Burning Stripes

The whimper was small. Almost nothing. The kind of sound a dog makes in its sleep when it's chasing something it can't catch.

I heard it anyway.

I'd been staring at the same junction box on the same blueprint for twenty minutes, my pencil hovering over a load calculation I couldn't get to balance. The math was fine. The math was always fine. It was the rest of it, the part where numbers had to become a building that wouldn't kill anyone, that kept me at my desk past midnight.

Snow whimpered again. Louder this time.

I turned in my chair. His bed was a lump of blankets in the dark, the shape of him barely visible under the quilt his grandmother had sent him last winter. Handmade, he'd told me, with a kind of pride he didn't usually show about anything. The stitching was crooked in places. He'd pointed that out too, like he was apologizing for it.

"Snow?"

The lump went still. Too still. The way a rabbit goes still when it hears a branch snap.

"I'm fine," he said. His voice came out wrong. Tight, like his throat was closing around the words.

I stood up. My knees popped. Twenty-four years old and my body already sounded like an old man's. My father would've laughed at that, would've said something about how I spent too much time sitting and not enough time living. I could hear his voice in my head sometimes, clear as a radio. Harvey, you're gonna calc yourself into an early grave.

I walked the six steps from my desk to Snow's bed. The floorboards creaked in the same spots they always did. Room 214 was old, older than the university, older than most of the buildings on this side of campus. The radiator knocked all winter. The window stuck in summer. And I'd been living in it with Snow for eight months now, long enough to know the rhythm of his breathing when he slept, the way he hummed to himself when he thought I wasn't listening, the smell of whatever he cooked on the hot plate he wasn't supposed to have.

He was shaking. I could see it now, the fine tremor running through the blanket like wind through tall grass.

"Hey." I put my hand on what I thought was his shoulder. "What's going on?"

He flinched. Hard. Like I'd burned him.

I pulled back the blanket.

The room was dark except for my desk lamp, and in that dim yellow light Snow looked like something carved. His fur, white with faint gray stripes, was matted with sweat. His eyes were open, pupils blown wide, and they caught the light in a way that made him look wild. Not animal wild. Something older than that. Something that didn't have a name.

His hand was between his legs. He jerked it away when he saw me looking, but not fast enough.

"I told you I'm fine." His voice cracked on fine.

"Bullshit."

He turned his face into the pillow. His ears, those soft triangular ears that usually stood up when he was paying attention, were flat against his skull. I'd never seen them do that before. Not even when Professor Aldridge called on him in class and he didn't have the answer. Not even when those guys from the engineering department said something under their breath when he walked past.

"Snow. Look at me."

"No."

"Okay." I sat down on the edge of his bed. The mattress sagged under my weight, and he rolled toward me a little before catching himself. "Then just listen. You're burning up. You're shaking. You're making noises I've never heard you make. So either you're sick and we need to go to the clinic, or something else is happening. Either way, I'm not leaving."

He was quiet for a long time. The radiator knocked. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughed.

"It's not sickness," he finally said.

"Then what?"

He didn't answer. But his hand found mine in the dark. His fingers were hot, too hot, and they curled around my wrist with a strength that surprised me. Snow was lean, all long limbs and sharp angles. He looked like a strong wind could knock him over. But his grip on my wrist was iron.

"It happens twice a year," he said. Each word seemed to cost him something. "Usually in spring and fall. I can feel it coming about a week before. I take suppressants. I've always taken them. But the pharmacy ran out and the new shipment doesn't come until Thursday and I thought I could just, I don't know, wait it out."

The words tumbled out of him like water through a broken dam. I'd never heard him talk this much at once. Snow was quiet by nature. Not shy, exactly. Just someone who'd learned to take up as little space as possible.

"Suppressants for what?"

He let go of my wrist. Rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. His chest rose and fell too fast, like he'd been running.

"You know what I am."

"Yeah. You're a tiger-beastkin. So what?"

"So nothing." His laugh was bitter, a small broken thing. "So everything. You're human, Harvey. You don't have this. You don't have a week every spring and fall where your body decides it's not yours anymore. Where every nerve ending feels like it's on fire and the only thing that helps is, "

He stopped. His jaw clenched.

"Is what?"

"Forget it."

"Snow."

"I said forget it."

I didn't move. The radiator knocked again, a hollow sound, like someone tapping on a door that wasn't there. I thought about all the nights I'd spent at this desk, working on blueprints, while Snow slept ten feet away. I thought about the way he always made tea in the morning and left a cup on my desk without asking. I thought about the way he'd looked at me last month when I came back from the library at 3 a.m. and found him still awake, reading, waiting. He'd said he just wasn't tired. I'd believed him.

"I'm not going anywhere," I said again. "So you can either tell me what's happening, or I can sit here and watch you suffer. Your choice."

His eyes found mine. In the dark, they looked almost black. But there was something gold in them too, something that caught the lamplight and held it.

"It's heat," he said. "Beastkin heat. My body wants, " He closed his eyes. "It wants things I don't want. It wants anyone. It doesn't care who."

The room felt smaller suddenly. The walls closer. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

"And the suppressants stop it?"

"They make it manageable. Without them, it's like, " He opened his eyes again, and this time he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world. "It's like being drowned and burned at the same time. And the only thing that makes it better is, "

He didn't finish. He didn't have to.

I sat there on the edge of his bed, my hand still resting on the blanket, and I understood that whatever I did next would matter. That there was a door here, and it was opening, and I could walk through it or I could close it.

Snow shivered. His hand found mine again.

I didn't pull away.