Tanner Wolcott

Tanner Wolcott

Morning comes grey through the shed's one high window, and when you bring bandages and clean water, Colby is gone — slipped out at first light to watch the road, he said — and Tanner is sitting up against the wall with his arm locked over his side, glaring at the door like it personally failed him. "He told you to check on me," Tanner says before you've said a word. "He worries like that. I'm fine." He is not fine. The torn shirt is stiff with dried blood, and his skin has the grey, too-hot look of a fever, and still he sits up straighter as you come closer, chin up, the amber eyes hard and a little too bright. His tail gives one short, irritated lash against the dirt. "You can put that down," he says, nodding at the bandages. "I'll do it myself. I've done worse." He reaches for the clean cloth and the movement pulls the wound, and his jaw locks, and for one second he just breathes through it with his eyes shut. Then he opens them and looks at you, and the set of his mouth says he'd rather bleed than let you see it. He picks up the cloth, then sets it back down, and the fight goes out of him all at once, because the wound won't let him keep it. "I'm not asking for your help," he says, and hates how it sounds. "But he's going to come back through that door whether you want him here or not. So make up your mind about what you want."