up from the inside out. Still hearing Tess’s laugh, still thinking about the way she curled up under my arm. So I did what I always did when I couldn’t shut my head up. I put on my boots, walked out past the porch, and shifted at the edge of the hay field.

The field was silver in the moonlight, flat and still except for moths and the odd whippoorwill.

As soon as I shifted, I ran.

Even after all this time, it was a shock how fast the wolf could move. The air was cooler down on all fours, the grass blades alive with dew and critters I’d never notice as a man. Scents stacked up in my head, layered and sharp. A possum, a fence post gone sour with mildew, something dead near the tree line. I cut north toward the creek, just to stretch out, and let myself slip into an old rhythm. Run, scan, double back. Patrol.

When I got to the bluff, I slowed. The grass was mashed flat where Tess and I had been. I circled it, just to smell, and her scent stuck out like a flare. Sweet, human, not scared of me. Maybe a little aroused. My wolf snarled and paced around it.

I should have turned south and made the full circuit. Instead, I doubled back, loped past the barn, and ended up behind the house, hiding in the shadow of the old cistern. The porch light was off, but I could see a square of yellow where Tess’s bedroom lamp was on. I don’t know what I thought I’d see. Just the outline of her moving in front of the glass, back and forth, a flicker of arm and hair, then nothing. After a while, the light went dark, and I was still there, too stubborn to leave.

That’s when I heard the music.

It came out the living room window, slow and scraping, nothing fancy. Sloane. I pawed closer to the open window, careful not to crunch the leaves under my pads.

Sloane was just inside, perched on the edge of the couch, not facing the glass, but the lamp behind her showed a silhouette. Her hair was down, and her knees were tucked up under her chin, like she was a little kid again. The violin was almost bigger than she was. She pulled the bow slowly, drawing out the sound until it got thin and lost in the air. She wasn’t looking at the strings or the music stand, just staring at nothing, chin set hard.

It was the same song she'd played at our parents’ funeral. I could remember the exact second she'd hit the bad note, and the way she’d kept going anyway. She was never scared of being wrong.