Page 49

We stayed there after the officiant-person finished, inviting everyone to drop a lily into the grave on the coffin. I declined, using the crutches as an excuse. Elliot took mine from my fingers and dropped it gently into the grave. For some reason, that put a little lump in my throat.

Noah came over and leaned into me, resting his head on my shoulder and holding on to one arm around the crutch braced in my armpit. “She asked about you.” The words were soft and sad.

“What?” I wasn’t following.

“When I came out. Before—” He stopped, swallowed. “She asked about you. How you were.”

“What did you say?” It wasn’t what I wanted to ask him. I wanted to know why he’d come out here. What he’d hoped to gain from agreeing to see her again. From coming back to this hell-hole of a house. I didn’t know how to ask any of that without sounding like a complete asshole.

“I told her you were happy,” he replied, sounding a little weepy. “She cried.”

I wanted to ask him if he’d told her I was happy living with a man.

An Indigenous badger shifter who didn’t believe in their God or his restrictions.

Who made me happy because he never asked me to deny myself food or sex, who loved me exactly as I was.

But I didn’t, because I knew Noah hadn’t said any of that.

And I was pretty sure our mother wouldn’t have liked hearing it if he had.

“Did she ask if you were?” I wanted to know.

“Y-yeah,” he managed, then sniffled. “I-I don’t think she understood,” he continued, answering my next set of questions even though I hadn’t asked them out loud. “And she wouldn’t use my name, but she wasn’t mean. She just…” He trailed off.

I knew what he’d been about to say. She just kept pretending that Noah was her daughter and just happened to have short hair and was wearing jeans and a t-shirt . As though it wasn’t perfectly obvious that Noah’s body didn’t look hardly at all like he’d looked at fifteen.

Maybe he could forgive her for that, but I couldn’t.

There was a lot I couldn’t forgive her for, even if I didn’t think she deserved to die.

But I didn’t say any of that.

I rested my cheek on the top of Noah’s head. “I know,” is all I said out loud.

“Do you think that—that maybe…?” He trailed off again, but I knew what he was asking. Would she ever have accepted us for who we are? Loved us for who we are? I was pretty sure I knew the answer, and it wasn’t the one he wanted to hear.

But I couldn’t lie to him. “I couldn’t say,” I said, instead.

I don’t know if he took it at face value or understood what I didn’t say, but he fell silent, still leaning against my shoulder, my cheek still on his hair.

“Love you, Sethy,” he said, finally.

“Love you, too, Nono.”

“Are you okay?” Elliot asked me as he closed the door to our hotel room.

“Mrrrp?”

I looked down at the cat, who had walked up to me, her little brown head tilted back and her tail undulating faintly back and forth. “You, too, huh?” I asked her.

“Seth.”

I sighed as I sat down on the end of the bed, having navigated around Sassafras. “I’m fine,” I replied.

“Are you?” he asked me, coming over and kneeling at my feet to unlace first one shoe, and then the other while he waited for my answer.

“If you’re asking if I’m emotionally devastated by my mother’s death and hiding it, no, I’m not.

If you’re asking if I have long-term emotional scarring from my fucked-up childhood, yes, of course I do.

Either way, I’m not about to break down into a weeping mess about it.

” I was irritable, cranky from pain and exhaustion and stress.

“Am I going to probably have nightmares about this whole shitty mess? Also yes. But it’ll be fine. ”

“And if I’m asking how much pain you’re in and whether or not you need meds and some ice cream?” His voice was gentle.

I deflated, the anger stripped away.

“Yes, please,” I said meekly.

Elliot stood back up, then bent and kissed my sweaty forehead. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Feed Sassafras first?” I asked, not wanting to get back up to do it.

He did, scooping dry food into her bowl, which she immediately began crunching between tiny, sharp teeth.

When the door closed behind him, I let myself fall back, legs still hanging off the end of the bed as I lay there.

I must have been more tired than I thought, because it felt like I blinked, and I heard the door opening again. I didn’t bother opening my eyes, wondering what it was that Elliot needed and had left in the room.

And then I heard the rustling of a plastic bag and opened one eye to find him carefully toeing off his shoes, two plastic grocery bags in each hand.

“Shit,” I grumbled.

“What?” he asked.

“I fell asleep,” I mumbled, the the words a little slurred.

He came over, setting the grocery bags on the desk, and pressed the back of his fingers against my forehead. I swatted at his hand. “I’m not sick ,” I protested.

“You basically passed out,” he countered. “I want to make sure.”

I grunted.

“Come on, let’s get you somewhere less likely to fuck up your back.”

He wasn’t wrong. If I’d spent too much more time in that position, my back would probably have been screaming at me for at least a couple hours.

So I let him help me sit up and move so that my back was propped against pillows he carefully arranged along the headboard.

And then he grabbed the cushion off the little sitting chair and used it to elevate my leg.

And then he brought me a plastic spoon and a pint of cashew milk chocolate truffle ice cream before putting the rest of whatever he’d purchased in the mini-fridge.

“Thanks.” I tried to sound appropriately grateful.

Elliot kissed my forehead again, one hand cradling the back of my head. But then he didn’t move away, holding his lips against my skin so that I could feel his breath. I didn’t mind, so I waited, letting him breathe me in.

Another kiss, and he let me go, stepping back. “Eat your ice cream,” he told me playfully, but I could hear the roughness in his voice underneath the levity.

“El?” I asked.

He sighed. “I just—I worry,” he said softly.

“I’m not dying,” I told him.

“We’re all dying,” came the retort. “I just don’t know what I’d do if you died first.”

I blinked, then set down the spoon I’d barely had the chance to pick up.

“I’m not planning on dying any time soon,” I informed him, although I was very aware of the fact that the line of work I’d chosen—firefighting and arson investigation, more than crime scene investigation, although anything in the criminal justice department had higher rates of mortality than most things not in criminal justice—made it pretty likely that I would be the one to go first, even if the alpha-gal or Lyme didn’t get me before that.

He might have a decade on me, but I was definitely the more sickly and breakable one.

“Good,” came the clipped response as he pulled off his socks. “I’m going to take a shower. Find something moderately interesting to watch?”

I knew he was avoiding me, but I let it go, picking up the remote and flicking through the odd collection of TV channels that characterized hotels everywhere. I settled on some sort of wilderness vet show and proceeded to do as I’d been told—eat my ice cream.

Elliot took longer in the shower than usual—although not by enough that I felt the need to worry about him—so I was most of the way through my ice cream by the time he came back out, towel wrapped around his hair and nothing but stray water drops on the rest of his body.

Sexy as Elliot’s body is, the towel-turban look isn’t terribly chic.

He grabbed an ice cream bar for himself out of the tiny hotel freezer and came over to sit beside me on the bed, opening the single-serve box and pulling out the wrapped treat, his gaze focused on the vet on the TV screen, who was attempting to wrestle an unconscious bear onto a stretcher while narrating for the camera how quickly they’d need to do this before said bear woke up.

He crunched through the chocolate shell, peeling off a piece with his teeth.

He liked to do this—eat away at the chocolate shell until it was gone before going after the ice cream underneath.

I took the last bite of mine, then set aside the container and spoon on the night stand. Elliot passed over the empty box of his, although he was still finishing the denuded ice cream.

I looked down at the box, then blinked in surprise. “Why’d you get dairy-free?” I asked him.

He turned his gaze from the TV to me. “Just in case I wanted to kiss you, so I don’t have to wait.”

I felt my neck flush. While the likelihood of me reacting to something Elliot had eaten was pretty low—given that one generally didn’t go from chewing to kissing without time in between for saliva to break down the proteins—going directly from ice cream to kissing would pose a risk.

If he’d gotten regular ice cream.

So I kissed him, leaning forward with one hand on the towel still wrapped around his head. And since he had eaten dairy-free ice cream, I let the kiss go where I wanted it to, my tongue pressing against his lips, then into his mouth when his lips parted.

He growled, both his hands sliding into my hair at the back of my head as he nipped at my lower lip. And then he shifted, letting the towel fall of his head, wet hair brushing over my hand as he leaned into me, pressing me back against the pillows.

I let my hands slide up his back, his skin hot against my palms.

Elliot broke the kiss, pressing his palm against my chest. “Are you sure?” he breathed. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“God, yes.” Right at that moment, I could not have cared less about my leg or the healing dissolving stitches.