He leaned against the wall, his legs stretched across the foot of the bed, and rubbed his jaw. “How long have you been running away from something?”
I blinked at the change of topic, and took a long while to reorient myself to having a conversation while tucked into bed instead of rolling around in the sheets with him. “Uh... it’s been a couple of months since Rocko...”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve been running longer than that.”
He was right, although the moon only knew how he knew that about me. I concentrated on smoothing my hands over the sheets and quilt, distantly wondering if Cricket would reappear to snuggle and use my hair as his pillow. “A long time.”
Henry made a thoughtful noise, his attention never wavering from my face. “That makes it a challenging habit to break.”
“I don’t intend to,” I said softly. “It’s too dangerous to stay in one place. If it weren’t Rocko, it would be... something else.”
His attention drifted as I moved my feet nervously under the sheets, and his hand landed on my ankle to squeeze gently. “The nice thing about a pack, Ophelia, is that you have other people to help when things go wrong.”
“You don’t want me to stay here,” I whispered. “You don’t understand. I’m trouble. Every day of my life, I’ve been trouble. I’m just no good—even my parents knew it.”
He went still, head cocked. “Your parents?”
“I’m dangerous,” I said. He needed to understand. Once he did, he wouldn’t want to sit there on a bed with me, and he sure as hell wouldn’t want to sleep with me. Or even sleep in the same house as me. But I didn’t want him to think it was a normal situation where he could say sweet things and I’d fall in love with him and everything would be fine. Happily ever after didn’t exist for me. “I’ve always been dangerous—my magic doesn’t work right. We had to move constantly so other witches wouldn’t figure it out. We couldn’t stay with a coven. My parents…fought about it, all the time. What to do. Whether to send me away to some boarding school. Whether to just strip away my magic completely and…and leave me.”
I cleared my throat as emotions I hadn’t acknowledged in years surged to the surface. I did not want to cry in front of him. I barely knew him. Somehow sleeping with him would have been less intimate than sharing my family history and tearing up over it. I didn’t cry in front of anyone; I couldn’t afford that kind of weakness. Only strength mattered. I had to stay strong.
His expression darkened as he watched me, and his fingers dug into my ankle in slightly more than a reassuring grip. “They suggested abandoning you? They told you this?”
“They didn’t have to,” I said. I couldn’t meet his gaze. He’d probably grown up in some idyllic wolf pack, surrounded by support and love, and wouldn’t understand the burden of being such a disappointment to one’s family. “They fought about it all the time. They tried to leave me with a coven once, but the coven wasn’t…very nice, and I managed to escape and found them before my folks could skip town...” I trailed off, distracted by the horrible memory of being surrounded by the coven members who’d wanted to use me in a ritual.
Henry growled deep in his chest and kept up the gentle pressure on my ankle. “That is horrible. They deserve death for such a thing.”
I attempted a smile. “You didn’t know me when I was a kid. They didn’t have any other choice.”
“No child deserves that,” he said, with enough fierceness that I had no doubt he believed it all the way to his core.
It was an easy thing to say though, since he didn’t know all the awful things I’d done. Burning down houses, even if it was by accident, tended to alienate one’s family, the neighbors, the coven... and it drew the attention of the police and Child Services when that was the last thing witches needed.
When I didn’t speak, Henry made a rough noise and squeezed my foot more. “You didn’t deserve that.”
He desperately wanted me to believe it. I wasn’t sure whether it was possible, since I had the evidence in front of me every day, in every memory. The silence stretched and I wondered how long he would stay. A guy like him couldn’t possibly just want to talk, though he hadn’t picked a very sexy topic. Maybe he’d disengage and go find someone else to sleep with. But Henry was sprawled out and looked unmovable as a boulder, his whole arm draped over my legs as he watched me.
He reminded me of Cricket suddenly—he’d started with a hand on my ankle, then his arm over that ankle, then the arm over both legs, then sprawling closer. It didn’t strike me as seductive, like he meant to make more of it. No, it felt more like comfort. An urge to soothe the uneasiness out of me. My head rested back against the headboard as I watched him, waiting for him to run away like everyone else in my life that I wanted to stay.
Why was it only the people who hurt me who wanted to stick around?
Henry’s foot moved and toed my loom, though part of his attention remained on my face. “When did you start with the crafting? Weaving and…other stuff?”
“Oh.” I craned my neck to frown at where the loom rested on the floor, and thought absently that I should ease the tension on the warp before I went to bed. But I didn’t want to move. Fatigue weighed me down and it grew harder to keep my eyes open. Henry radiated heat and a comfortable confidence, and the fear that usually kept me awake through the night dissipated in his very capable presence. “I dunno. I started knitting when I was little and learned how to put some magic into it, and that seemed to be the only thing that helped my control.”
He sat up a little and sniffed the air as he peered at the loom, then at the bag of yarn. “You put magic into it?”
I sat up so I could maybe show him, but Henry didn’t move from where he sprawled across my legs, and blinked at me when my face got closer to his. So I gestured lamely at the bag of yarn. “Yeah. I can make the magic into just another strand that’s knitted or woven into the cloth, and if I siphon off that energy, the rest of it left over isn’t quite so out of control.”
Henry made a thoughtful noise, studying me instead of the loom. “What else helps your control?”
My cheeks heated as I waited for the hint that some kinds of physical exertion would help tire me out, but he only waited, eyebrows raised. Maybe it had been entirely innocent? Maybe he didn’t mean it suggestively, even though every male witch I’d ever met had leered over the same possibility. I couldn’t read him and it drove me crazy. His aura revealed nothing about him other than an intense interest in me.
I cleared my throat and pushed away the memory of how it felt when he’d kissed my neck and behind my ear. If I weren’t such a coward, I could have felt a hell of a lot more. “Not really anything that I’ve discovered. Not that I’ve…tried a lot of things.”
“Sounds like it’s time to start trying things,” he said.
A laugh escaped before I could swallow it back, and Henry’s head tilted again in that wolf-like curiosity. He waited until I finally said, “It’s not that easy. It’s not like I can just randomly try things and hope that it helps with my control. I don’t know until something pushes me into being out of control. So unless I want to endanger people, there’s no way of learning what helps.”
