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"So why didn't you?"
He doesn't look up. His thumb keeps moving in that same steady arc across the top of my foot, and the pause goes on long enough that I know the answer is going to cost him.
"Because it kept everything else off your porch," he says.
The fire pops.
Six months of crossing the yard on the far side. Six months of thinking he hated me. He let a whole town be afraid of him because standing between me and the dark was a full time job and he was already working it.
"Gage."
"Hmm?"
"You are a disaster of a man."
"Yeah. I know."
He still hasn't let go of my foot. I still haven't asked him to. I like him touching my foot. It’s very soothing. It makes my heart speed up. What’s up with that?
The quilt is warm and the room smells like woodsmoke and beeswax and candy corn, and I can feel my own pulse in the arch of my foot where his hand is, and neither one of us is pretending anymore that this is about the burn.
Then every door in the house opens.
Not slamming. Nothing breaks. The pantry, the hall closet, the bathroom, the guest room where my bag is, all of them swinging wide a few slow inches at once, like the house is taking a breath.
The front door too. Bolted since dark. It comes off the latch without a sound and stands open on the cold and the wind and the fog rolling up the walk.
Gage doesn't move. His hand stays exactly where it is.
"I didn't mean to do that." My voice comes out thin. "I wasn't even angry. I wasn't anything."
"I know."
He sets my foot down, gently, and crosses the room. The candle flames on the mantel all lean toward the open door.
He shuts it. Throws the bolt. Then he stands there with his palm flat on the wood a lot longer than shutting a door takes.
"The wards on this house were set by the Lantern Coven," he says.
"Okay."
"Nothing opens the doors from the inside except me."
The cold gets in under the quilt with me.
"Then what just happened?"
He turns around, and whatever's in his face isn't fear of what's out there in the fog.
"You opened them."
17
GAGE
STILL EIGHT DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN
There are eleven doors in my house. Every one of them is standing open, and the woman who did it is sitting on my couch under her grandmother's quilt, holding a mug of cider like it might protect her.
