AMARIS
The birds woke me. Or she did. I still cannot say which.
The room was grey at the edges, that hour before the pack house remembers itself, and I surfaced out of sleep all at once with my heart going quick and my hand already pressed flat against my own sternum, and I lay there in the tangle of three people's warmth trying to work out what had pulled me up.
Then I remembered, and I stopped breathing for a second on purpose, and I reached in.
The way you press your tongue against a tooth. The way you pat a coat pocket in the street to feel the key.
I have a wolf.
I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing out loud in a bed containing two unconscious men, because the last thing this situation needed was me cackling at the ceiling at five in the morning, and also because if I started I was not entirely confident it would come out as laughing.
