Rye carried Marmot from the car, eyes everywhere.
“Whoa. Did you really build this?” he asked, taking in the not-quite-finished addition to the side of the house.
A rush of pride washed through Charlie.
“Not all of it. It was a small house originally. I gutted it and redid the interior about ten years ago. I’ve been adding to it over the last few years.”
When he closed the door behind them, he heard the familiar thump that was Jane jumping off the bed to greet him.
A minute later, she appeared at the end of the hallway and slunk majestically toward them.
“That’s Jane.”
Rye snorted. “I guess that makes you Tarzan?”
Charlie shook his head. It was exactly what Simon, Jack’s partner had said, when he’d begun feeling comfortable enough around Charlie to joke around.
Before Charlie could say anything, Marmot jumped from Rye’s arms and shot down the hallway. Charlie rushed after her, ready to throw himself between this cat bullet and Jane, but his movements were slow motion in comparison.
He had visions of a vicious fight—tufts of fur flying and claws scratching at his sweet Jane, who might’ve been large but would never hurt anything. He vibrated with tension, ready to pluck the hell beast off Jane at any sign of aggression.
But Marmot didn’t attack. She slid to a halt a foot from Jane and stuck out her nose. Half Jane’s size and sleek where Jane was fluffy, Marmot circled Jane, sniffing at her. Jane stood still and let herself be sniffed.
Marmot yipped and Jane meowed her ripping metal meow. Then Jane plopped down in the middle of the hallway and Marmot began licking her all over as Jane purred.
Charlie couldn’t believe his little lone wolf was instantly won over.
“Not what I thought was going to happen,” Charlie said. No longer worried about Jane, he could focus on Rye. “Let’s get you taken care of.”
He led Rye to the master bathroom. He loved this bathroom. The floor was a deep indigo penny tile and the shower a herringbone of a sea glass blue so light you had to look twice to be sure of the color. It had taken two weeks to tile.
The shower was the most luxurious thing in the house. Once his back had begun to ache at the end of a long day and his knees twinge with too much kneeling, he stood under the shower and let the heat pour over his aching body and imagined that the warmth of it could follow him when he dried off. It was the one thing in the house he’d designed just for himself.
Charlie got the first aid kit from under the sink and turned to find Rye staring at the shower with naked longing. Probably sleeping on the floor of an unheated house with no water didn’t provide many opportunities to take one.
“You wanna take a shower?” Charlie offered.
He could see the moment when Rye’s kneejerk no was coming—the flared nostrils and narrowed eyes—but then Rye looked down.
“So bad,” he said sheepishly, and raised his eyes to Charlie’s.
Charlie forgot to speak for a moment. In the light of his bathroom, Rye’s gray eyes were the same saturation as that sea glass tile—luminous and tumbled smooth by the violence of the oceans that surrounded them.
“Uh, yeah, be my guest,” Charlie said.
He looked at Rye’s clothes. Jeans streaked with dirt, a faded black long-sleeved T-shirt for some band he’d never heard of, a too-big jean jacket lined with fleece.
“If you put your clothes outside, I’ll stick them in the wash and leave you some sweats,” he offered.
Rye’s pupils dilated.
“Thanks,” he said softly. “Or...maybe you better let me do it. They’re probably a little ripe.”
Charlie waved his concern away.
“Take your time. I’ll just...check on the cats.”
Chapter Seven
Rye
Rye groaned as he stepped under the hot waterfall of Charlie’s shower, but his groan turned to a whimper when water ran down over the cut on his leg.
He’d never liked blood and just thinking about the cut made him woozy.
He luxuriated under the water for a while, then washed his hair with Charlie’s shampoo. It was jasmine, and made Rye think of dark, secret gardens strung with fairy lights a thousand miles away from Wyoming.
When he got out of the shower he found clothes on the other side of the bathroom door. He wrapped his dripping hair in the towel and pulled on navy blue sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt that said WYOMING in brown letters outlined in yellow and a man riding a horse underneath it in the same brown and yellow. It was hideous. The clothes clung to his damp skin. Both were so huge he felt like he was being swallowed.
He hung up the towel and crept out of the bathroom, the extra fabric of the sweatpants pooling at his ankles and his hair dampening the shoulders of the sweatshirt. Following a cattish sound, he found Charlie, Jane, and Marmot in a high-ceilinged living room with exposed wood beams and a wood floor covered with a deep gray rug. On the rug, Jane and Marmot were playing a kind of tug-of-war with Charlie, who was on his back with a sleeve in each of their mouths.