Afon
She falls asleep before I do.
That's how it always goes. She talks and talks, and then somewhere in the middle of a sentence, the words slow down, her breathing changes, and she's gone. Out like a light. Like she trusts the dark now.
The snow has eased off some, the wind dropped to a soft whisper in the spruce. Caroline's breath is warm against my skin. I lie there with her cheek on my chest and her hand in mine. It's self-indulgent, but fuck it, I'm indulging tonight.
Just this once. Just for a while.
I don't sleep. I don't want to. Sleep would waste it.
For one hour, I let myself be a man who has this. It's the longest I've gone without thinking about Reznik in three weeks.
Then the hour ends. Good things always do.
The dread comes back the way the cold comes back when the fire dies: slow at first, then all at once.
There's no use fighting it. Besides, I have things that must be done.
Not far from here, in a rundown logging camp, a dead man in a long coat is commanding a growing army of killers with our scent in their nose.
I haven't heard the whine of snowmobiles since we bedded down, but I'm ready for them to pierce the night at any moment.
Which isn't to say that they're necessarily coming. They have time and the luxury of patience. I have neither.
But the clock of Reznik's approach isn't the only thing hanging over my head. There are also two more parts to the story that I owe Caroline. I can't stop thinking about what will happen when the ugly truth finally comes out of my mouth.
She swore—up and down, left and right—that no matter what I say, it won't change her mind about me. She really does believe that. I almost believe it, too, as long as I'm lying here.
But she doesn't know yet just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I wait until the sky lightens from black to gray.
I ease out from under Caroline. She makes a disappointed sound and reaches for the warm spot I left, but then settles back down into REM.
I tuck the blanket up over her shoulder, then rise and pull on my clothes.
My hip pulls and burns where the graze opened up last night, but it's closed again now, mostly. Tacky. It'll hold.
Wolf lifts his head and looks to me for guidance.
"Stay," I instruct him. "Watch her."
He drops his head back down between his paws, but his eyes stay open, fixed on the lump of blanket where Caroline sleeps. Good dog.
I take the Remington and the binoculars and I go climbing.
While we descended yesterday, I made note of an outlook maybe forty minutes up the ridge from the camp.
I climb to it now in the gray dawn, breaking new snow, my breath fogging out ahead of me.
The whole world is clean, white, and quiet.
The sun isn't up yet but the sky's gone pale enough to see by.
When I get to the outlook, I crouch behind a boulder and raise the binoculars. The valley spreads out below me. I find the logging road first, a gray seam through the trees, then I track south along it until I find the camp.
It takes me a second to understand what I'm looking at.
The bunkhouse is there, just as I remember.
The shed, the rusting yarder, the cinder block, all of it.
But the trucks are gone. The van is gone.
The two snowmobiles that were ready to run yesterday, the lookout, the eight men, the man in the long coat…
gone. The whole camp sits empty in the snow, the generator silent, no smoke, no movement.
A single tarp flaps loose where the snowmobile used to be.
I lower the glasses and blink, sure I misunderstood.
Then I raise them again and look harder.
But no.
Empty.
They're gone.
I crouch there a long time and let the cold work into my knees as I think about what this means.
An empty camp is worse than a full one. If it were a full camp, I'd know where they are. A full camp means I can watch it, count it, plan around it. A full camp is a problem I can hold in my hands.
An empty camp, though… that means they moved. It means the man in the long coat decided it was time for a new approach. They're hunting.
And I don't know how close they might be.
They could be anywhere on this mountain.
Hell, they could be down in Pike Hollow right now, sitting in Barb's diner, asking the trapper in the wool cap if he saw a man and a woman come down off the ridge.
They could be sitting on the road we'd have to cross to make it to the highway and get the fuck out of here.
I should have seen it coming. The storm gave them cover. Everything that might've outed them—tracks, sound, smoke—gets swallowed up in the snow. The same storm I planned to use to slip out, they used to disappear.
I rub a hand down my face and feel the cold sweat on it despite the chill.
The smart play would have been to walk out in the dark, in the storm, the second we left the diner. No fire. No camp. No stopping. I knew that. And yet I made a fire anyway, because she was shivering and I'm a fool.
And because, for one night, I wanted to be a man instead of a weapon.
I let myself have her.
And while I had her, I stopped watching the mountain.
This is the thing I always knew, and no matter how many times I tried to explain it to Caroline, she wouldn't listen: You can't have both.
You can't have a thing and keep it safe at the same time.
The wanting makes you blind. I've known it for twenty years.
I learned it on a county road outside Saratoga Springs.
But I went and did it anyway.
I glass the valley one more time, slow, every fold and gap of it, and find nothing. Reznik, that undying ghost, has vanished again. Fuck knows where he'll turn up next.
Then I get up and start back down.
She's awake when I get back to camp.
Caroline sitting up with the blanket around her shoulders and the flannel on underneath.
Her hair is a disaster, but with Wolf's head in her lap, she doesn't seem like she cares at all.
She's smiling and cooing baby-ish nonsense at the dog, which I despise and I know he loves, that spoiled furry bastard.
But I can't fully blame him for leaning into it, because when she turns and directs that same sunny smile at me, I go belly-up almost as fast as he did.
It does something to me, that smile. Every fucking time. A kryptonite I never knew I had.
"You're back," she says. "I woke up and you were gone. Wolf wouldn't tell me where. He's very tight-lipped for a guy whose favorite hobby is licking his own crotch."
I want so badly to banter and laugh with her. But this morning is not a time for jokes. "I hiked up to check the ridge."
Her smile dims a notch. She knows me well enough now to read between the lines. "That doesn't sound like the beginning of good news."
I crouch by the cold fire and start building it back up, because my hands need something to do.
"The camp's empty," I say. "They moved out in the night. Trucks, men, all of it."
"That's good, right?" she says. But she says it the way you say a thing you already know isn't true. "They left? Maybe they gave up?"
"They didn't leave. They moved." I get the kindling going, cup the flame. "An empty camp means I don't know where they are. That's worse."
Her eyebrows come together as she broods. "Worse than eight guys with guns four miles away?"
"I'd rather have a problem I can see versus one I can't."
She pulls the blanket tighter. Wolf nudges her hand and she scratches him without looking, her eyes on me. "So they could be anywhere," she says. "Like, in town. Or guarding the ways out."
"Exactly."
She's no fool. She may be new to this world, but she learns fast. Besides, it's in her blood. Bill always had a knack for this sort of thing.
She lets out a long breath. And then, because she's her, she says, "Well. Cool. Love that for us."
I almost laugh. I'm not sure how she does it—how she takes a thing that should flatten her and turns it sideways and makes it small enough to manage. I've been doing this work my whole life and I've never learned that trick. I always felt like every mission would be my last.
"What do we do?" she asks.
And there it is again. We. The enormity of that silly little word.
"I don't know yet," I tell her honestly. "I need to think."
But "thinking" is the last thing on my mind right now, funnily enough. Instead of sketching out a map of the mountain and evaluating escape routes, or trying to read the storm patterns to see what might be coming for us, I'm looking at Caroline and feeling a familiar hunger build in my stomach.
The flannel hanging off one shoulder.
The mark I left on her throat, just visible above the collar.
The heat in her eyes that matches mine.
"You've got that face on," she says dubiously. "The thinking-yourself-to-death face."
"Yeah, well, there's a lot to think about."
"There always is." She lifts the corner of the blanket. An invitation. "It'll still be there in a few minutes."
I know better. This is the thing that gets people killed. This is the wanting, blinding me, the same as last night.
But fuck it.
I go to her anyway.
I tell myself it's the cold. We need the warmth, to stay close, conserve heat. I know I'm lying and I do it anyway, because she's holding the blanket open and her face is soft. I am so tired of standing on the cold side of everything.
I get under the blanket and she folds against me, all warm and loose-limbed from sleep, and I find her mouth with mine.
Last night was a wall coming down—all that pressure, all that frustration, finally let go. This is something else. There's no fight left in either of us. There's just her, and the gray morning, and the snowflakes falling softly all around us like manna from heaven.
I take my time. I get the flannel off her and lay her back on the blanket, then spend minutes gazing, licking, touching, kissing every inch of skin I can find.
Last night had a desperate element to it that made me rush more than I would've liked.
Today, in the light, I can worship her like I ought to.
Her breath hitches when I touch her there.
A kiss to the underside of her chin draws out a moan.
A nip at the crook of her elbow makes her gasp.
Grazing fingers across her ribs or the crease of her thigh makes her squirm so fucking deliciously, so small and breakable, so feminine, so pure.
"You're beautiful," I tell her, both because it's true and because I watch what it does to her when I say it.
Her reaction is everything I wanted. Her whole body goes warm under my hands. Her hips lift toward me.
So I say it again. I purr it against her skin.
"Look at you. Look how good you are."
She comes apart at the praise, easy as anything, like nobody's ever told her these things. It's as if she's been starving for it the same way she accused me of starving her. Her hands find my hair and hold on. Her breath goes ragged.
I like seeing how she responds to me. I taught myself my whole life to be stone, unyielding, never-changing.
But Caroline? She is a breath of fresh air in every sense.
She's warm and fragrant and she moves so perfectly.
Praise fills her up, I'm learning. She likes to be told how impossibly right she is. She likes to be wanted out loud.
I'm not surprised. She's spent her whole life with men who couldn't say a single true thing. I've been one of those men to her too. The silent kind. The kind who shows and never says.
Not now. Never again, if I can help it. For now, I tell her everything, soft and filthy, my mouth at her ear, and I watch each word ripple through her like flower petals scattered on the wind.
When I finally move over her, she's begging for it.
I give it to her slow, slower than last night, feeding one inch of my cock at a time into her wet warmth and gazing intently at her face as she gasps, moans, splutters, keens, writhes, does all the most beautiful things I've ever seen, one after the next.
There's not enough money or firepower in the world to make me look away from her right now.
And there's not a chain that's ever been forged that could keep my mouth tethered shut.
Not when there's so much I want to say to her.
I praise every sound she makes and every curve she possesses.
I tell her how fucking good she feels, how she was made for this, made for me, and how she's going to milk my soul out of me through my dick, and that if I die in the process, well, fuck it, that's exactly how I've always wanted to go.
A few strokes later, I follow her down into the warm dark of bliss.
"Afon." Her voice is small. Careful. Not like her.
"Mm."
"What happens to us after this?" She doesn't lift her head.
I feel her ask it against my sternum more than I hear it.
"When this is over. When we—if we—get down off this mountain, when you're not standing between me and a bunch of guys with guns anymore…
" She hesitates. "When you've told me everything… "
She's been circling this for days. We both have. It's been there the whole time, under every joke and every fight and every night in the narrow bed. The question the whole mountain's been built around.
What happens to us.
I keep my hand moving up and down her back.
There's a version of this story where I tell her the truth, which is that I don't know what happens because she doesn't know yet what I did, and once she knows, it might not be us anymore.
It might be her, on a train back to Manhattan, looking out the window, never wanting to hear my name again.
And she'd be right to. That's a real possibility, maybe the most likely one, and I owe it to her not to pretend otherwise.
There's another version where I tell her what I want, which is the truth and more.
It's the truth plus the reveal that I want a happy ending, too.
I want her, and a roof that isn't burning, and a fire I build for warmth instead of survival, and mornings, and years.
I told myself twenty years ago that nobody gets that shit twice, but I decided at some point along the way that I would beg to have it a second time anyway.
But how can I tell her either thing? The truth would ruin what I want. The truth and more might ruin what she wants.
So I say nothing in the end.
I press my mouth to the top of her head and I keep my hand moving. I let the question sit there in the quiet between us, unanswered. I don't have it in me to lie to her and I don't have it in me to tell her the truth.
She doesn't push. That's how I know she already understands. She just sighs against me, and after a moment, her hand finds my left one in the dark and her fingers slide between mine and she holds on.
That's when the engines roar.