CHAPTER TEN
Living with Wisp was torture of the sweetest kind.
The worse part of it all was that she didn’t even know she was doing it: driving me crazy. My eyes would trail after her incessantly, tripping over her lips or, if I was lucky, an exposed collar bone. She’d smile at me, or laugh, or say my name in that stupidly tender way she did, and I’d find myself desperately clenching my hands, blunt nails digging into my palms as I forcibly stopped myself from reaching out and touching – taking.
I’d be doing this, and she’d just keep looking at me with those innocent doe eyes, trust practically radiating from them.
That was the problem. She exuded fucking sweetness everywhere she went, her honeysuckle scent invading every part of my cabin, every part of my life.
There was no break from it.
It’d been less than a fortnight since I’d found her, only ten days since I’d taken her shopping, and already I could feel myself losing it. Losing control of him: my other half. He constantly rippled beneath my skin, threatening to break free.
I hadn’t let him loose since I’d found her. It had been impossible with Wisp wandering after me like a baby duckling that had imprinted on its mother.
She didn’t like being left alone in the cabin and insisted on tagging along everywhere I went, even walking the perimeter of my land with me every morning. She struggled to keep up – shorter legs made for shorter strides, after all – but she always made a valiant effort.
I knew it was a bad habit, letting her come with me, and that many of my problems would be solved if I just insisted she stay back, but I didn’t have it in me to refuse her, not when she looked at me the way she did, eyes blown wide, pleading.
If I was lucky, she’d never know of the ungodly power those eyes wielded over me.
“So… how can I help?”
I grunted, not bothering to look up from where I was retying the intricate knot that the trap door mechanism of my snare relied on. The rope was thin, but strong and coarse against my fingers. “Help?”
I could hear the frown in her voice as she replied, “Yes, help. As in, you know, assistance. Maybe you could teach me to-”
“Honey, I think I’ve endured enough of your help.”
I tensed the moment the moniker fell out of my mouth, the knot nearly unraveling between my fingers as I realized what I’d said. It wasn’t the first time it had slipped out in Wisp’s presence, but it was the first time she’d been conscious to hear it.
There was silence for a moment as we both took in what I’d said. I waited tensely for her to point the pet name out, question it, maybe even take offense, but then…
“Well, in my defense, I didn't know that rabbits were so fast.”
She ignored it altogether.
I was all too happy to do the same. “Right.” I snorted, not bothering to point out that it was a hare she’d “accidentally” set free a minute earlier, not a rabbit.
Also: unintentional, my ass. The way Wisp’s face had gone pale watching me behead the wild turkey we’d caught yesterday was all the evidence I needed to confirm that the hare had been let loose on purpose.
Luckily for Wisp, I was more amused than annoyed by the situation, and any irritation that did linger was directed inward. I’d been too distracted by the way her shirt rode up as she bent over, exposing the pale strip of skin above her jeans, to notice she’d been attempting to open the trap in the first place.
“I’m serious.”
“I’m sure you are.”
I heard her sigh and had to suppress a grin at how purposefully exasperated it sounded. “I mean about helping! I’m sorry about the rabbit, but I just feel so useless standing around watching you do everything. Maybe if you taught me how to set up one of those traps, or, I don't know, let me pull the fish up from the river, I could save you some time.”
I finished tying the knot, finally standing from where I’d been resting on my haunches and turning to face her. Her eyes were huge and shining, but for once, I didn’t hesitate. “No.”
Her hopeful expression crumbled, but I only had a moment to feel guilty before her face was changing, her brow furrowing and lips twisting in irritation. “Why not?” she demanded, hands on her hips.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her she looked about as intimidating as a newborn fawn. “You’re not used to work,” I explained simply.
A familiar red began creeping up Wisp’s neck and her cheeks grew splotchy. She huffed, hands fluttering at her sides as her agitation grew. “I don’t even know if that’s true or not. How could you possibly-?”
Quicker than she could track, my hands shot forward, and I cut her off by grabbing her wrists. My grip was gentle but insistent as I pulled her hands forward, turning them so that they rested palm-side up in front of her.
“What-?”
Almost involuntarily, my thumbs ran over the fleshy part of her palms. “Your hands,” I explained softly. “Look how smooth and delicate your skin is. There isn’t a callous in sight, and your nails are rounded and perfectly trimmed. These aren’t the hands of someone used to manual labor.”
I forced myself to release her wrists, but Wisp didn’t let them drop back down to her sides. Instead, she continued to stare silently at them.
“I… I still want to help,” she said finally, sounding only more determined. She squeezed her hands into little fists, and I wondered if she’d taken what I’d said as an insult – a challenge, even. I hadn’t meant it as one. It was merely an observation, a potential clue, even, to who she was.
Her eyes flitted back up to me, brown pinning me in place. “Please, Derek,” she added softly.
Goddamn it.
“Fine,” I relented tersely, “but not this. You’re not strong enough to pull up the fish cage, and you’re so soft-hearted, you’re liable to let all the animals I catch free if given half the chance.” I ran my fingers over the stubble on my chin as I racked my brain. “Maybe I can teach you how to tend to the chickens,” I muttered, thinking aloud more than anything.
The blinding grin Wisp flashed me in return made a feeling of rightness settle in my chest, and I knew I’d made the correct decision. Then she took me by surprise by springing at me, practically mugging me as she jumped onto her tip-toes, wrapped her arms around my neck, and squeezed.
I stiffened.
No one had touched me with such genuine affection – sexual desire hardly counted – for longer than I cared to remember. She was so small against me, but stronger than I thought, and the heat her body radiated seem to almost curl itself around me.
It was… comforting.
“Sorry!” Wisp blurted a moment later, seeming to suddenly realize what she was doing. She hurriedly released me, letting go of my neck and falling back onto the soles of her feet. She no doubt took my stiffness for anger or discomfort rather than what it really was: surprise. “And thank you! I swear you won’t regret teaching me.”
Even if she turned out to be the worst chicken caretaker in the world, I already knew it to be true.
The places she’d touched me – had wrapped herself around me – remained warm the next hour.
Wisp took to looking after the roughly two dozen chickens in my coop like a fucking tadpole took to swimming. She fed them every morning and gathered the eggs they laid every afternoon. I’d never admit it, but it was amusing to watch her with them.
She talked to them, chattering on like they could actually understand her. She had even named the damn things.
“What do you think of Bernadette?” Wisp asked, squatting and examining the hen before her. She was one of the larger chickens of the coop, with light brown plumage, and her bright red wattle flapped beneath her beak as she pecked enthusiastically at the seed Wisp had sprinkled on the ground. “Or how about Matilda? Maybe Geraldine?”
They were some of the fucking ugliest names I’d ever heard. I wasn’t sure if Wisp was talking to me or the damn chicken at this point, though – I’d already made the mistake of thinking she was talking to me when she wasn’t twice yesterday, the first day I’d brought her out to the coop – and so I didn’t offer my opinion.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to name the things you plan on eating?” I asked instead.
I knew it was a mistake as soon as I saw the way her shoulders tightened. Wisp turned, her wide, brown eyes zeroing in on me from where she remained crouched next to the hen. “You’re going to eat them? But I thought you raised them for their eggs!”
And what did she think happened to them when they stopped laying eggs? Surely, she didn’t expect that I kept them around, wasting perfectly good chicken seed on dud hens?
“I do, but…”
The truth was on the tip of my tongue when Thane suddenly barked loudly to our right, causing a nearby hen to squawk noisily and flap her wings in a panic.
“Thane, you big bully,” Wisp scolded, marching over to him. “Leave Patricia alone.”
Thane whined in response, pushing his snout into her hip and demanding she pet him. Wisp obliged with a sigh.
If I didn't know better, I’d say he was jealous of the damn hens.
“But?” Wisp asked, turning back around to face me after the commotion had settled, ready to resume our conversation. Her teeth dug into her bottom lip, like she already knew what I’d been about to say, and it involved her precious chickens roasting in the oven.
Shit.
When I opened my mouth, a lie fell out. “But… but nothing. That is what they’re for. I was just referring to chickens in general.”
Wisp blinked. “Oh.” It was a happy sound, like she was pleasantly surprised by my answer.
It made the inner voice that demanded to know when I had developed such a soft spot for little girls with big, brown eyes and soft, pink lips a little easier to ignore.
“So, what’d you name the rooster?” I asked, changing the subject and gesturing at the strutting cock.
“Hmm?” Wisp hummed, following my line of sight to the rooster. “Oh! Why, Romeo, of course.”
I snorted. “Of course.”
Wisp flashed me a grin before resuming her examination of the light brown hen still pecking away at the seed near her feet. “I think she’s definitely a Geraldine.”
I cringed in sympathy for the poor chicken. “Yeah, well, tell… Geraldine… to lay off the seed, will you? If she gets much fatter, I might have to rethink frying her up.”
“Hush,” Wisp scolded light-heartedly, shoving her little hand against my shoulder in a gesture so natural and sweet that it fucking stung. “She’ll hear you.”
My eyebrows shot up incredulously.
Right.
“Sh-… Fu-… Goddamn it!” I exploded a half-second later, barely suppressing a string of cuss words from shooting out of my mouth.
That little fucker, Geraldine, had pecked a damn hole through the top of my boot.
I shot a half-hearted glare at Wisp when I heard snickering from her direction.
Quickly hiding her smile behind a hand, she shrugged. “I tried to warn you.”
Someone should have warned me.
Letting Wisp live with me was supposed to be a fucking hardship, not this, whatever this was. It felt remarkably like playing house.
I was almost grateful for the near constant reminders that we were doing just that: playing. Pretending.
There were Wisp’s nightmares, for one. She had them almost every night. I’d listen to her toss and turn on my couch. Her heartbeat would skyrocket and then she’d wake up making this loud choking noise, almost like a scream was stuck in her throat.
She didn’t talk about them – her dreams – not even when I’d taken to waking her from them a few nights ago, so I followed her cue and kept mum. I tried not to take it personally and reminded myself that with her memory being what it was, there was a chance she didn’t even know what they were about.
Still, her silence on the matter jarred me.
More than it should have.
There were also my slip-ups. During one of our excursions through the woods, I had hoisted a fallen tree up in front of her without a second thought. The trunk had been at least a foot in diameter and easily weighed a few hundred pounds. I still remembered the faint sound of her voice as she’d watched me with wide eyes.
“Holy crap, you’re strong.”
I had purposefully fumbled the log after that and acted like it strained me more than it did to carry the hunk of wood, but that didn’t make me feel much better about the foolish error.
I had also nearly shown Wisp my claws, my nails sharpening on instinct when she’d let out a shrill scream in the bathroom yesterday morning.
All over a goddamn spider.
Even with those missteps, though – and my damn near constant inner struggle not to scoop her in my arms and hide her away in my bedroom for the rest of eternity – I had to admit that Wisp… she fit.
It was almost as if there had been an empty space in my life that I’d been unaware of, and she’d just come along one day and filled it.
It pleased me more than I would ever admit to see her toothbrush lying next to mine on the bathroom vanity or to watch her rifling through my kitchen cabinets, attempting to familiarize herself with everything as she baked. (She was a fucking awful cook.)
Still, I didn't know how he would take it.
It was another reason I was so reluctant to let him loose. Even though I was him, and he was me, I couldn’t say for sure how he’d react to having her in front of him. He was possessive and unpredictable.
He hadn’t cared one way or the other for her when he’d found her on our land nearly two weeks ago, but she hadn’t been making herself comfortable in his territory at the time.
Now I knew he thought of her as his, mine.
But she wasn’t.
And until I’d hammered that home to him – to myself – I didn’t want to take any risks.
So I took to letting out the tension I could feel brewing beneath the surface any other way I could think of. At the moment, that meant wood-carving, digging my pocket knife therapeutically into the hunk of wood in my hand as I did my best to ignore the girl sitting on the other side of the couch.
It was made a nearly impossible feat by the way she was sitting, her legs tucked underneath her, her socked foot brushing up against my thigh. She had my laptop balanced precariously on the top of her thighs, clicking away.
I wasn’t a complete Neanderthal. I did have a computer and access to the Internet. One of the first things I’d done after agreeing to let her stay with me was consult it for missing persons cases in the state of Washington. There had been nothing; no one fitting her description reported missing in the correct timeframe.
I think Wisp had used the laptop more in the week and a half she’d been with me than I had in the years since I’d bought it. She liked looking things up about amnesia, and the first few days she had stared at a map of Washington until her eyes were red. I think she’d been hoping to recognize a town name.
“You know, I was thinking, we should set up an online store for you to sell your woodwork. You know, so you can expand your customer base.”
I snorted, not looking up from the piece I was working on. “No.”
“Why not? I bet people would fall over themselves to buy the stuff you make. You’re really good.”
I tried to brush off the compliment, but it stuck stubbornly to my skin, warming me from the outside in. “I don’t need the money,” I pointed out nonetheless, waving the idea away.
“Well, I sort of figured that. It’s not like you have a job.”
I allowed my eyes to glance her way at that, raising an eyebrow, and I had the pleasure of seeing her eyes widen when she realized what she’d said.
“I didn’t mean it like that!” she rushed to explain, sitting up straight. She put her feet on the floor, and I secretly mourned the comfortable warmth of her foot against my thigh. “It’s not a bad thing. You’re hardly a drag on society. I only meant that you don’t sell the eggs the chickens produce or harvest a crop or anything like that. I mean, you own a thousand acres of land; of course you don’t need the money!” She frowned, and I could practically see the gears whirling in her head. “How’d you come to own it, anyway? Your land? Was it some sort of inheritance left to you by some rich, eccentric great uncle or something?”
I stiffened at the question, but pried my mouth open and forced myself to answer. “Something like that,” I managed to bite out.
There was silence for a few minutes after that, and I was just starting to relax again, thinking maybe I’d gotten lucky and she wasn’t going to push the subject.
I should have known better.
“Did it cause some kind of family feud?” she asked tentatively. “Bad blood between you and your relatives, I mean. I can’t help but notice that no one ever comes around. You never talk about anyone, either. Not even your parents.”
The knife in my hand stilled, and I took a deep breath in through my nose in an effort not to explode at her. “Drop it, Wisp,” I grit out lowly between clenched teeth.
But it was like she didn’t hear me.
Usually so receptive to my mood, Wisp didn’t seem to pick up on the tenseness of my posture or the fact that there was a firestorm brewing beneath my relatively calm façade.
When she opened her mouth again, I could hear the misplaced concern. “Or… I mean…” she hesitated, like she finally realized she was traipsing into dangerous territory. But she couldn’t fucking help herself. “Did something happen to them?” she asked delicately.
“I said to fucking drop it!”
I could see the blaze in the back of my mind, massive orange flames licking at the sky. I could smell the smoke as it filled the air, twisting around me, collecting in my lungs and suffocating me. I acted without thought, anger taking control as I jabbed the knife straight through the hunk of wood in my hand, going so far as to pin it to the wooden coffee table, the sharp end of the tool slicing through that, too.
I stood, digging the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, painstakingly aware of my heavy breathing, the only other sound in the eerily quiet room a deep growl rumbling from Thane’s chest.
It was directed at me, of course. (Goddamn traitor.)
When I felt fit to speak, I lowered my hands and turned to face Wisp. “For Christ’s sake, are your ears as defective as your goddamn memory?”
Wisp blinked. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to...” she trailed off, not finishing her sentence, and I wanted to demand what the hell she didn’t mean to do. “I just noticed you never talk about them is all. Your family, that is. There aren’t even any pictures on the walls,” she rambled nervously. “I mean… don’t you ever get lonely out here all by yourself?”
“Are you lonely out here?” I snapped, unable to stop myself. “Because tell you what, honey, if you are, you’re more than welcome to leave.”
Her already huge brown eyes somehow widened further. “What? No! Th-that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry!” she repeated.
I was suddenly very aware of the wet sheen in Wisp’s eyes – tears. She was fucking trembling, her shoulders hunched like she was trying to fold into herself – like she was trying to hide.
Like she was afraid of me.
And just like that, my anger deflated. I could feel it seeping from my bunched muscles like air escaping a popped balloon. What remained was worse.
I should have felt guilty for blowing up at her; I knew that. I was being an asshole, twisting her words and using them against her, practically threatening to kick her out of my home when I knew she didn’t have anywhere else to go.
I was the fucking worst. Less than scum.
But I’d already known all that. And all I felt was hollow.
“Forget it,” I offered mechanically. “It’s fine. And you’re right.”
Wisp frowned, understandably confused about my sudden change of heart. “I am?”
“Yeah. I’m going crazy cooped up out here. I’m going out, probably to the bar.” Not offering her any further explanation, I went to the door to pull on my boots.
She stood, scrambling after me, but keeping a respectable distance. “What? Why? I said I was sorry. Please don’t be mad. I… I won’t talk about it anymore-”
“It’s nothing you said,” I offered breezily. (It was.) “You’re not being punished.” (I am.) “I just need to unwind, get away for a few hours.”
I didn’t say “get away from you”, but I may as well have by the hurt radiating from Wisp’s small form. But then her demeanor changed so fast I almost thought I’d imagined it. She straightened her shoulders before marching over to me and slipping on her shoes.
“What are you doing?” I demanded tersely.
“Going with you,” she offered just as briskly.
Frustration welled up in me. “Look-”
“No, you look,” she snapped, interrupting me, looking as shocked as I felt for about half a second before forging ahead. “You said I’m not being punished. And, well, maybe I want to get out for a little while, too. Besides, I didn’t get to properly check out, what’s it called…The Tavern?... last time we were there.” She paused, gesturing at me where I stood, unconsciously blocking the door. “So…?”
“Fine,” I muttered through clenched teeth after staring the stubborn fool down and seeing that she was perfectly serious. I opened the door. “Just stay out of my way. I’m not babysitting.”
She bristled before strutting past me through the open door. “Good,” she offered, eyeing me pointedly. “Because I’m not a little kid. I don’t need a babysitter.”