We lay in the straw for a long time without saying anything.

I could feel it. That's the part I keep coming back to. Not the smell of the coop, not the hens shifting on their perches above us, not the straw digging into my shoulder. It was the heat of him still working its way out of me, slow and thick, the same slow thick slide I'd felt in the yard except this time it was his, and my body just let it happen, the way it lets everything happen now. I lay there with my cheek on the floorboards and my tail flat and I didn't wipe it away.

I felt filthy. I want to be honest about that, because a week ago filthy would have been the worst thing I could be, and now it was just a fact I noticed the way you notice the weather. We smelled like chickens. Both of us. Not like people who had been in a chicken coop. Like chickens. There's a difference and I could smell it.

My head was full of cotton. I don't know how else to describe what that was, the first time, with a body that isn't the body you learned things in. I'd never thought about having an experience like that. Not once, in twenty-three years. And I know Rayan hadn't either, because Rayan had spent two years telling me exactly what he thought about everything, and that had never come up.

I turned my head in the straw. He was right there, on his side, one arm under his cheek, looking at the rafters. The feathers on his neck were all stuck up in the wrong directions. There was straw in his sickle tail. He looked like a scarecrow somebody had given up on.

"I love you," I said.

He turned his head.

"I don't care how you smell," I said. "I don't care how you look. I don't care if you crow at midnight for the rest of our lives and I cluck every time somebody knocks on a door. I love you. If this is it, if we're a rooster and a hen now, then I'm still going to be a hen next to you."

He didn't say anything for a second. Then his whole face did something complicated, and he laughed, and then he wasn't laughing, and he put his hand …