“I appreciate the thought,” Dax said. “I really do. But stay out of this.”
She came up empty. Dax and Cluck may have been made of the same things, but they were no more alike than sand and glass.
“You’re loyal.” Dax threw the crumpled bag on the table. “That counts with us. But stay out of things you don’t know anything about.”
He yanked her over to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap. He held her hands under and squirted dish soap into her palms.
“What, you think my hands aren’t clean?” she asked. “You think I’m gonna make everything dirty?”
“This isn’t for us.” He rubbed his hands over hers. “It’s for you.”
“I know how to wash my own hands.”
He scrubbed her harder. “Do you know what happens to people who touch them?”
“Who?”
“The guy you shoved.”
The feel of his hands and the soap’s fake lemon reached her stomach. She swallowed to keep everything still.
Her words stalled in her throat. They turned to a weak hum. Her hands went limp in his.
The Paloma instinct still ruled her. Even to stop a fight, she’d touched Matías instead of Dax. And this family was as afraid of touching a Paloma as hers was of touching a Corbeau.
“If you touch them and you don’t know what you’re doing, they make you sick,” Dax said.
Know what you’re doing. Hitting. Kicking. Things that drew blood.
Dax splashed a last rinse over her hands. He loosened his grip and reached for a dish towel.
She pulled her hands free and ran out the back door.
“You should be thanking me,” Dax yelled after her.
She kept going until she got to the river. She searched the water. The dull pink hadn’t surfaced. Her tail hadn’t washed up again. She plunged her hands in, looking out for the fabric and beads, letting the river strip away the dish soap and the feel of Dax’s hands.
The sun fell below the tops of the trees. Cluck found her as the light turned the branches gold.
“What were you thinking?” he asked.
She kept her eyes on the water. “News travels fast.”
“I hired you,” he said. “Anything you do, I hear about it. What if Dax had figured out who you were? What if—who was he, your brother, your cousin? What if he’d figured out where you were?”
“But they didn’t,” she said.
He got in front of her. His eyes adjusted, almost red in this light. When the sun hit his hair, long and messy enough to hide his feathers, it looked copper.
“You think you’re outside of this,” he said. “You think because your family threw you out you’re not part of this. Guess what, it doesn’t work that way.”
She looked past him at the water. Sundown cast a sheet of rose gold over the surface.
“I get it,” Cluck said. “Believe me, I do. I wouldn’t want Dax messing up anyone I cared about either.”
Lace looked at him. “Are you kidding? Matías would’ve kicked his ass.”
His shoulders relaxed, and he almost smiled. “Then I’m sorry I didn’t get to see it.”
She unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it off him. Pulled his undershirt off by the bottom hem.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She took his hands and led him into the river, making him walk with her until the water lapped at his thighs and her hips.
It swirled around them. The rose gold curled into scrolls. The sun’s hands warmed his bare back. She set her palms on his skin and found it fever-hot.
The scar on her forearm meant she could never be loyal to her family. Her name meant she could never be loyal to the Corbeaus. The only one left to be loyal to was him.
“This is the border between my family’s part of the woods, and yours,” she said. “Right here, we’re not standing anywhere that belongs to anybody.”
“Yes, we are,” he said. “Because it’s water.”
“I was careful,” she said.
He held a wet palm to her cheek. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“Everybody gets hurt,” she said. “You know that.”
Jamais couard n’aura belle amie.
Faint heart never won true love.
He gave Lace a head start, so she’d get back to the house before he did. He’d wait a few minutes and then follow. The last thing they needed was Dax seeing them both together, soaked in river water.
His wet clothes stuck to him. He turned his back to the river. Every glint off the water felt sharp as a glass shard. Every rustle of the current through the tree roots stung. In a few days his family would pack up, leave Almendro for the next town, and put a long stretch of highway between them and this river.
Lace’s shadow disappeared into the farthest trees, and all the sharp edges settled into his chest.
It wasn’t this river he’d miss. It was the girl who kept pulling him into it.
He went after her. He wanted them both to stand in the winter rain of the Carmel River, the shallows like topaz. He wanted to show her blue hour Mexican jays and vermillion flycatchers, bright as flames, lured hundreds of miles outside their range by the silt of the Pajaro. He wanted them both to find their footing in the glacier-carved bed of Fallen Leaf, the water new from the rain turning over the whole lake every eight years.
“Lace.” He caught up and put a hand on her arm.
She turned into his touch, but said, “I thought the whole point was showing up at different times.”
He dropped his hand from her arm. “Have you thought about what you’re gonna do when we leave town?”
The shadow of a few leaves crossed her face. “Not really.”
He tried not to nod, knowing his nod would look slow and heavy. With her two-word answer, the disappointment crept up on him. He hadn’t realized until he’d asked the question that he’d wanted her to say yes, she’d worried about it like he did when he saw the light on the water. Or no, that it hadn’t occurred to her. Something surer than “not really.” “Not really” was her version of a shrug.
Maybe after this week, he wouldn’t be anything more to her than the guy who showed her how to climb a tree. She’d remember him putting white feathers on her back, but she’d forget, one color at a time, the way the sun hit them.
It was still worth asking. She’d already covered him like beads of river water.
“Would you consider coming with me?” he said.
The sky flashed gold in her eyes. “What?”
“I mean coming with us,” he said. “We’re heading out on Monday. Madera County, then Mariposa. I know it means you wouldn’t be near your family, but how much are you really seeing them now?”
“I don’t want you to feel sorry for me,” she said.
“I don’t. I’m saying you have a job with us if you want it.”
“You don’t have to look out for me.”
“Do you have somewhere else you want to go?” he asked. “Do you have somewhere else you want to be more than you want to be with me?”
Her lips parted, her eyes going over the ground like she was searching for the glimmer of something lost. But she didn’t say anything.
“Sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to answer right now. You can think about it.”
She lifted her eyes from the ground. “No.”
“No, you don’t want to think about it?” he asked.
“No, there’s nowhere I want to be more than where you are.”
He felt the sky shifting deeper blue, falling toward the dark of the water.
“What?” he asked.
“I haven’t thought about what would happen when you left town because I didn’t want to,” she said. “I didn’t want to think about being somewhere you’re not.”
“Is that a yes?” he asked.
She smiled, and the woods turned from shadow to all blue, pure and dark. “What do you think?”
He slid a hand onto the back of her neck and pulled her into him.
The harder he kissed her, the more he picked up the taste of river salt, pink as her tail, glinting on her mouth like glass beads. He could smell the sun-warmed water and wild sky lupines of Honey Lake. He could feel them both getting their clothes soaked in the Estrella River, its water stirred by a hundred little earthquakes they’d never feel unless he held her so close and so still his breath sounded the same as hers.