CHAPTER 334: 334: WIND BETWEEN FINGERS

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It made Ikea’s dress move in a way that the dress had been designed to move in light, not in rain. A dead branch, long and brittle, shivered free from a pine and began to fall toward the space where her uncovered head stood.

Kai did not think. His body has spent a year training to skip the step where thought gets in the way of survival. He snapped their joined hands toward him and the motion brought her off her feet and into his chest. She raised her other hand to catch her balance and it struck his shoulder, then slid along the hard muscle and found purchase at the seam where flesh met the memory of plates. The branch struck the ground a half step from where her heels had been with a crack that surprised a bird into silence.

The world narrowed. Her thigh slid along his leg and found the line where muscle matched muscle. Her hips met his with the simple physics of momentum. She was lighter than he expected and heavier in the ways that make weight matter. His free arm came up of its own will and circled her back to keep her from falling through him.

Their faces were already very close. They had been the way a mouth is close to a cup when you lift it, before you drink. The wind ran out of the bowl. The quiet rushed back in. Her breath touched his lips. His breath touched hers. Her eyes flicked down and up. The angle made itself. It felt as natural as the way water finds the lowest place.

Their mouths touched.

It was not a kiss built from hungry years. It was not a kiss that wanted to be watched. It was a kiss that happened because two sets of nerves made a choice at the same time and their owners decided to allow it, just long enough to know what the first taste was like in a long time. It was soft. Warmer than the air. A shock, and then the shock vanishes into the place shocks go when they decide they would rather consent.

The forest held very still. The bowl of light did not break. The water went on whispering to its stones the way couples go on speaking to each other in low voices after the important sentence has already been said.

He felt her fingers curl once against his shoulder and then open. He felt his own hand relax around hers instead of tightening. He could have deepened it and did not. She could have pulled back and did not. They stood in that simple, impossible balance for the count of five heartbeats. Then the world remembered to tick.

She drew the smallest breath and stepped back a half step. He let her. Their fingers were still linked. He did not make them unlink.

The look she gave him then was not an invitation and not a warning. It was the honest assessment of a woman standing in front of a door she knew she could open whenever she chose. It said, without saying, that she had felt the same pull and that she was not embarrassed by the fact. It said, without saying, that she was not going to hand him the key and walk away.

"Stranger," she said again, and her voice was the same voice that had asked him for help a minute ago and not the same at all. "Can you help me?"

The question hung in the bowl like a bell that had just been struck. It would go on ringing until someone answered it. Kai looked at her and tried, honestly tried, to find in his memory the reason his chest had shaken when she spoke her name. Nothing came. The System was sulking. The instinct was loud. Duty was louder. Somewhere inside the mountain, eggs turned in silk and made no sound.

He could feel in the soles of his feet the way decisions travel through life and make channels so deep that later choices feel like they must run in the same stream. He could feel the way this choice wanted to make a channel. He did not like admitting that. He did not like admitting he wanted to stick his big thick ant anaconda inside her soft pink ant hole.

His fingers eased finally from hers. He did not step back. He did not touch her again. He shaped the first words of an answer. The wind lifted a strand of her pale hair and laid it against his wrist like a thread tying a story to a place.

With the taste of that sudden kiss still on both their mouths and the question still in the air, waiting to learn what sort of man Kai will be to a woman who names herself Ikea and calls herself a traveler who forgot to learn the basics.

Kai did not take his eyes from hers until he saw the warmth in her cheeks cool to something steadier. The bright accident had faded into a quiet that felt delicate and real. He inclined his head once, a gesture of acknowledgment between two people who both knew what had just happened and were not going to pretend it had not.

"That was an unexpected accident," he said at last.

Ikea’s mouth curved, then settled. "Indeed," she answered. "It was an accident."

They let the word do its work and then step aside.

"You asked for help," Kai said. "I will teach you some basics. It will not make you a hunter, but it will keep the world from eating you while you sleep."

"I will listen," she said. "I will not forget."

He moved to the edge of the bowl, to a place where a low ridge shouldered the wind. He tapped the ground with his heel, listened to the sound, and nodded. "First lesson. Choose where to build before you choose how. Look for high ground with a back to it."