The lantern burned down to a stub and neither of them said a word for eleven minutes.

Dan could count them. There was nothing else to do. He stood with his forelegs planted and his hands on the half door and he counted, and on the other side of the plank wall Erica's straw shifted every so often with the sound of a body that couldn't settle.

"I'm going to say something," Erica said, "and I want you to just let me finish it."

"Okay."

"I've never wanted anything this much in my life and it's scaring the hell out of me." Her voice came through the boards, low and level, like she was reading a weather report. "Not the wanting. The way the wanting is shaped. It's not like wanting you. It's not even like wanting sex. It's like being hungry and knowing exactly what food is and where it's standing."

Dan's tail lifted. He felt it go and he didn't stop it. Behind him, in the dark of his own stall, he was slick enough that he could feel it running down the inside of a hind leg, warm, and the smell of it was filling the whole building like something baking.

"It's the same for me," he said.

"I know. I can smell it."

"I mean it's the same shape. I want you to pin me against a wall and not ask me anything."

Erica laughed, a short, cracked sound. "That's a hell of a thing to hear from a guy I've known for nine years."

"I know."

"You used to apologize to spiders before you killed them."

"I know, Erica."

Straw moved. A hoof rang on the packed dirt floor. Then nothing, and Dan could hear her breathing through the boards, slow and deliberate, like she was holding something down with both hands.

"Go to sleep," she said. "I'll go to sleep. We'll be fine by morning."

Dan closed his eyes.

Ten seconds later his hips did something he didn't tell them to do, a slow roll, and his tail flagged all the way up, and the muscles down in the mare half of him clenched and released and clenched again, and he heard himself make a noise, a low nicker that came up out of his chest without …