Still Waters

by Infernalitae

In the beginning Whitney Miller had been just one more screaming, frightened human doomed to die. Had it not been for her resemblance to a dead woman, she, too, would have joined the faceless masses in a forest of bones. She was not his mother, yet still he stayed his hand until all resemblance faded and luck became something else entirely. *Eventual romance/mature content.

17. Hungry Eyes

Chapter 17
Hungry Eyes

~/13/~

Too hot.

It was the first and closest thing to a thought she had; that the warmth was oppressive, smothering. Whitney shifted, kicking halfheartedly out with one leg, and was slapped upside the head by her second, far more coherent thought.

Christ on a Christmas tree, OUCH.

Her back screeched with the movement, and she quickly stopped, suddenly very awake and balancing a number of colorful curses on the tip of her tongue. She was sore, all right, just as she'd predicted. It was as if all the little pains she had gathered throughout the night had fused together and leeched outward until her entire fucking body had become a solid throb of pain. Fortunately, as she discovered upon gingerly testing an arm, it was just that – a dull throb. No sharp pulls or stabbing agony to indicate something torn or sprained or injured. Just a full-body Charley-horse. No big deal.

Exercising the cautious care of a woman many decades her senior she sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the couch that had absolutely been part of the problem. It creaked sadly as her weight distribution changed; a combination of old springs and imitation leather upholstery that time had not been kind to.

The couch itself was too short for someone with her height to stretch out, which had forced her to either remain curled up or to have her feet propped up on the arm of it – something she had been able to tolerate for no more than a few moments at a time. The metal bones of its frame had dug into her ribs and hips as she slept, the cracking vinyl scraping at her calves and knees so that her skin now sported a nice collection of long red. The only reason she had been able to sleep at all was with thanks to the soul-deep exhaustion that had swept the consciousness out from under her.

With a preemptive, drawn-out hiss of "fuuuuck" and a grit of her teeth, she forced herself to arch her back, roll her shoulders, turn her head slowly and deliberately from side to side, all the while peering about at her new surroundings – far more now in the daylight then the rough ink-sketch it had been in the dark.

She was inside of what appeared to be some kind of multi-purpose building. The spacious main room in which she found herself was stuffed full of seating and tables and a wide hearth for gathering at. There was a whole wall dedicated to a towering bookcase and a set of shelves messily stocked with board games and clear tubs full of Legos and craft supplies and decks of cards. A butcher-paper mural had been taped to another, underneath an open-slat staircase leading up to the a second floor, festooned with a great big hand-painted statement of Welcome Camp Crystal Lake Summer 1984, and how on earth it was still sticking rather than falling into a crumpled heap after so many years Whitney had no idea. It was very possible that it she were to so much as disturb the air too close to that half of the room it would do just that.

The entire interior from walls to floors to supports and ceiling was wood. Beautiful old hardwood, the kind now found only in tiny houses from the early 1900s or the homes of the exorbitantly wealthy. The hearth seated in the half-wall directly across from her couch was stone, tall and deep-set, topped with a thick slab of raw wood, complete with bark, to serve as a mantle. Clearly the owners had had money – enough to build and open a summer camp – and of course it had been the fifties, things had been different then. Money, not to mention the worth of things, had been different then. But still...she was impressed, suburban city girl that she was.

She didn't remember all the windows – windows that now stood out in beautiful glass clarity, sun streaming in through what seemed to be the entire back wall of the room with even more above, visible beyond the open banister closing off the second story overhead. Granted, it had been very late, very dark, and there had been no moon to provide the kind of light which might have illuminated them. She had been mostly blind. Blind, barefoot, and completely reliant on Jason.

Why hadn't he taken her back – to the house at least, if not the tunnel?

She remembered the way he had stopped mid-walk, pausing as though finding himself suddenly lost. It had only been for a moment before he had taken a sharp turn and set them on a detour she didn't recognize, ultimately bringing her here. She had been too tired to do much other than acquiesce, but now as she studied the solid wood paneling of the interior around her she considered the possible reasons.

He seemed to understand that they had reached a kind of paradigm shift; that what had been before lay now on the other side of a line they had irrevocably crossed. Going back was no longer an option. Whether or not he would have forced her back there if she'd left was inconsequential. She had chosen to stay. Which by very definition made her a prisoner no more. Was that why he'd brought her here – to somehow confirm that distinction? If that was true, then there would have been no point in telling him that she honestly wouldn't have minded going back, that the tunnel had become familiar or that her little bed nest was far more comfortable than this creaky, old-ass couch.

Tired as she had been, it hadn't escaped her notice that he went no further than the mat just outside the door. It had seemed that to enter would have been to perform a trespass of his own into a space that he rejected as beyond his territory. She wondered if he hadn't been trying somehow to put her back into the word he had snatched her from – the human world, as it were – as if to make amends for having done so. Not that he'd needed to.

Well...maybe he had needed to.

She knew what it was to feel the need to apologize for something not entirely of her own doing, didn't she? Though his deeds were far more justifiable than hers had been. Funny how now she could look back on the kidnapping she had regarded as foul and cruel had become somehow sympathetic. Funny how things could alter one's perspective.

Then there was the way he'd carried her. She was used to him scooping her up by looping his arm just under her backside, so that no longer had much power to affect her beyond the now normal tingle of pleasant awareness at the contact as much as the flex of strength underneath her.

It must have been because she'd relinquished her normal grip at his shoulder in favor of holding her towel aloft above them to keep off most of the rain. Had he worried she might fall and moved to prevent it? She could think of no other reason why he would suddenly break the habit of weeks to use both hands otherwise. Not that she didn't appreciate the concern, but it wasn't what had made her breath shallow when she'd felt his palm cup the curve of her waist.

She could have told him not to, that she was fine. But she hadn't. And that hadn't been at all self-serving.

Liar.

She tipped her chin back, peering up at the high beams strung across the triangular point of the ceiling, the light pouring through all the windows in pale golden sheets; so lovely and warm after such a miserable night. It was probably lovely a fresh-smelling outside now, after so much rain to clear away the stagnant state of the summer air. Inside, however, the air was so thick with dust that it nearly cast the illusion as to being filled with vapor.

Sure enough, as though by virtue of a countdown initiated the moment she'd stirred, the next inhale she took caught in a violent sneeze. Tight pain lanced along her back and she winced. It was…well, it wasn't the worst she'd ever had, but it wasn't awesome. And that was after the hot shower and all the stretching she'd done.

She twisted where she sat, her eyes finding the door – now closed, though she had not left it that way. Jason's doing, apparently.

Where was he? She was fairly confident he wouldn't have gone after Clay. He had so clearly made a choice, and it had not been death. But had he stood guard outside all night fearing she might slip away in the night, or else as a vigilant sentinel against any outside harm? Had he gone back to the house, spent the night in the childhood bed far too small for his frame – alone? The thought bothered her. Not so much the house as much as the aloneness. It was an inexplicable dislike; it wasn't as if he hadn't spent countless nights in just such a fashion, but that had been before. If she was here then he was no longer alone...at least for as long as she stayed.

Three days.

That was what she'd said.

Three days, and I'll explain.

It had been an arbitrary number produced out of need, a promise made in desperate hope. It had produced the outcome she had wanted, and that had been enough in the moment. Now, though, she had to face the reality of making such a promise to one man, and the separate, conflicting statement she had made to another.

She had said she wasn't going anywhere. Then she had said she would go in three days. So which was it? Neither was a promise she could break, and neither could she keep without breaking the other. When the three days were up, what then? Would she go? And if she did go, what happened then? If she stayed, she risked Clay stirring up worse trouble, and if she didn't she risked breaking something precious. Which was the right path to take? Was it possible to satisfy both? She had no answers and no idea what she was going to do. There was nothing in her head but the faint buzz of a mild headache.

With a decisive inhale, Whitney closed her eyes. Shutting out the faint pang of the ache in her head. She didn't need to have an answer right now this second. She had three days – she'd figure it out. She would have to.

But for right now this second, the only task she was going to assign herself was getting up and looking outside.

Gingerly she got to her feet, straightening with a groan and stretching where she stood; generous moments spent bending and moving to encourage her body to make its peace with the idea of moving around. Though painful at first, it would do nothing but help her, and while she felt much older than she was, the hobbling hitch to her gait eased as she crossed the space between couch and entryway.

She gripped the knob, twisted, pulled the door open, and immediately aborted the step she had been about to take across the threshold to keep from trampling the array of objects arrayed upon the ancient be-flowered welcome mat like a small army lying in wait for her to attempt escape.

They spread out from the mat to encompass part of the porch: a tidy aurora of items. Her things from the tunnel were all there: blankets folded into neat, stacked squares, the pillow she'd used, her crate full of books, the pretty stones and other little knickknacks, the duffel full of clothes. Two battery lanterns and a flashlight. The bag of (sort of) food was there, along with additional offerings she hadn't seen before. Most of a box of granola bars, half a bunch of bananas, a single orange, an entire unopened flat of grocery-warehouse muffins – the kind so big they required two hands to hold. Her shoes were there, painstakingly scraped and brushed free of most of the mud. A task which would have taken the better part of an hour to reach quite such a state of almost-clean again.

And there was more; more things scattered amongst these which her brain could not quite pick out apart from the fact that they were there, adding to the number of items purposefully left here for her to find, and to indicate that yes, this was to be her living space now while she remained here.

Had he been at this all night? Traveling back and forth between house and lodge – a not insignificant trek – in order to ferry all this here? Obviously he must have. Chances were he slept about as much as he ate, which meant not much and in small doses. Still, the idea of him spending his entire night hauling all these things to her (to say nothing of cleaning her damn shoes) and all while fairly severely injured inspired both touched affection and a worry she couldn't stifle.

It occurred to her, as she surveyed the items laid out like so many sacred offerings, that he must not have feared that she would up and vanish, unbound and uncaged as she had been all throughout the night. And if he hadn't, it would have been because of two things. One, because he understood he could no longer serve as her keeper-jailer as he once had – which seemed only fortified by this act of presenting her with a space of her own. Two, because had he trusted her enough to keep her word, to stay.

It galled her to feel so undeserving of that trust, the grain of self-disgust scratched and stuck like sand in the back of her throat. It was not a trust she would ever betray again. If she had to break every bone in her own body not to, so help her, she would. She would do it, and utter not a single complaint.

With a wince she lowered herself to the porch and reached for her shoes – abruptly pausing as she went to slip them on as she caught a flash of color inside the left one. Something nestled in the opening.

Reaching in, she extracted three tiny, sunny yellow buttercup blossoms.

Her heart gave a giddy little flip-flop at the sight of them before she promptly told said heart to knock it off. She knew what this particular heady mix of anxious almost-nausea and stupid, half-euphoric glee was, flooding her veins like anesthesia straight from an IV. It was worse now than it had been the first few times he'd brought her flowers, though they meant no more now than they had then. Yet the more he did it – and the more infatuated with him she became – the harder it was to hold on to that fact.

Cradling the flowers gently in an open hand, she slipped on the shoes and got clumsily back to her feet. Upon glancing around, it was clear that wherever Jason was, he wasn't waiting outside the house for her. Not that she should expect him to be...and not that she did, considering he might be in the midst of yet another trip to bring some other object to add to the array, or doing something else entirely, which was more likely to her mind. He had more and far better things to do than babysit her, that was for certain. And she had plenty to do herself, too; giving the lodge a thorough looking-over, making a list of things that needed cleaning, fixing, etcetera, and taking stock of things she might need.

It seemed logical to start by walking the perimeter of the building, so she did, stepping down from the porch steps all the while gritting her teeth against screeching legs and beginning to circle the building.

Her knowledge of architecture and structural integrity were basically nonexistent, but there were no obvious holes in the walls or broken windows, no obvious signs of rot or of rust, of encroaching tree roots or of fire damage, that she could see. There was what appeared to be a small attached shed at the east side, which housed gas line and fuses and a great old monster of a generator that, from the reek of the tiny space, ran on gasoline, and hinted at the building's age.

The foundation likely dated back to the fifties, possibly earlier, its skeleton dressed down and re-fortified, redesigned around, gutted and redecorated a number of times over the decades in order to look as though it had only been left sitting for a few years rather than what would have been closer to almost thirty. They had probably just been finished gussying it up again for the reopening in '84 only for any hope of the camp ever opening its doors again was spectacularly dashed by the massacre at the hands of Mrs. Voorhees. Whitney was positive there would have been significantly more damage otherwise. But as far as she could tell it seemed sound enough to be livable.

By the time she made it back around to the porch her body had begrudgingly accepted that it would, in fact, need to deal with being asked to generate movement, and it was becoming clear that the cold-break of the night before had passed. It wasn't quite as hot as it had been the weeks leading up to it, but they were still deep in the middle of August and Whitney was betting there would be more sweltering days before summer was over.

Tip-toeing carefully through the arrangement of objects she still couldn't quite bear to disturb further, she made her way back inside, eyeing the lazy drifts of dust that layered the warm beams of morning sun. A mental note was made to open up all the doors and windows she came across to initiate a thorough airing-out.

She wandered through the rec room she had spent the night in, crossing to the long bay of windows in search of latches or mechanisms and pleased to discover that they had been designed to prop open, swinging out on hinges from the top and staying open with the help of built-in metal pieces. Some of these were a bit warped from age, but each worked, and she happily went down the line until all six were wrestled open. She hoped that with help from the open door a nice cross-breeze might start to coax out the stale air and usher the fresh in.

Making her way through the open threshold beneath the stairs, she found herself in the kitchen.

It was an odd, hodgepodge of a room, neither large enough to be as high-capacity as the camp itself had seemed to be trying to make itself, nor small enough to be just for the staff and counselors. From the look of them the appliances hadn't been replaced since the early 80's, thought from the quick look-over she gave them the fridge and gas stove would probably be in working order were there power. She would have to ask Jason about the presence of fuel on the premises, if for nothing else then to power the stove. Although, push come to shove, she could cook during the fireplace. It would take some guessing, and some potentially dangerous (for her digestive system) learning, but she could figure it out.

When examining the sink – a deep, wide beast of hollow metal meant to handle a great many dishes at once – she noticed the cracks in the lower right corner of the window above it. A tight, circular spiderweb set in the glass reminiscent of what a fist might have made. Or perhaps an errant baseball. Though it was sound enough not to shatter when she propped it open.

She ran a palm along a counter, passing a water-stained drying rack and several large canning jars filled with dry pasta, rice, and beans, and a lone can of crappy coffee far too old now to be of any good. Yet she still found herself tempted by the idea of the everyday pleasure that was coffee. There was quite a bit of counter space, she noted, and there were plenty of both cooking and eating dishes stored away in the cupboards – ones she would wash before using, but still.

Then there was the wide, walk-in pantry; the kind lined with deep shelves suited to high-capacity storage. She peeked inside, squinting in attempt to penetrate the pressing dark of the little room. From what she could tell it was mostly empty, which made sense. And frankly whatever there might have been inside was more than likely significantly passed anything close to its prime.

It wasn't until she was closing the door again that she noticed the scuff marks there, and a fine chill danced its way up her spine. Shallow dents and gouges dappled the surface all around the knob outside as though someone had been trying to smash their way in. Jason had not been responsible for these. He would have simply yanked the flimsy door from its hinges, not slashing viciously at it with a blunt object. These were courtesy of his mother, and just as much a marker of the levels of her madness as her mourning. There had been no smell of blood or rot, and the door itself was still fully intact, which was enough evidence to reassure Whitney that no one had died in there, but she still found herself a little disturbed.

Gradually she wandered back out to the main room, craning her neck to look up at the great wooden beams supporting the angled ceiling and the rails of the second level. All of fourteen seconds were spent considering the stairs before she rejected the idea. Her body was doing relatively well considering the abuse of the night before, she didn't need to subject it to a full flight of stairs just yet. She needed to pace herself, and frankly, there was plenty to contend with on this flood alone: airing, washing, carrying in all the stuff from the porch. So that was what she was going to worry about.

She began by changing her clothes; swapping the admittedly quite comfortable dress for a too-large shirt and a pair of shorts which were moderately less cool, but better suited to housework. Plus, there was a tiny part of her that really just didn't want to damage or get it dirty. It was pretty, after all. Next she went about separating all the foodstuffs from the rest of the items to bring into the kitchen area, which would be in need of a wipe-down before she did anything resembling preparing to eat inside.

She was on her way back out to the porch when movement stirred at the corner of her periphery, and she glanced up to see Jason walking up the path they had taken to get there last night, a bag of some kind slung over one shoulder.

Soft pleasure uncoiled in her chest, something between eagerness and contentment. Immediately her course altered, her feet taking her across the porch to the railing where she braced her hands to wait for him. She caught herself smiling, genuinely happy to see him in the ways that had come to be familiar before the grinding mess of last night.

His head lifted slightly, no more than a fraction of an inch, but she knew it signaled that he in turn had seen her. His stride lengthened, and she was relieved to note the complete absence of a limp, or of any other sign of pain.

"Hey," she greeted as he climbed the shallow steps to the porch, the wood creaking softly beneath his weight even while his footfalls themselves were soundless.

He gave her a small nod in reply, the closest thing to a hello she had ever received from him, and she found herself abruptly wordless. She didn't feel awkward, exactly...but for some reason she was utterly at a loss as to what to say to him after, well, everything. Rather desperately she wanted to ask how he was – a question he would have no way to answer, and which seemed so futilely, pointlessly inadequate inside her own head.

"Were you out here all night?"

It didn't quite convey what all she wanted it to, but she supposed it would have to do.

Another nod, broader, more definitive – answer rather than acknowledgement. With his two-finger point he indicated the path and the way he'd come, then the array of items he'd left outside the door, as if she'd needed an explanation of what exactly he'd been doing all that time.

"I saw," she agreed, "thank you." She pointed down to her feet, to the shoes enveloping them. "Especially for these."

She saw his eyes drop, alighting first on the shoes, and then lower almost bashfully to the planks beneath his feet.

"You didn't have to do this," she said softly, "I could have done it today."

His great shoulder rose and lowered in a half-shrug, hand making a hapless kind of gesture that she interpreted as waving off her statement by virtue of the fact that he didn't really sleep, and it had been something to do and needed doing, and was no trouble. And so forth. Fondness spread warm as a blush through her. He really was just a sweet man underneath all that fearsome exterior – though no longer so fearsome to her now. He simply seemed to want to be helpful, or quite possibly found himself fighting off a sense of listless uncertainty now that his comfortable routines had yet again been flipped upside down. And that was certainly something she could relate to.

"Well, you definitely did not have to clean my shoes."

He shrugged again, as if to say it was no trouble, which it absolutely would have been. But she let it go.

"Come here and let me look at your shoulder."

It was not a request, and while Jason was really far too large for her to bully into doing anything he didn't want to, he obeyed all the same. Lowering the canvas bag he carried to the floor he moved closer. Whitney rose up on her toes, reaching for his jacket collar.

"If you could take this off, that would help," she muttered as she struggled with the torn layer of fabric.

The remark had been more an empty gripe than anything else. She had certainly not expected him to actually do it, and when he did, shrugging out of the coat to clutch it in the opposite hand, she was too stunned to do anything but blink and go with it.

There were two new holes in his shirt, the aged beige fabric stained newly dark around them. Yet it was not, she realized upon grazing the cloth, stiff with the blood that had made these stains. He must have rinsed it, then, possibly while seeing to the wounds underneath. She was careful of any potential bandaging as she plucked at the torn cloth and eased it up to peer underneath, not wanting to disturb it unless she had to. Except there was nothing to disturb. No bandages. No wounds.

Whitney frowned, instantly and thoroughly befuddled. There had been cuts – she would have sworn on her own grave. One directly to the trapezius, another encroaching lower toward the pectoral. She had seen the dark glisten of sluggish bleeding, had fretted about the potential need for sutures. The slashes in the shirt had not been there before, nor had the obvious bloodstains...so where were the injuries that had caused them?

Pushing away, she hunkered down, snatching at the hole in his trousers above the left knee, only vaguely aware of his jerking start when she did. Gingerly she felt around for the puncture she remembered, sliding her hand around to skim the back of his thigh for an exit wound, and finding none. No bandaging here, either. There was nothing but torn pants and undamaged skin underneath; warm and smooth, the flesh it housed solid and whole. Stunned, she sat back on her heels, staring intently at the tear in the sturdy workman's cloth and trying to understand what she was both seeing and not seeing.

"But you were hurt," she said faintly, tipping her head back to look at the masked face peering owlishly down at her. "Weren't you? Or have I completely lost it?"

Something like fond amusement flickered in his eyes when he nodded once, and then shook his head. Yes to the first, no to the second.

"So, then—what, they just healed overnight? That's not..."

He was nodding again, lifting the no longer injured shoulder in another bemused half-shrug as if to say: I know, I don't understand either.

Well, that was...different.

She had mused to herself once or twice about whether he was some weirdly corporeal ghost, or a zombie, but those had just been silly, idle thoughts. She had never seriously considered there might actually be something not quite natural going on. Had she?

...or had she?

He didn't eat, didn't sleep. And when he'd affirmed that he had drowned, that he had died, she had assumed he meant that he'd stopped breathing, lost consciousness, that he'd been clinically dead for a few seconds. She had assumed he was referring to a near-death experience lasting no more than a moment or two. But she also remembered wondering how it was possible that he could have been alive for the time it had taken his mother to work up to her vengeful rampage without Pamela ever realizing her son was right there. Madness, she had thought, grief. Or, he truly had died; lost to the water that had claimed him until something had called him back.

Whitney Miller didn't so much pride herself on being a perfectly rational person as she did accept it as truth. A truth she might have been questioning with real concern just then had it not been for the other undeniable truth that she'd washed his blood from her fingers the night before, and the sources of that blood no longer existed. The perfectly rational explanation was that she did not have all the answers of the universe.

And frankly, that was all she was capable of processing of that subject.

"I mean...so long as you're ok, I guess," she murmured, unsure what else to say.

Jason's exhale left him with the cadence of a laugh. A hand appeared in front of her, palm up, and almost without thinking she laid her own inside it. Gently he pulled, and she didn't even feel the whine of her hamstrings as he helped her stand.

"I was just moving everything inside," she said, gesturing to the items at their feet, "and I was thinking I might take a look around the other cabins today, see if there's anything worth salvaging. Batteries for the lanterns, maybe candles, more blankets. Things like that."

He touched her arm, a graze of fingertips asking for her attention, which she gave. Pointedly he shook his head, and while she had become rather adept at guessing, this wasn't a head shake she could gather the meaning of.

"No, what?" she asked, recalling the things she'd just said in order to repeat them, find the one he objected to. "Moving things?" No response. "The cabins?"

There was the head shake again, firm and unrelenting. The kind of head shake that meant business. Yet she could think of no reason he would object so strongly to the idea...until she remembered the glass strewn in still glittering shards upon the ground as he directed her around the perimeter of disaster. That was why. The damage done to the cabins must have left them unsound to the point of being dangerous.

"No looking in the cabins. Got it. Is there somewhere else I could look, then?"

He seemed to be hesitating, with head very slightly tilted as if in thought.

"It's not super important," she felt the need to add, "I'll be fine either way..." She promptly shut up when Jason took a step back toward the porch steps, beckoning her to follow.

He waited for her at the bottom of the steps, apparently not content to simply lead her, and Whitney allowed herself a moment of appreciation for the obvious shift in how their relationship now functioned; whether because it was no longer necessary that one of them precede the other, or simply because he had decided he preferred it this way. Either way, she liked it – this new sense of camaraderie. It wasn't as if there had been none before, but what was there had been tainted by the unspoken absence of choice. Now, though, with both choice and freedom firmly established, she might be able to think of them truly as the friends she rather imagined they were.

Side by side they walked down the path, the dense trees opening up as they entered the camp proper. She studied the cabins as they passed. Every one of them exhibited signs of fire damage. Charred siding, crumbling eaves and corners, soot-streaked metal window-frames, and glass warped and curdled by heat until it looked as though a layer of water had been trapped within, all bubbles and froth; scorched by a mourning rage determined to make them uninhabitable for the rest of time.

Jason's touch skimmed her elbow, drawing her to watch as he pointed to a cabin off to the left which he followed up with a quick series of gestures she couldn't quite interpret.

"Sorry, what was that?"

Ever patient, he repeated as asked, slowing the gestures down. He pointed first to one cabin, then another, after which he spread his hands apart as though rifling through something – not unlike she did with her laundry basket in search of a shirt she might be able to get away with wearing one more time before washing – after which he mimed the action of hefting something into his arms.

She had him repeat the sequence once more before she was able to put together that he had already searched the cabins. She also gathered, purely from intuition rather than directly asking, that he had done so quite a long time ago, that it might possibly have been one of the first things he'd done, being under the assumption that he would need whatever supplies he could scrounge to survive. Until that had been proven wrong. Whatever might have been of use he had removed, and the rest was left to molder.

It was after this exchange that she recalled the tunnels beneath the house; tunnels crammed with what had seemed like a hoarder's collection of useless junk to a mind seeing without context.

After a while she had come to assume the accumulation of stuff was because he was tucking it all out of sight, leaving no trace of the many trespassers he had dispatched for anyone searching to find. She was still less than sure what he did with the bodies, but the objects hikers and campers tended to carry with them seemed to be exactly the kind of things she remembered seeing stuffed and piled into tight niches like strange detritus – and exactly the kind of things she had been hoping to recover. Plus, whatever he had salvaged was probably in far better shape being stored safe in the weather-protected and relatively temperature-controlled underground than they would have left in crumbling cabins.

Jason's stride faltered when the house's rickety silhouette came into view. He might have said nothing, but the emotion he gave off was palpable; a worry laced so sharply with regret that she could almost taste the tang of it, and she didn't need words to tell her why.

In his mind the house was no longer a place for her; neither one in which she belonged nor one he expected her to wish to go, and in his mind asking her to go inside was tantamount to putting her back in chains. A bit dramatic, perhaps, but she couldn't say she didn't understand why he would think it. She was even grateful for it, since it proved that he was sensitive to the wrong he had done her. He had always been human – human enough for rage, human enough for sorrow and loss and care and thousands of other things – but it had never really been clear to Whitney how much of right and wrong he retained from an incomplete childhood, abstract, murky things they were. It was possible he had learned simply through her telling him so, and if that was the case it was because he was human enough to do so.

He had done her wrong, and a great wrong at that. But understanding and empathy had gone a long way toward mending those cracks, and his clear reluctance to steer her now to the place he had once caged her did the rest.

With a deliberate calm she moved forward, her stride measured as her feet carried her to the sad old house. The tired groan of the two shallow steps up to the door were like the starting notes of a familiar song played on an out-of-key piano, and she laid light fingertips against the frame from which the battered screen hung in a brief, silent kind of greeting before turning to look back over her shoulder for Jason, still standing in the grass- and weed-ridden gravel, watching her oddly.

"Are you coming?"

~/~

He had wanted to be helpful.

In the moment he'd simply thought that he knew where to find the kinds of things she mentioned looking for: batteries and blankets and the like. Then the house had come into view and everything flooded back to him.

The fear she would think he was somehow trying to trap her, or else force her back into the same cage even if not to keep her there, had been crippling. He no longer wanted her to associate him with bondage, with chains and discomfort and death, and the house could be nothing but those things to her – to say nothing of the tunnels beneath. Yet now as he followed Whitney's slender shape down the hallway of his mother's house, it was evident that he needn't have worried.

He stood by his decision to relocate her to the lodge. It still felt right to give her a space that was purely hers, untainted by the bad things of before. Untainted by almost everything, if he remembered rightly. And it was a decision she seemed to agree with, or at lease accept, since when he'd arrived from his last trip had been to find her awake and sorting through the things he'd spent the dark hours relocating there. Yet it was still good to know that she didn't seem to revile the house he'd locked her beneath. Or, rather, he supposed it was more himself that he was glad she didn't revile. Not that he wouldn't have understood if she had, but he knew now as he had not before just how deeply it would wound him were she to ever look at him again the way she once had – with revulsion the only thing more powerful than her fear.

She stopped at the edge of the open trapdoor; and while with hands unbound she could have safely sat, swung her legs over and dropped to the tunnel mouth below, she didn't. She waited, reaching for him in clear request for him to lift her down. And he knew it was only because that was what was familiar to her, what would happen here, but knowing it had done nothing to stop the twist of yearning as he lowered her into the tight space below.

He experienced yet another keen stab of nervous unease when she hesitated at the end of the sloping path, certain the sight of the cavernous chamber that had served her as a living space for the better part of a month and a half had triggered something unpleasant for her. When she turned to look at him it was with her lower lip caught between her teeth and a small furrow between her brows, but the question that left her was light.

"Should I just…?"

The tight coil in his chest released on a silent sigh. She was concerned with rudeness, of all things, of being intrusive. Not bad memories. He made a broad, sweeping gesture with an open hand, hoping she understood that she should feel free to explore, and to take, as she wished.

She'd said he hadn't needed to bring her books and things to her, and he knew she had meant it. But what she hadn't understood was that he had needed to. Bringing the things that had become hers to the place that would now be was the very literal least of what he could do to begin to atone for everything he'd done. As was giving her free reign here. After all, he had little use for the veritable millions of odds and ends stored in the nooks and crevices of rock and earth, and if even a fraction could be of use to her then he was glad for it.

Clearly uncertain, Whitney began to wander through the open room, almost immediately gravitating toward her corner.

The mattress and the overturned table-crate were all that remained now, everything else already relocated to the lodge. Yet she still paused there, crouching, reaching for something nestled in the dirt. When she lifted her hand it was with a piece of green glass was held carefully between two fingers, and he recognized the flat bottom of the little bottle she had liked to keep flowers in. Shattered in whatever struggle had taken place, he assumed. Perhaps in the midst of removing the manacles.

Manacles which, broken beyond his ability to repair, he had removed from the room, no longer wanting to look at them.

With a sigh, she returned the glass to the dirt, and he realized the tiny frown creasing between her brows when she stood was one of regret. She lamented the loss. He decided right then that he would find her another. He would bring her a thousand pretty bottles if it would smooth away that frown.

After a moment she gravitated to the other side of the room, passing the workbench to the cluttered shelves beyond. She was hesitant to touch anything at first, often recoiling mid-reach and leaving him to pick up and offer the various objects to her. But gradually she grew more comfortable, and soon he found himself trailing behind her with a crate to carry her selections.

He didn't lead so much as guide her along. When she approached the opening of the leftmost branching tunnel – the one which ended in a heavy metal door and carnage beyond – he steered her gently away. If she strayed too close to a weak bit of floor or a precarious pile of objects, he drew her attention to it or nudged her around. If she noticed, she didn't say; just continued on, following his silent direction toward the better collections of useable goods.

It had occurred to Jason once or twice during the early hours before dawn that he should have been dealing with the bodies he had left scattered in the wake of the evening's rampage. It occurred to him again now as he glanced over Whitney's shoulder down the earthen path, recalling the brown-haired girl he had left at the end of a different tunnel, split through the ribs and crumpled, now long-cold. He didn't normally delay his cleanup for so long. To do so had always seemed risky, and he supposed it was riskier now than it had been before. But just as it had this morning, the risk seemed so much less important than this – than seeing to the living, breathing girl currently clutching a rolled-up sleeping bag to her chest, bright and beautiful even in the wash of harsh, yellow light.

She turned, hugging her prize, and the way she looked at him, the quick, bright flash of her smile, set the heart in his chest to hammering in a way that was still so odd to feel. He didn't anyone had ever looked at him that way: simply happy to see him, to be with him. Just as he was.

The dead could wait. They would wait as long as they must, for he had another calling now.

By the time she declared herself satisfied, they had filled three crates and a fraying wicker basket with supplies, and Whitney appeared pleased, if tired.

He had noticed it only in passing before, but now he was sure. There was a faint hitch to her movement, a subtle stiffness in her steps, every time she bent or twisted. Not quite gingerly, not quite with pain, but bordering on it. The unmistakable strain of overworked muscles. She'd put herself through a grueling ordeal to protect her brother – had nearly broken herself in the effort. He admired the dedication it had taken even as he hoped she never found herself in a place where she must do so again.

He knew better than to press her about it, for all the protective force inside him fretted. She understood her limitations to a degree he would never have, knew what would help and what would hinder. It wasn't his place to question. Throughout her excavation of the tunnel maze she had been content to go easy, allowing him to lift and carry for her, and as he went about the task of moving everything up through the trapdoor she elected to rest, seated on the workbench stool. He was not blind to the faint cast of guilt as she watched, but was pleased that she offered no protest. He would do whatever was required, be whatever she needed. He would be the blunt instrument. He would bleed. For her. And he would be glad to do it.

On his second trip back down to the chamber he found her relocated to the floor, cradling a rat in her palm as several others milled about her; hoping, no doubt, for some kind of edible reward for their affection. Persistent little beggars. And yet she stroked and cooed to them as though they were puppies, not the unwanted vermin his mother had worked diligently to purge from the house.

"I'll come visit," he heard her murmur, and paused as he bent to lift the last of the crates, "I'll bring plenty of treats. Don't worry."

An indescribable tenderness spread through him, like the warmth that radiated outward from a sip of hot liquid. She knew perfectly well he would continue to feed them, just as he had well before her arrival. But she said it because it was something she wanted to do for her own sake, not out of any concern for the wellbeing of the hoard of now irreversibly spoiled rodents. He hadn't been aware just how much he cared for the little beasts until she had begun showing them so much of her own affection, and the odd feelings of ownership seeing her with them now stirred were as unexpected as they were pleasant.

Gently she nudged them along, hauling herself to her feet with the first real admission she had given of her less-than-peak physical state – a shallow groan.

"Oof. Gotta keep moving," she muttered to herself, but he made note of it, glad that the only thing left to carry was the basket laden with candles and rolls of plastic wrap and other light, small objects.

It took two trips to get everything to the lodge. Well, one for her, toting the basket. Due to his size he was able to manage two of the crates at once with ease, which left only one behind and thus no reason for her to go back again. Not that it stopped her from being active for the scant minutes he was gone. Far from it.

Intent on spending the rest of the day gutting and cleaning the entire ground floor of the lodge, Whitney was a human-shaped flurry of motion; occupied with so many tasks that she routinely interrupted herself in the midst of one to begin or carry on with another as though there were simply too much to do to keep it all straight.

If she thought it odd that he lingered, that he trailed her when she ventured to the bathroom structure for her muddy clothes, or that he lurked outside like a shadow while she swept floors and washed towels and linens, she said nothing about it. If she objected to his inserting himself into her business to help her rig the clotheslines she had wrestled with, struggling to remember which of the knots he'd taught her were right to secure twine around the trunks of trees, she didn't so much as hint it. She did, however, smile. And often.

He never followed farther than the porch – and even this pressed uncomfortably close to feeling out of bounds – but even when she couldn't see him, she would often talk to him. It was only simple, idle talk, pieces he couldn't have recalled afterwards, but just the fact that she did it was enough for him to hope she enjoyed the company.

In truth it simply never occurred to him to leave. Even with the list of things he should do growing steadily longer in the back of his mind he could never quite bring himself to go. He was content enough to deem it the compulsion he felt to be near in case she had any need of him, in whatever form it may come, but were he to look deeper down he knew he would find a tangle of fear and confusion and hollow yearning that he could not yet bear to touch.

So he stayed, watching her relocate stacks of books inside, exchange heat-dried linens for freshly washed ones, hang cloths over windows with a hammer and nails and regretful winces. He listened to her curse her way through figuring out how to work the camp stove excavated from the tunnels, and to her screech of surprised glee upon finding an old radio – the music from which, while not unpleasant, was vastly improved upon in the moments she elected to sing along. And as the day passed and the encroaching night began to deepen, he found himself leaning against the porch railing just outside the open kitchen door, bathed in the spill of lantern and candlelight, watching Whitney dance around to the song that had just begun to play.

There was something vaguely familiar about the music, as though he had heard it once before a long, long time ago. But it was far more entertaining to focus on the girl singing with enthusiastic volume into the wooden spoon clutched in her hand than to a potentially unpleasant sliver of the past.

"Nothing can be sadder than a glass of wine alone—"

She spun, twirling giddily on bare feet upon a freshly mopped floor. Her hips rocking from side to side to the rhythm as she pranced about the kitchen, shoulders hunching forward, then rolling back with the arc of her back, and the pure joy in it was infectious. He could feel the corners of his own mouth twitch upward as she spun again, hair whipping wild about her face and one arm arcing gracefully above her head.

Her eyes found him, sparkling as though inset with stars, her cheeks flushed. She grinned, the smile as bright as a child's.

Tossing the spoon lightly to the drying rack from which she'd snatched it in her music-induced jubilance, she crossed the floor, an extra bounce to her steps as she made her way out onto the porch.

His head tilted as she approached, still swaying to the melody, regarding her with both amusement and curiosity. She reached for him, slim fingers folding about his wrist and gently tugging. Surrendering to her silent request he moved away from the porch, which pleased her – which in turn pleased him – and allowed her grip to trail down the inside of his wrist to softly grasp his hand.

He did little more than stand still while she moved, his arm joints loosening so she could continue to weave and twist upon the balls of her feet while holding onto him. It was unclear whether she expected him to mimic her or whether she was happy with this, but she had sought to include him, and that was enough to make up for any puzzlement he might have entertained about the matter. She seemed happy enough, her smile fluid as she sang softly along with the lyrics. And he had to admit that it was rather nice.

After a moment she lifted their joined arms, ducking gracefully underneath the arch she had made. She twirled, delicate steps taking her as far as extended elbows would allow before she spun back and into him, her shoulder nestling softly against his ribs as she folded his arm around her.

Her fingers tightening ever so slightly around his own, and he couldn't have said why it struck him only then and not before – not the instant she had made to touch him.

Her hands; small and soft and clean. His own…filthy, and from far more than simply the dirt and grease from the day's work. More than the events of the night before. It shouldn't have mattered. He had touched her before now with the same hands, no more or less dirty than they were now. And yet it did.

It did.

Without thinking he snatched his hand from her, sharply, as though she had burned him, and he regretted it the second she turned to him, startled, the guileless joy slipping from her face.

"What's wrong?"

Jason didn't know how to answer her. How did he relay something so simple, and yet so…intrinsically not? Hating the traces of hurt beginning to form around her eyes and mouth and not knowing what else to do, he held out his hands, showing her the grime of years etched in the creases of his palms, the stains of awful deeds.

She didn't see it.

Her frown deepened. "You didn't hurt me," she said, clearly confused as to how he could think it, and frustration caused his fingers to curl, nails biting into flesh.

He wheeled from her, eyes darting, landing on the trim of the door – decidedly less white than when it had been fresh-painted, but white enough. He pressed his hand there, gripping tightly enough for tiny chips of paint to flake away, and when he removed it the dark smudge left in imprint was both vindication and disappointment. If one could be disappointed by something known to be present.

She looked at the mark, and he imagined he could see her eyes following the individual streaks left by fingers. Then she glanced back to him, uncertain. "Your…" Another glance to the trim. "Your hands are dirty?"

His chin lowered to form a nod, relieved that she had put it together and hoping it would erase the leftover traces of hurt he could still see. Relieved and, if he were honest, ashamed. But that was all right. He could take the dawning displeasure as she realized he had dirtied her skin so long as she no longer looked at him as though he'd slapped her.

Yet the displeasure – the disgust – he braced for did not come.

Her frown eased, flowed smoothly into a soft understanding that nearly knocked the breath from him. "Well that's an easy fix," she said gently. "Come on."

He didn't comprehend at first; not when she padded to the door, crossing the threshold as easily as breathing, not when she turned to find him over her shoulder and repeat the invitation she had just given.

His step back was born of reflex. He wasn't proud of it, but nor was he entirely shamed by it. For all that he might want to obey, he knew his place and it was not there, not inside these walls, beneath this roof.

Whitney, it seemed, did not agree.

The understanding was still there, somehow even softer now, sending a shock of weakness down his spine, for it looked like love. Though it was not.

"This place is on your land," she told him, no pressure in her voice, no annoyance. Only truth as she saw it. "That makes it yours."

She did understand, somehow, by some meld of cleverness and wisdom and simple care. So she would understand that he could not cross this last line, could not swallow the repulsion of what had become learned instinct. She would leave him to the night sky and open air, to his filthy hands and sour memories.

But if he believed that, it would only have been because he didn't know her…and yet he did.

"Or maybe it's mine now," she amended thoughtfully, dark brows curving slightly at the idea as she studied him.

It was hers, and not because he had somehow gifted it to her when he had not seen it as his to give. She had earned it through labor, paid in sweat and effort and song. If she claimed it now, the laws of nature would acquiesce.

"It is mine, then. And I say you're welcome here."

She held out her hand to him, the please unspoken but somehow all the louder for it.

"Come on," she coaxed, and he felt himself folding, felt the resistance crumbling alongside the rigid structure of the line he could no longer clearly see.

He did not move to place his hand in hers, yet he found it there all the same. A moment more spent upon tense, bated breath he hovered on the edge, the toes of his boots grazing the metal track of the door. She had turned to face him, her own toes – bare, so delicate and small – directly across from his, just for an instant. Until her right foot lifted, slid back. Until she stepped. And he, drawn by the force she was – greater even, it seemed, than gravity – followed.

She led him to the sink, moving slowly, as though leading a wary stray to food (a not completely inaccurate likeness) towing him patiently along until she was right up against the counter. The sink itself was quite deep, as if an entire laundry tub had been set there, and he remembered her exclaiming how much she appreciated the size of it. At least six times. She did not do so again, though a part of him wished she would, if only to ease the remnants of discomfort with the honey of her voice. There was no sound at all but for the notes floating from the little radio atop the refrigerator and the muted slosh of water from the faucet.

He stood just behind her, precisely where she'd led him, waiting in tense stillness as she tested temperature and fussed with something that clattered quietly. When she reached back, it startled him. He had expected her to present a bar of soap and set him to scrubbing. Instead she gripped him by the wrists, pulling his arms forward; forcing him to step closer or else topple into her, forcing his arms to curve around her, to frame her in.

Warm water met his skin, drawing a flinch that was purely surprise. Touch followed: fingertips skimming over his knuckles to push his sleeves farther up his forearms and then back down, turning his palms up, smoothing soap there. Without him even noticing, the strict binds of unbelonging loosened and fell away.

He was…mesmerized.

It was the sensation of her hands on his: rubbing soft circles into his palms, stroking methodically down the length of each finger, scouring gently at his nails with a tiny brush. It was the nearness of her, slight and slender between his arms, the way she occasionally tugged him forward by another fraction of an inch to better see to her work. It was the way she stood with her head tipped down, hair pulled sideways so that the nape of her neck was exposed, pale and long and slender. The way the wide collar of her shirt gaped, slipped down to bare one shoulder.

It was the smell of her. So faint at first, just a wafting hint of it slipping through the perforation of his mask like a brief taste of something sweet – and he would have sworn that he could isolate her within a mass of people just from the way she smelled. New-grass freshness, honey, the salt of skin.

An almost compulsive urge overtook him. To lower his head, to curve around her until he could bury his shielded face in her hair and take a proper, deep inhale. He seized it and clamped down, working to shove it back into the safe, tightly-locked recesses of his mind. He was so focused on suppressing that when he heard the sharp breath he almost thought it his own. Yet it couldn't have been. It wasn't at all the kind of long, savoring breath he had imagined taking; but short and harsh, more startled than relishing. Higher in pitch by far than anything his lungs could have produced.

The thing he registered before any other was that Whitney had gone abruptly still; her hands all of a sudden motionless where they gripped his own, the slim length of her wound tight as a coil of wire where it pressed flush against him...

The rest collided in a rush of shock, confusion, and horror.

He didn't know when he had done it – how he had done it – but somehow in his war with the impulse to lower his head, he had moved forward. Enough to close the buffer of space that had remained between them. He hadn't meant to. If anything, he had been working quite hard to do the utter opposite. Yet now he held her pinned, trapped between the sink and the front of his own body, and he could feel every dip and curve of her from the narrow blades of her shoulders to the sweep of her back down to the lush swell of her backside. From chest to belly to thighs, all he could feel was her: the softness of her, the heat of her bleeding straight through his clothes and into his skin, and he stood no better chance of fighting it than he did a kick to the head.

He had never put his coat back on; hadn't felt the need to. It was still where he'd left it hours ago, draped over the porch railing, which meant it was that much easier to feel her, or the heat to catch in his veins and spread like fire across a spill of gasoline. He felt it in his limbs, licking at the inside of his chest, his throat, and the ache which swiftly followed was so sharp that it might have buckled his knees had they not locked a split second before.

Her fingers flexed, a short, tight spasm against his wrists, and the swift downward pitch of his stomach told him long before his brain that she had felt the stiffening of the flesh at his groin – and that she needed no time to decode what it meant. She knew.

She knew.

He could see the pale oval of her face reflected clearly in the dark glass of the unveiled window in front of them. She was no longer looking down at his hands but up at his reflection, shock and revelation and a gleam of the all-too-familiar thing so close to fear in her wide eyes, and his throat was closing in on itself, positive beyond doubt that whatever it was he was doing – had done – was wrong in every single way it could be wrong.

~/~

If asked, Whitney would only have been able to recall the feeling of comfortable fulfillment. She had been working gently at his hands, the warm vibrato of Stevie Nicks playing in the background, enjoying the rasp of the calluses lining his fingers.

He did have such nice hands, she had thought for what felt like the hundredth time; with their broad palms and long, dexterous fingers. A bit dirty, true – sanitation had definitely not been one of his top concerns, but even still. Why the layers of dirt had bothered him so fiercely and out of the blue, she wasn't sure. But it had been something she had the power and means to help with. That he had allowed her to coax him inside to do so was reward in of itself, as was the sweet sense of closeness.

If asked, she wasn't sure she could pinpoint when exactly everything had changed. She just remembered suddenly being keenly aware of him as she had not been a second before: the incredible heat of him at her back, every place he touched her. It was at that point she realized that he was right there, the wall of his chest pressing into her shoulder blades, broad thighs tight against her backside. The edge of the counter was biting into her stomach, but she hadn't felt it. All she had felt was him, all raw strength and power and…

She stiffened.

She was no virgin, naïve or otherwise, she knew what a man's arousal felt like. But that didn't stop the shock from snapping in her brain like a burst vessel, because that was not be…it could not…

But it was. He was. She could feel him, just against the small of her back, hard beneath thick cloth in a way that was in no way subtle.

Her chin jerked up, her eyes flying to the window not yet bestowed with a makeshift curtain – the glass bare and dark and allowing her to meet his eyes perfectly through the reflection, allowing her to see the horror, the mortification there.

His inhale was sharp, preparatory. He was going to flee, going to hurl himself away from her, and if she let him he would fold himself in fear and shame and…

She moved purely on instinct, clutching at his hands and holding fast.

"Wait—" she blurted, feeling his flinch through her grip on him, through the tendons standing out tight and strained along the backs of his hands. She gentled her voice, tamping down the shock that had emerged harsher than intended. "It's all right. You didn't do anything wrong."

She tipped sideways into stilted silence, words stolen by her own brain's valiant effort to process.

Where on earth had this come from? All this time while she had been just short of losing her mind there had beenno sign that he noticed, no sign that he understood. She had been so sure, and now, out of absolutely nowhere...

His hand slipped free of her grasp, leaving a damp streak as it slid across her ribs to curve with the shape of her waist, bracing as if in preparation to push away. A tremor chased down the length of her spine, and she felt her breath hitch on an inhale, stilling instantly when the movement nudged her ass into the unmistakable bulge beneath his trousers. Yet again she found herself shocked by it, by the insistent hardness of it.

He didn't shy back at the contact, though she caught the sudden cording of tendon in his neck to indicate the gritted teeth, the effort it cost him not to. The tension in him was like the uneasy, unwilling flex of bone before it snapped, and she knew that if she moved but an inch more, he would bolt.

Suddenly her mind caught at a shred of memory; another time when she had felt his palm against her side. The curl of his arm around her, pulling her into the shelter of his own shape as he angled his head to stare her brother down with a deadly meld of warning and threat. The way she had fleetingly thought it almost possessive, as though he weren't merely shielding her but attempting to send a message.

Oh.

He hadn't known they were siblings at the time. He had simply seen some other man with their hands on her – another man, specifically. She wasn't sure he had even realized why he felt the need to respond the way he had. What was clear now was that something in him, buried so deep that it had taken the thought of her being stolen away from him to reach it, had recognized a very specific threat to something he considered his and had protested. Loudly. He might not have made a sound, but everything about him from bristling posture to the ember-hot warning in his stare had been as concussive as a snarl.

He had been staking a claim on a mate without even realizing it, without even knowing what he was doing.

Holy fucking hell.

No…this had not come out of nowhere. She didn't know just for how long it had been there, but it had. And she had been completely blind.

Her exhale was thin and trembling, as were her words when she made another attempt to soothe. "It's all right," she repeated, though she could tell he didn't really believe her, and not just because the wary tension at her back did not relax.

It was fair to say that her ability to be reassuring was somewhat compromised.

"It's completely normal, it doesn't even mean..."

But it did. He did. He was looking at her the same way she was likely looking at him. Wanting, but afraid to say it. Afraid to so much as breathe in case to want ruined everything.

Suddenly the comprehension that had always been absent before was there; a sharp, flailing battleground of awe and terror and desire that the thirteen-year-old girl she had once been recognized all too deeply.

Sympathy unfolded, tender and gentle.

Poor man. She had taken his ignorance for granted. It hadn't occurred to her that his regard for her could – let alone would – evolve the way hers had. Which had been excruciatingly naïve of her.

She had been the first person to spend any real time with him, to know him, treat him with any manner of kindness. This outcome had always been possible, had been perhaps even inevitable after a certain point. He was not a child, nor was he what others might have deemed him: a child in a man's body. He was simply…innocent. He simply had never learned, never had the freedom to until she'd come along, and quite frankly she should have seen it coming. She might have, too, had it not been for the far less likely variable of her own developing feelings for him. The ones that should not have happened, but very much had.

The idea that he might want her the way she had come to want him...except there was no might about it. She wasn't as learned in the intricacies as some, but she knew enough to be able to tell the difference between a purely physiological response and one focused on her. This was not the kind of erection based purely in deep-buried sensory-reaction. This was the response of a man who knew very clearly what he wanted. Who he wanted. Even if the exact context was spotty, some things were simple biology.

It slammed into her like a sucker-punch, straight to the gut. She actually felt faint – faint of all stupid, antiquated garbage – but truly, light-headed and short of breath and joints gone as sturdy as fucking marshmallow.

Holy shit, this was real. This was not the product of stress and survival instincts. This was not a response to terror, or relief, or the need for comfort. It had come from natural closeness. And attraction. And…something tinny and shrill was pinging at the back of her mind, faint traces of concern almost completely forgotten.

Did he…surely not. She was almost entirely certain she knew the answer, but she needed to know.

She turned within the frame of his arms, planting a hand against his ribs and pressing gently – and regretted the sudden move instantly. He stepped swiftly back, clearly interpreting her nudge as a demand to get the hell away from her rather than simply giving her the space to face him while keeping her head relatively straight. And of course he would. He was trying to protect himself like any other living creature would. What else could he do?

Her hand twisted, fisting her fingers into the front of his shirt to hold him fast. Which worked frankly better than it should have, more due to his swift defensive response to freeze than any strength of hers.

His eyes were still too wide, too pale, still limned with a bit of that wild creature fear that pulled at her tender heart. She could feel the shortness of his breath, the too-quick rise and fall of it beneath her knuckles where they rested against the plain of his stomach; tight with latent reflex to run.

Steeling herself, she held his gaze and asked.

"That night—in the beginning, did you let me live because I looked like your mother?"

Evidently whatever he had been bracing for had not included this. Confusion creased at the inner corners of his eyes, a new, different kind of unease. He seemed wary, as though he were suddenly worried what the answer to her question might bring.

The moments it took him to weigh his choices were not comfortable. But finally he moved, offering a stiff, not-quite nod – the one he used to indicate both yes and no, or sometimes. In this instance she thought it more to be an answer of: sort of. It was possible he had never really known why he'd done it, and perhaps it never became crucial to know. That was fair. It wasn't even the important question.

"Did you…is that why you kept me?"

The creases deepened alongside his confusion. He shook his head once, a slight, jerky motion. But an answer.

No. No was good.

She could feel her own fingers tighten where they gripped his shirt, where they clutched the lip of the sink behind her, trying to channel her nerves into them and away from her voice.

"Do I still remind you of her?"

She hadn't really wanted to ask, especially since it seemed so clear. But she had already missed something so important and it had made her doubt her certainties. If the only thing turning him on was a resemblance to his dead mother…she needed to fucking know.

Comprehension struck, a tiny match of a light sparking in his lovely stormy eyes. He got it now, what she was asking him. Not, she thought, quite the way she meant it, but he gathered the importance of it – how crucial it was that she didn't. When he shook his head this time, it was intent, emphatic even. There was conviction there, earnest and sure, and there was so little guile to him even in his worst moments that she believed it instantly.

No.

He hadn't kept her because he hoped she was some reincarnation of his mother, a vessel to house the spirit of a dead woman. Maybe he had kept her out of what he felt was necessity. Maybe because he had been lonely and her presence had made him feel it. Maybe he still didn't know. But one thing was very clear: she was not Pamela. Not only did he know it, he was somehow able to convey in the space of a look how much he did not want her to be.

Thank god. At least in that her assumption had been right, for once.

"All right," she said, the words more whisper than anything with real form, but she had no doubt that he heard them.

He no longer seemed balanced on a hair-trigger to run, so she let her grip on him ease. Her hand was wet, leaving a patch of damp as her fingers uncurled to rest softly against his belly. He might not have been completely relaxed, but she could still feel how little difference it would have made. Jason was not soft around the middle. The body of a farmer, she remembered thinking, of a laborer; strong because he used it, not because he had sculpted it for vanity's sake.

A heady little flutter somewhere far too low to be innocent drew her attention to just how much that appealed to her.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him lift a hand – a cautious thing, slow and wary – reaching tentatively. She wasn't sure what he'd been reaching for, only that whatever it was, apprehension forced him to retract the hand, fingers curling reflexively inward. Gentle affection tugged sharply at her gut. He was normally so decisive, so calmly confident, to see him so afraid of reproach, of doing something bad, was at once sweet and painfully heartbreaking.

"I promise, it's all right," she insisted, pressing gently with her palm for emphasis, and she could tell by the way his focus cleared, sharpened, that she was much more reassuring this time.

He studied her closely, expression guarded. Again his hand lifted, still tentative where it hovered uncertainly. She could feel his heart hammering against his ribs – or was it her own pulse rattling through her? The tendons in his throat worked as he swallowed, and it was funny how even someone so big could seem so delicate.

There was a question in his hesitation, a request for assurance, for permission

"Go ahead."

With almost the downhill ease of a sigh he reached for her, hand going immediately to her hair. Carefully he stroked, threading the curling, red-brown strands between his fingers, and it was such a simple, genuine thing, so honest, endearing, and a little sad – as though it were something he had wanted to do for a very long time.

Something squeezed in her chest, the urge to cry clutching fiercely at her breath.

She knew what he could do with that hand, brutish in size next to her relatively small shape. He could have shattered her, ruined her, and it would have been easy – as easy as breathing – but he touched her so gently, so reverently. Touched her as though he might break her should he be even a fraction too rough and didn't dare. Didn't dare because she was something precious. The hesitance in him was at such odds with such a hulking, powerful form, and yet somehow it fit him perfectly.

Rough fingertips brushed her temple, traced a delicate line down the side of her face, taking generous moments to follow the arc of her cheekbone; and whether the faint tingle she felt in the wake of it was leftover dampness from the water or simply her own hyper-awareness she didn't know.

It was somewhat refreshing, in a way. Neither of the guys she'd been with before had been virgins, and there was an earnestness to Jason that they simply hadn't had. He knew there was something illicit about it, knew what he did was far too intimate for what their relationship had been just seconds ago. He could tell he wanted something, and that it had to do with her, but he still didn't have all the pieces to put together exactly what. For whatever reason, the anticipation of him figuring it out was really almost delicious.

The tip of his index finger grazed her mouth, seemingly studying the shape of her lips, and his eyes…his eyes were burning, fevered as the flush she could feel spreading across her cheeks, the heat pooling between her thighs.

The sound that left her was utterly out of her control; a strangled, gasping, mousy thing that could not have been less sexy if she'd actively tried. And to her dismay, it had the effect of a slap.

Jason flinched back so quickly that she swore she heard the air sing as though cut with a blade. She blinked, startled, but was only able to catch the fresh streak of alarm in the whites of his eyes before he fled – lurching for the kitchen door with a speed that was frankly impressive, considering how clearly disoriented he was. She didn't even have time to open her mouth to offer the reassurance that she already knew wasn't going to come. He was gone. And she was left clinging to the counter in order to keep from sliding to the floor in a puddle.

The tap was still running – she could hear the rush of water behind her, but was helpless to do anything about it. It was all she could do to remember how to breathe.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

That had actually just happened. He had just touched her the way a lover would, had looked at her as if he could make her come with nothing more than the look itself. And he fucking might have. She was so damn wet just for the thought of him.

All of a sudden she understood what it was to crave a man, to want him specifically to the point that her very cells seemed greedy for him. She understood what it was to want sex so badly that she actually ached.

She had always found the idea of sex better than the doing. She liked it fine, but it never really turned out the way she had always thought it should, and eventually she had decided her expectations were skewed. Now she was faced with the very real possibility that the problem had not been her expectations at all but the potential partner, because Jason seemed to be triggering a physiological response she hadn't known she possessed. Had been since before she had allowed herself to feel it.

Well, she had thought she liked her men lithe and sleek, not built like a brick fucking house. All kinds of revelations to be had, it seemed.

She had no idea how long it took her to catch her breath back, or for her legs to feel like they could hold her weight again; but at some point she was able to turn back to the sink and shut it off. For a moment she stood there, staring down at the slow course of water spiraling its way down the drain.

She'd clearly spooked him, though she hadn't meant to. Hadn't wanted to. She wasn't unsympathetic; she remembered the strength of her emotion scaring her when she'd been younger, the way physical attraction had seemed so intense, so uncontrolled. He would not have liked that. In fact, he might never like it. Just because he found her attractive did not mean he actually wanted to do anything with it, or that he ever would. That was his choice to make, although she (and her currently screeching lady-parts) hoped it wasn't the one he did.

God, she hoped he was all right.

Far too restless to think about sleeping, she picked up where she had left off – before she'd gotten carried away by a good song and silliness and inadvertently started a train wreck. One by one she finished wiping out the cupboards and replacing all the dishes she had spent the better part of an hour washing. Done with that, she nailed a piece of cotton cut from a bedsheet over the kitchen window to make a curtain as she had done with the rest of the ground-level windows. There was nothing she could do about the big ones in the rec room, but she still managed to recreate the sense of security that came with the knowledge that nothing could see in unless she chose.

That done, she went about making her bed situation more palatable.

The couch was too short for her, and Whitney was not enthused about the idea of a repeat experience in spinal compression. Wrestling the seats from the base she laid them on the floor, covering the cracked vinyl with a flannel sheet intended or winter use. With two of the pillows from her bed nest in the tunnel added to extend the length, it was just tall enough for her. Not a permanent situation, but good enough for one night. One thing was for sure, she wouldn't be cold. It felt no cooler than it had at sunset, some time ago now, which solidified her decision to leave the big windows open.

She busied herself with a few other little, menial tasks. Consolidating some of the toys and things from the shelves to make room for her books, arranging her collection of stones and other pretty gifts atop the mantle. Setting the buttercups from her shoe in their glass of water on the table next to the main door. They had been wilting before they ever made it to the water, which was sad, but only to be expected with heat like this.

She had hoped the fussing might distract her, and it had, to an extent. Yet when she ran out of things to do and reluctantly curled up to attempt going to bed, she was unable to ignore the subtle restless tension she was still nursing like a cracked rib.

Rolling onto her back, she threw an arm over her face and swore – unleashing a long, hearty string of profanity that would have scandalized most decent people.

Was she seriously going to lie here all night tossing and turning over the lady version of blue balls? What was that even called? Any other time, any other place, she would have slipped a hand beneath her underwear and just taken care of it. Quite frankly, though, the idea was less than appealing.

She didn't want her own hand.

Not even a little bit.

Ugh – for fuck's sake!

~/~

Jason burned. His skin blazed, chafing beneath his clothes, his blood boiling in his veins. The heat and force of his own labored breathing caught against his mask, pressed back against his face, near to suffocating. The flesh between his legs swollen and throbbing as he staggered like a wounded thing in its death throes through the trees, loud as any stupid, mindless human. He didn't know how to stop it, couldn't will his body to quiet, could only stumble through the dark as if in the mindless drive to put as much distance between himself and the source of the agony as he could.

But how was he supposed to distance himself from something that he could not evict from his mind?

She was all he could see, all he could hear; the warm honey of her voice mirrored in her eyes, in her skin, luminous where the candle-glow had touched her, her hair a bright, burning thing. The fire of her seemed to have caught in his very flesh and he couldn't get it out.

"It's completely normal, it doesn't even mean..."

But it did. He knew it did. And if the subtle shifts of her expression were any indication, she knew it too.

Yet she hadn't cringed or recoiled. She had murmured soft, soothing things to him in her kindness, allowed him to make real the selfish fantasy of touching that beautiful hair, the graceful bones of her face, her lips.

And then she…she had made that sound, that airy tangle of notes half gasp and half sigh. He'd heard that exact sound before from other mouths – oblivious to his presence and otherwise occupied in their conjoined writhing – and thought it odd, mildly off-putting. Not so from her: from her voice, her mouth, with the faint, butterfly-wing flutter of her eyelids as her lips parted ever so slightly.

His body tightened, shuddered, nearly sent him to his knees at the recalled image. As it had then, something in him, deep in his belly, clenched like a fist, lightning crackling along his bones, in his veins, until his very breath seemed static in his mouth. His entire existence had narrowed down to her, to the razor-sharp need he'd had to seize her, crush her backward into the counter – body to body – the way it had felt when she'd shifted back against him, lush and sweet and perfect.

His shoulder struck the great trunk of a sturdy old pine and he slumped against it, glad of the support, of something to ground him, to slow the world's spinning.

Desperately he grasped for anger, for something that made sense. Giving himself over to anger had been grounding last time, had settled the noise in his head – but it had also been a result of insult. He could not replicate it on his own, and he could not bring himself to conjure anger for her. His madness was not of her doing. She had done nothing, and he had recoiled from her as though from the bite of a snake, terrified by the urgency of it, by the power of his own craving. He was a monster – he would hurt her. He was ugly and deformed, a killer. Beastly. She had let him touch her out of kindness, a healer's mercy, not because she desired it.

The word stuck in his mind, and he latched onto the interlocking-gears rightness of it.

Desire.

Just how it fit so escaped him. The knowing seemed embedded in his flesh, his blood, but his brain continued to flounder, the answer slipping between his fingers, slick and evasive as an eel.

He ground his teeth together, lacking anger but finding stubborn will instead. He had overcome this once, and even if that had been a paltry sliver of this if he had done it once he could do it again. He would. If it took him all night, if it took breaking open his knuckles and bloodying the hands so patiently washed. If it took burying himself in death.

In corpses.

He had work to do. Work that should not wait – should not have waited as long as he'd left it. Work that would surely purge him of this madness.

A moment more. It was all he allowed himself. One more breath; one more scrap of a remembered smile.

Then he set his shoulders and threw himself back into death.

---

NOTES:

So…that happened!

For as long as this chapter took me (we won't go into the reasons why because I literally mentally can't) almost all of it was written in less than two days. This was an extremely productive weekend and I'm convinced my hormones are entirely to thank for that. If there are typos or weird things, I apologize. I just finished it and I want to fucking post it – I'll probably fix things later.

I know the first part is kind of boring, but I hope the rest was worth it. Romantic angst is my favorite thing in the goddamn world and I do not think it coincidental that this is the longest chapter yet. And yes, the slow burn bug is still biting. I just can't bring myself to believe this would go any other way with these two. And it's fun!

The silly little dance scene (I am absolute trash) was shameless theft of a similar thing from the 2015 movie The Man From UNCLE. I ripped the song, too. Speaking of which, credit to Solomon Burke for the line of lyrics.

One more quick thing that I might or might not get yelled at about Whitney: the "omg it's never been like this with anyone else" cliché. Except it's really not. I don't know if this is a cliché that originated in truth or denial, but physical chemistry is a thing and it does not operate the same with just anyone, even with people you're attracted to. I'm a trash romance writer, and I'm happy about that, but I've lived this – both the revelation and being shocked by it. If I seem defensive, it's half because I care very much about realism in my smut and this was one of the things that use to irk me. It's real, fam! I promise! Now, the thing that isn't always real is the other compatibility/chemistry necessary to make a good lasting relationship.

That's coming. Or, well…it's already kind of there. I don't know.

Whatever.

My babies are frustrated and I'm tired. But happy.

I love you all so much. As always, thank you for your patience with my slowness, and for all the love you send my way. We've been on this journey for over a year now, and I'm still as touched by the following this story has garnered as I was then. Bless you all.

Until next time!