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I’m still holding his hair.

Neither of us lets go.

“Why did you stop?”

His eyes open.

They’re darker now.

“Because if I kiss you again,” he says roughly, “I’m not sure I will want to. Give me the remote now.”

"Sure. I forgot what we were fighting about anyway." I chuckle.

The lamp flickers. Every bulb in the room stutters and dims, and my magic hums up the back of my neck like a plucked wire.

Gage's head snaps toward the window. The moment breaks clean in half.

Naturally.

"If this house is haunted," I tell the ceiling, "I'm charging it rent."

He sits back. His jaw could crack a walnut. I pretend I'm not unsteady.

We finish the movie. Or we aim our faces at it while neither of us watches a single frame. I can’t stop thinking about that kiss.

By ten he's testing the new locks he installed against my will. He won't go until I promise to call if anything so much as breathes wrong.

He steps onto the porch. Cold pours in past him, sharp with dead leaves and the storm that finally chose yes.

"Gage."

He looks back.

"Thank you."

Something in his face gives, quiet and unguarded, there and then gone.

"Lock it," he says.

I roll my eyes. "Good night."

"Night, Maren."

I close the door. Turn the first dead bolt. Then the second. I rest my forehead on the wood and breathe him back out of my lungs as I realize how attracted I am to him. And, that kiss…

My thighs press together on instinct.

Sid sits at my heel, tail wrapped around his feet, staring up.

"What?"

Wolf.

I straighten so fast my neck cracks.

Second time. Clearer now. A whole word dropped into my head in that dry, not-mine voice, and I can't blame it on the pizza.

"Sid? What does that mean?"