My hair is still dripping icy water down my neck and back, and my dress sticks to me like it’s made of wet sand. As if thinking the same thing, he wraps a beach towel around his waist and rolls it along his washboard stomach to keep it in place.

Then he takes his boots off. And peels off his pants.

“What are you doing?” I sound nervous.

He doesn’t pause as he strips beneath his towel. “Trying to warm up. You should do the same if you don’t want your precious heat to get sucked out by your wet clothes.” His pants land with a plop on the rug.

I hesitate while he sits close to me in front of the fire.

He opens his demon wings. I suppose he does it to dry them off, but it has the added effect of being a heat trap. The muscles along my back and shoulders relax as soon as I feel the warmth swirling behind me.

I shiver, trying to shake off as much of the cold as I can. He tightens the circle of his wings, keeping the heat of the fire growing between us.

“Good job out there,” he says. He looks at me with quiet approval.

I blink at him in surprise. It’s not like no one has ever said that to me. But somehow this is different. Unexpected.

“You too.” I want to say more. I crack open the vault in my head to see if I can peek in and maybe see something worth saying, but it all pushes against the door, wanting to flood out. I slam the door shut, leaning against it to keep it from bursting open. Still, my tongue gets tangled in all the things I want to say. “Yeah, you too.”

He nods as if he understands, as if I actually had said all those things tumbling out of the vault and he accepts them.

We listen to the fire crackle for a while.

I’ve warmed enough to want to be free of my gritty, wet dress, which is sucking the fledgling heat from my skin. I wrap my blanket around myself and bite into the overlapping edge to keep it in place as a shield.

He grins when he sees me squirming underneath, wrestling with the wet dress. “I’m sure a respectable modern man would turn his back so he wouldn’t see if there was a slip-up.”

I nod, keeping a tight bite on my blanket.

“But we’d lose our heat shelter.” He raises a wing a few inches to demonstrate. Cool air immediately touches my legs. He lowers his wing back into place again. He shrugs. “I guess you’ll just have to not slip up.”

I continue to squirm, getting myself free of the left sleeve.

“Don’t laugh or anything,” he says, “because that could be disastrous.”