Page 30 of Animal Tamer
“I catch everything.” She pushes her glasses up her nose. “Rome made a woman behind me cry. Actual tears. Her husband kept offering her napkins.”
“He has that effect.”
“He haspresence. You could teach a masterclass on—” She stops herself. Fiddles with the bag strap. “Anyway. It was wonderful. All of it.”
Behind me, Domino whickers at his empty hay net with the tact of a creature who has never once been subtle, and Wren's eyes go past my shoulder to the row of chores still waiting. The hay. The water troughs. Caesar's evening feed thawing on the prep table. Brutus's ointment.
“Let me help you,” she says.
I blink at her. “You don't have to do that.”
“I know I don't have to.”
“You worked all day. You should—” What. Go home? I don't want her to go home. “It's late,” I finish lamely.
“It's nine thirty, Rowe. I'm a large animal vet in farm country. Nine thirty is mid-afternoon.” She's already setting her bag on the prep table, already rolling the sleevesof the blouse that's too nice for hay dust, and there's a stubborn set to her jaw I recognize from the first day, when she walked into the monkey tent loaded for a fight. “Hay nets or water troughs. Pick one. The other's mine.”
“Wren—”
“Pick one, or I pick both and you stand there feeling weird about it.”
A sound comes out of me that I don't recognize at first. It's a laugh. Small, rusty, but a laugh.
“Troughs,” I say.
“Then I've got hay.”
We work. She moves through the enclosures with ease, talking low to each animal before she gets close. Cleopatra takes hay from her hand. Brutus pretends not to watch her and fails. She asks questions while she works—how much does Rome eat in a day, who built the enrichment puzzles, does Caesar's raw diet ship frozen or do we source it locally—and I answer all of them, and it's the most words I've said to anyone who isn't my brothers in years.
At some point, I stop tracking where she is in relation to my body. I only notice it after, when she passes behind me carrying a flake of hay, close enough that the air moves against my back, and my shoulders don't climb toward my ears.
I don't know what to do with that.
By the time the last trough is filled, her blouse has hay stuck to one shoulder, and there's a smear of dust across her jaw, and she's grinning at Pip, who has decided the top of the gate is the best place to supervise from.
“That's everything?” she asks.
“That's everything,” I confirm.
She brushes her palms on her jeans and looks around the tent like she's not ready to be done, and I recognize thelook because I'm feeling it, and the next words are out of my mouth before the sane part of me can call a vote.
“I have beer. In my trailer. If you want one.”
She goes still.
So do I.
My trailer. My trailer is four hundred square feet of space where no one goes. Logan comes in sometimes. No one else. Not Elias, not Marek, no one, in twenty years, because the trailer is the one place where nothing can reach me, and I just invited her into it, and my hands have started a fine tremor down at my sides that I hide by shoving them into my pockets.
The bed is in there. The bed where I’ve groaned her name in the dark.
She'll be within arm's reach the entire time. There's nowhere in that trailer that isn't within arm's reach.
My pulse is climbing, and I can hear it, and I'm about to open my mouth and offer her a way out—or the picnic tables, there are picnic tables by the cantina—when she smiles widely.
“Yeah,” she says. “I'd like that.”
“Okay,” I say.
