Firefly Nights

CHAPTER 16.33

The hens clucked like they had secrets they weren't ready to tell. The kind of secrets that lived bone-deep and came out in feathers and fussing and the impatient scratch of claws against dirt. They didn't care if I hadn't slept. Didn't care if I'd kissed a man until my lungs forgot how to breathe. They just wanted their feed, their water, their slice of warmth in a world that asked too much.

I crouched beside the coop, the wicker basket crooked in the bend of my arm, fingertips caked in dust and yolk-stained straw. Morning hadn't fully shaken the cold yet, and the damp clung to the earth like it didn't want to let go. My knees ached against the packed dirt, but I welcomed it—the grounding of it. Something real. Something small.

The hens fluttered and pecked, feathers lifting like they were shrugging off the night. My mother used to say chickens were honest creatures. She kept them not for the eggs—though she liked those too—but for the rhythm. For the reliability. She never settled for plain ones either. Brown was too dull, she said. White too predictable. So we had blues, creams, speckled ones with storm-colored feathers and angry little eyes. She liked the Ameraucanas best—the ones that laid soft lavender eggs like prayers no one had bothered to speak aloud.

Said the world was too cruel not to want beauty in strange places.

I didn't argue. I never had.

One of the hens—Henrietta, mean as sin—darted toward my boot and pecked like she knew I was late. I nudged her back with a soft tap of my toe and reached into the nest, fingers curling around a warm green shell. Still slick from the body it had come from. I held it a second too long, thumb brushing over the pale curve like it might tell me something.

Something about cycles. About softness that survives.

The ache from last night had settled into me like a slow burn. Not painful, but present. Like my body had learned something it wasn't ready to name. There were places on me that still remembered—my ribs, my hips, the inside of my thigh where his hand had rested so gently it made me want to cry. My mouth still ached from the way he kissed like he meant it. Like he was asking to stay with him without ever saying the words.

I tipped grain into the rusted pan, the scatter of it loud in the hush of the morning. The hens swarmed with a kind of desperate grace, all flapping and pecking and hunger. They didn't wait. They just took what they needed.

I wished I could be more like that.

But my thoughts wouldn't quiet. They curled around me like woodsmoke, pulling me back to the loft. To the rasp of his breath. The press of his forehead against mine. The way he hadn't tried to take anything—just been there, with all the weight and silence that came with it.

And still, I couldn't quite breathe right.

I turned toward the water trough, brushing dirt from my hands, when I heard the barn door creak open behind me. That slow, aching kind of sound that didn't rush. Just arrived.

I didn't need to look.

My body already knew.

Colt Langmore.

That steady pull of him—the way the air seemed to shift before his boots ever hit the ground. Like gravity, but quieter. He didn't announce himself. Didn't need to. The stillness he carried always came first, settling in my chest like a warning or a comfort. I could never tell which.

I stood, slowly, brushing straw off my palms, trying not to shake. Trying not to show how every part of me had gone taut with the sound of him.

"You always talk to your hens that much?" His voice was low, worn-in like an old saddle. It scraped just enough to leave a mark.