My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 269

269 /328

Mina

I'd gotten up before the light, careful not to wake him, which was the first thing I'd done in my life purely because I wanted to.

The lodge kitchen was small and cold at that hour, the kind of cold that lives in stone and doesn't leave until the fire has been going a good while, and I'd crouched by the coal and coaxed it awake the way Marta had shown me, the way I'd refused to thank Marta for at the time, and I was glad for it now. The oil went in the pan. The pan went on the coals. I stood in the small kitchen in a borrowed nightgown that was two sizes too large and waited for the heat to come, and I let myself be happy about it. Quietly. The way you're happy about a thing you don't want to startle.

He was still in the room down the hall.

I knew because I could hear him. Not the breathing specifically, the way I would have heard a wolf's breathing — I'd been damping my ears down in crowded keeps long enough that the habit stuck even now — but his weight in the bed, the particular creak of the frame when he shifted, the long settling quiet of a man deep in sleep. I'd been listening to it for an hour already, from the moment I came awake and found his arm still across me.

That was the part I kept coming back to. The arm across me.

I'd spent the whole night in it. I'd woken twice in the dark and both times his arm was there, draped across my waist in the unselfconscious way of a man who doesn't know he's doing it, who pulls the warm thing in his bed toward himself in his sleep without deciding to. His chest had been against my back the whole night. I knew every degree of the heat that came off him. I knew the exact texture of the hair on his forearm under my fingers because I'd run my hand over it in the dark and it had taken everything I had not to wake him to tell him something I didn't have words for.

The oil started to shimmer at the edges of the pan.

I'd had men. Fewer than people would guess, more than the North would approve of. None of it had been bad, exactly. Some of it had been good in the plain functional way that things can be good. But not once — not one single time — had I lain down with someone and actually felt the lack of them the moment they weren't there.

You take what you can get when you grow up the way I grew up, and what I had gotten was fine, and fine had been enough, because I had always known who I was actually saving it for, even when I told myself I wasn't.

He'd been a voice on a phone for ten years. A voice that knew the right thing to say at midnight and a bad joke at the wrong moment and exactly how long to let a silence go before filling it. A voice that had pulled me through more nights than I could count in a fortress full of people who'd have stepped on me without slowing down.