Page 16 of Remmen

They knew nothing about me. Which was how I liked it. I asked, they answered, everyone went home happy, and nobody got a good look at me.

The women I’d flown in with were scattered around the near end, and Chloe pointed me through them like a tour guide.

“Briar.” A little bright one basically in her husband’s lap, lit up like she’d swallowed a coal. “Disgusting, right? Two weeks and they still can’t keep their hands off each other.”

Briar heard her name, beamed at us with her entire face, and went right back to her husband. Good for Briar.

“Alexis.” Cooler, down the end, nursing one drink and watching her assigned bull across the room with a look I couldn’t read. I didn’t think she could either. Not happy, not sorry. Just waiting to find out which one she was going to be.

And then there was the one who ended up next to me.

Julia came over for the pitcher and forgot to leave. She had a lovely smile screwed down tight, and I’d sat across a table from that exact smile enough times to know it was holding up the roof.

She asked me polite little questions about nothing at all. I answered a couple and lobbed one back, nothing, just where’d she grow up. And somewhere before the bottom of her cup the smile slipped, and she started talking, and didn’t really stop.

Nothing dramatic. Her husband was kind. That was the whole problem. Kind, careful, gave her room, asked her opinion — and she sat across from him every night feeling like a guest in her own house, waiting to feel the thing everyone at this table so clearly felt, and it wasn’t coming, and she didn’t know if that was him or her or the entire insane idea of marrying a stranger across a galaxy.

I didn’t fix it. You don’t fix it. I let her put it down, turned it over with her a little, asked the couple of questions that made a person hear their own answer. By the time Chloe hauled us both back into the loud part of the night, Julia was sitting up straighter and laughing at something, lighter than she’d sat down.

Which was great.

Except I had an office forty feet from here with my name on the door and a couch built for exactly that conversation, and it had been empty since the day I landed. Not one man in this whole town of walking bruises would come sit on it. And a woman I’d known for an hour handed me her marriage over a shared pitcher because I asked where she grew up.

Apparently I could work anywhere but the room they paid me to work in.

I decided to be depressed about that later, and had more of the dangerous drink instead.

Which is when the jokes started.

Somebody’s husband said something about horns, and the whole table leaned in, and Chloe helpfully translated for the newcomer, and I was told, in loving detail, in front of everyone, exactly what the horns and the tails were reputed to be good for.

I went red. Instantly. Roots of the hair.

The table lost it.

“She’s blushing.” Chloe was delighted, like she’d won money. “She counsels these men. She’s their therapist and she’s blushing.”

“I work with them,” I said, with all the dignity a woman that color can scrape together. “This is wildly inappropriate. Please, go on, I’m taking notes.”

They went on. I didn’t take notes. But a professional kept herself informed.

And under the heat in my face there was the other kind, the kind I’d walked in with and had zero intention of putting down on this table.

Because as of a few nights ago I actually knew a couple of things about the size of them. About the warmth. About what it felt like to get scooped up like you weighed nothing and carried through a dark, sleeping town against a chest the width of a door.

I knew it and I planned to go right on knowing it, privately, forever. That part they didn’t get.

Then the door opened, and the whole room dropped a few degrees.

I felt it before I understood it. The noise didn’t stop so much as drain out, table by table, till the loudest thing in the place was the fire. Chloe’s hand went still on her mug. Behind the bar, the keeper who’d been trading insults with everyone all night suddenly needed something very badly from a crate under the counter.

Rauf stood in the doorway with the dark behind him.

I knew him right away. The one who’d pounded on the truck door with a hand the size of my head and begged for help through the metal.

He looked worse in the light, or just more, rougher than the town bulls, road dust on him, braced like he already knew how the room would go. He had a list crushed in one fist. He’d come to trade at the quiet end of the night, and it hadn’t been quiet enough.

Nobody said hello. A whole warm room full of found family, and every one of them found something to look at on the floor.