in his lips he handed her the makeshift suture.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” she said.
“This…” he said, “this is not my kidding face.”
Sarah reluctantly took the needle and thread. “Maybe you should lie down?”
“I think… if I do that, I’m going to throw up,” he wheezed.
“I’m…” she tried to decide on the best way to get at the wound with a careful hand. Resolutely, she swung a leg over top of him and sat down on his lap, straddling him. He gave a little squeak of surprise, but she shushed him. “I’ve never done this before,” she said. “If you don’t want crooked stitches… or to lose an eye, for that matter, then… hold me still. And you hold still, too.”
It was not the most orthodox medical procedure but he reached out and his warm hands steadied on her naked thighs. She felt a shiver and swallowed around the lump in her throat. His hands felt good on her skin, like an electric current, and she almost let out a little sigh of pleasure as they squeezed her soft skin as she made the first pierce of the needle.
Dylan didn’t make so much as a sound but simply stared straight ahead at her collarbone, as if staring through her. He’s not looking at me, she thought. He’s looking past the pain. The first stitch was clumsy and difficult. It was odd to push a needle through the skin, especially live skin, and it made it all the stranger that Dylan didn’t react at all. She couldn’t tell if she was hurting him, and bit her lip.
“You’re doing great,” he whispered, when she was halfway through.
The only hint of life from him was when his grip on her thighs tightened, and she looked down and realized that over the course of stitching him, his hands had accidentally moved further up their thighs, his fingers already underneath the thin fabric of her shorts. Any closer…, she felt her heart beating faster.
But then it was over, and she had tied the last stitch. Reluctantly she stood up, and felt his hands fall away. There was still a ghost sensation of them on her thighs, and she sniffed to avoid the annoying flush that seemed to sweep her whole body.
“All good?” he asked. “How do I look?”
“Wrecked,” she said honestly.
“Good, good. I would hate to feel any worse than I look,” he joked.
She absently put the make-shift suture away and poured water in the kettle and put it on top of the stove which was already warm. Dylan went to the small washroom and she heard water from the creek splashing on his face, and then he returned with a fresh shirt on, and several steri-strip bandages over the gash.
Neither of them spoke as Dylan collapsed on one end of the couch, and Sarah took the other, and handed him a blue cup full of tea – it was infused with several dried herbs that Chris himself had picked and left out in the sun. Dylan could detect sage, ginger, yarrow… even something tart, like rosehips.
“I think they’ll come back,” he muttered, after they had been quiet for several minutes.
She turned, her eyes following him over the lip of her cup as she sipped. His black hair was still wet where he’d washed the blood off it, and she caught the edge of his green eyes glaring into the empty fireplace. Behind them, an ember popped in the stove. A drop from the faucet landed on her dirty plates from morning before.
“Why do you think that?”
“They were poachers, weren’t they? That’s the only explanation… and now they know that there’s a bear on this island. Shit, two bears. More than that, they know that the bears are also… us. This is bad, Sarah.”
She merely nodded. She’d already grasped the gravity of the situation, but she let him get there on his own. “And Chris injured… maybe, even killed… one of them,” she breathed aloud. The image of the screaming young man trailing blood was still blazoned like a terrible nightmare in her memory.
“I suppose that’s the one thing we have in common,” he said, “shifters and poachers. Hurt one of us and we’ll hunt down the people that did.”
She shivered, despite the warmth of the hot tea in her hands. “I’m… scared, Dylan…”
He looked toward her, and set his tea on the small oaken table. “I know, me too.” His face straightened in the shadows of the lamps, his gaze a green reverie suddenly