A gentleman—a good person—would avert his eyes. I watch, lips parted in the darkness, trying to memorize the way she looks as she wiggles, hopping a little, and then her breasts bounce free. They’re full and round and pale, the lower curve kissing her ribcage, her pink nipples puckered in the cold. There’s a red line around her torso where the elastic was digging into her skin, and even from here I can tell it’s got striations in it, tiny ridges and valleys in her flesh.
I wonder what they’d feel like under my fingertips, my tongue, and ball my hand into a fist. I haven’t blinked. I’ve been holding my breath for fear that she could hear me if I breathe, though now she’s trying to pull the bra over her head, both arms in the air and her face covered, her braid tangled somewhere in the electric blue and she’s twisting and turning and jiggling—
She’s stuck, and I’m transfixed. I’m getting hard. I keep watching as she takes a deep breath and wriggles a little more and then finally pulls the bra off, shaking her head and making a face as she throws it onto the bed and then grabs something else.
Finally, I break away. Before I mount the steps to the porch I sit down on them for a moment, take off my gloves and hat, and let the cold bite into my skin. It doesn’t feel good but it does feel right, like maybe it can freeze that out of my brain. I stood there. I watched, and that old voice says it’s wrong to want and a newer, correct one says it’s wrong to watch without permission.
I consider throwing myself into the creek. Instead, I stand and open the door to the cabin.
I’ve barely got my coat and boots off when the bedroom door opens and Andi’s standing there in thermal underwear, the shirt rainbow-striped and the bottom avocado-patterned. I have no idea where she gets these things, because the stores I frequent sell long johns in three colors: white, gray, and black.
“Oh good,” she says, and she’s smiling, and her braid is over one shoulder, her feet bare and her top just tight enough with nothing underneath that I can see her nipples pointing at me. I want to lift her top and lick the marks her bra left behind. “You made it.”
“That wasn’t in question,” I say, running a hand through my hair and making eye contact. I can feel my face going red, and I hope it looks like I’m flushed from the cold.
“Your brother Reid called,” she says, nodding toward the kitchen, where my phone’s charging from a battery. “I almost answered, but then I figured…”
She leaves I’m not sure how he feels about me unsaid, which is fair.
“Thanks,” I say, and head into the kitchen because no one can leave me alone.
“They’re not really a migratory species,” I tell Reid for what has to be the thirtieth time. “And especially not the ones here. She’s fine.”
He makes his grumpy-slash-concerned face at me, the picture jerky because he insists that I videochat from the middle of nowhere via a satellite connection.
“She looks cold,” he insists. “Here. See?”
“I don’t—” I say, but he’s already taking his phone to the back door, holding it up to the window, and flicking on the floodlights overlooking my back yard. In the very back of the cage on the left—sized more like a large dog run than a cage—is a lump inside a wooden crate, turned on its side and perched high up on a pole. I’m pretty sure the lump is glaring.
“She looks fine,” I tell Reid. “Eagles overwinter in New England and Minnesota, where it regularly gets much colder than this.”
“In the wild, they huddle together to share body heat,” he says, with the confidence of someone who’s read a Wikipedia page. He flips the camera around so he can glare at me again. “Vicky’s alone out there.”
God, it’s Vicky now.
“She’s sheltered.”
“You’ve got a whole collection of heating pads and hot water bottles,” he says, walking through the house. “Tell me which ones are for animals and which ones are for when you go camping with your buddies and move rocks or whatever for two days straight and then spend a day lying on the couch complaining about your back when you get home.”
“I don’t do that.”
Reid snorts. “Sure.”
Behind me, I hear the bedroom door open, followed by padded footsteps. When I turn, Andi’s standing in the doorway to the kitchen, wearing my sweater again, eyebrows raised. I carefully don’t think about jiggling or how I’ve seen her bare nipples without her permission, because if I did, I might spiral.
“It’s Reid,” I tell her, and then tell Reid, “This is Andi,” and yes, introductions are extra-awkward on a video chat with a dicey connection.
“Hi,” she says, and comes over to sit next to me. “You named the animals?”
“They needed names,” he says, a little defensive.
“Oh, I’m on your side,” she says, and I think it gets a small smile out of Reid.
“They are wildlife,” I mutter, not that anyone’s listening.
“It’s for show. I heard him call them Victoria and Fluffy just yesterday,” Andi says, and I frown at her. “I think he doesn’t want to get attached.”
“That’s not it,” I protest. “It can be dangerous to start anthropomorphizing wild animals, because you’re less likely to treat something named Fluffy as a threat even though he’s got just as many teeth as C-347.”
They both look at me for a long moment.
“Are you the cool girl Sadie and Ariel keep talking about?” Reid asks, ignoring my good point to change the subject. Andi laughs.
“Dunno. I hope so,” she says. “I used to live next to you guys when we were kids, but I think we moved away before you were born. Ariel and Sadie were really little. I’m surprised they remember me.”
“Mostly Sadie,” Reid says. “But Ariel believes everything she says.”
“I do remember them ganging up on Jacob,” Andi says. Jacob’s about two years older than Sadie, and they’ve never gotten along very well. “Your mom had a baby, like, two months before we moved, but I think that was—”
“That was Reid,” I interrupt, and fuck, I should have mentioned this to Andi before so it wouldn’t put Reid on the spot like this. “He transitioned a couple years ago.”
“Oh! Neat,” she says. I think a pixelated Reid blinks.
“Thanks?” he says.
“But yeah, you obviously don’t remember me,” Andi goes on. “You were tiny when we left. Are you the youngest? You’re not the youngest.”
“No, there’s two more,” Reid says, and doesn’t look thrilled about it.
“Drew and Ruth still live with our parents,” I add.
“You know how there are songs to help people remember all the presidents? Or the capitol of every state?” Andi asks, leaning back in her chair. “You guys need that for your siblings.”
Reid snorts, but he sort of smiles, too.
“There’s only twelve,” he says. “You can’t remember twelve names?”
Reid hassles Andi for another minute, until she’s laughing, and I put up with it for a few minutes while I watch the battery on the iPad dwindle.