Whisper by Harper Alexander Page A

momentarily, auto pilot taking me to Jay's shelter three tents down. I paused where his silhouette was projected onto the canvas, blinking at it, feeling the urge to caress the paint strokes of the ocean that were painted there. They were like rippling blue muscles on the shadow of his back.
    Wondering abruptly where such an urge had come from, I shook my tired self out of it and moved on to the flap of the tent. The instinct to knock quickly found me feeling foolish standing there with my hand raised, and I tried a little harder to focus, putting my arm back at my side where it belonged. “Jay?” I called instead.
    His silhouette straightened from where it seemed to be arranging bedding, and he stepped over a bundle of some sort and came to the entrance. Pushing back the flap, he stepped out into the fresh bite of the spring darkness. My breath made a cloud in his face.
    “I don't have any blankets,” I announced.
    Another time, he might have told me I'd be fine and sent me back to bed, but seeing my sleepy disorientation, he chose to humor me that time. “You can have mine,” he said, ducking into his tent to grab them.
    In my compromised state, I still managed to notice that he seized the single article that he had to his own name. “Jay – no,” I protested rather pathetically, all but slurring my words. I could only hope my frown spoke for itself. “You'll freeze.”
    He scoffed at me, lightly, but I couldn't divine if it was to defend his fur-skinned manliness or actually because my sleep-addled worries were amusing. He deposited the bedding into my arms and turned me around, pushing me back the way I had come. I was determined to be stubborn, though, not one to tolerate him pushing me around just because I was drowsy and easy to take advantage of. Never mind that giving me the means to keep warm did not really fall under the category of one human being taking advantage of another.
    I turned back around, my frown deepening. “I didn't come to take your own blankets.”
    “No? Then what did you come for; just to complain?”
    “I...just take them back, Jay. I have my thoughts to keep me warm.”
    His eyebrows cocked slightly at that, as if I'd volunteered information he didn't necessarily want to know. I couldn't imagine what he thought I had said, though. For that matter, I didn't know what I was saying. But I cast the blankets at his feet. He retrieved them with his brows still lingering in that funny position, though now it might have been more from amusement.
    “Thanks anyway,” I finished before he could throw them back, this time likely in my face, and I turned back toward my tent. No bundle of relentless good will thwacked me in the back or parachuted down over my head, so I returned to my tent triumphant, irrationally smug, and cold.
    I was sleepwalking before I got there, however, and the thoughts that kept me warm turned out to be schemes of spiriting myself to the stables in place of my tent, where I let myself into the arena and lay down with the horses. I was just sinking to the perfumed depths of my nightly euphoria when a pair of hands slipped into the waters of my dreams and hauled me out by the shoulders. My eyes fluttered at the interruption, seeing only the dark forms of sleeping horses, but I could smell Jay's pine soap and hear the murmur of his quiet voice at my ear, coaxing me up.
    “Not tonight, Willow,” I heard him say gently, which for some reason I took to mean Not on my watch , and then he steered me from my desired resting place and cast me back into a respectable tent for the night. His, I discovered as he tucked me into the covers and I snuggled in, pulling them up to my chin. Then it was on with my dreams – of horses galloping through Thomas Kinkade paintings, splashing wet paint onto everything and rendering themselves works of art, and of following the shell-shaped hoofprints of one frothy white stallion, where he led me to one of the seven wonders of the world and