11. Emilia
EMILIA
The books vanish behind his back. His shoulders square. His chin drops. Every muscle in his body locks into the same defensive posture he uses when the sheriff's headlights crawled up his gate. Like he's bracing for a fight.
But this time the threat is me.
"Get back in the bunk."
He's not angry. Something worse than angry. Ashamed.
I know that sound . I know it the way you know a language you grew up speaking, even after years of silence.
My mother used that same lilt every time my father's guests complimented her cooking and she burned the next meal on purpose, as if proving to herself she didn't deserve the praise.
My nanny Elena used that when I told her she was the only real parent I'd ever had. She quit the following week.
I know shame when it puts on armor.
And I am done watching people I care about shrink themselves into nothing because somebody taught them they weren't enough.
"No."
His jaw tightens. The tendons in his neck pull taut.
"Emilia."
"I said no."
I don't move toward him. I plant my feet on the rough plank floor, his too-big wool socks bunching around my ankles, and I hold my ground. The cast-iron stove ticks and pops between us. Wind screams against the boarded windows. The cabin feels the size of a closet, and he fills every inch of it.
"You can shut me in a storage room when there's danger outside," I say. "You can carry me up a mountain when my legs give out. You can lock gates and arm yourself and stand between me and every terrible thing that followed me here. But you do not get to hide this from me and pretend it's nothing."
His nostrils flare. The sketchbooks stay behind his back.
"They're scribbles."
"They are not scribbles."
"Emilia, drop it."
"The shadow work on the creek basin drawing.
The way you built depth with just pressure variation on the charcoal.
You layered the foreground darker to pull the eye toward the water, then feathered the line of trees so it almost dissolves into the sky.
That isn't scribbling. That's someone who sees the world differently than other people and has the hands to put it on paper. "
He blinks. Just once, but I catch it.
I take one step forward.
"I grew up surrounded by men who collected art. My father has an expensive Basquiat in his study. He doesn't look at it. He's never once stood in front of it and felt something. It's a line item. A tax write-off. A thing he owns so other powerful men know he can afford to own it."
Another step. The floor groans under my feet.
"The men in my world buy beauty because they can't create it. They acquire talent because they have none. They surround themselves with rare, extraordinary things because they are ordinary and terrified someone will notice."
I'm close enough now to see the charcoal dust ground into the creases of his knuckles. Permanent. Part of him. Not grease from the garage. Pigment.
"You made something with your hands that stopped me cold, Justice. In a cabin in a blizzard, after running for my life for a week, your drawings made me forget all of it for thirty seconds. Do you understand what that means? Do you have any idea what that's worth?"
The rigid line of his mouth hasn't softened, but something shifts behind his eyes. A crack in the wall. Small. A fracture line spreading through concrete.
"You are worth ten of them. Ten of every man in every boardroom and penthouse and private club my father ever dragged me into.
With your busted knuckles and your charcoal sticks.
You are worth ten of all of them combined, and if you try to shove those books under a bunk again so nobody sees them, I will dig them out every single time. "
His arms drop. Not all the way. The sketchbooks hang at his sides, one in each fist, the pages fluttering in the draft from the stove vent. His eyes search mine. Looking for the lie. The performance. The angle.
He won't find one.
My hands come up to his face. I have to rise on my toes and he still has to bend down, and my fingers barely span his jaw, rough with days of stubble that scrapes against my palms.
I pull him to me and kiss him.
Not gentle. Not tentative. Not the soft, questioning press of lips from the night by the fireplace when everything was new and fragile and I wasn't sure he wanted me to stay.
This kiss is a declaration. I pour every word I just said into it, and every word I don't have yet.
My fingers grip his jaw and I drag him closer, standing on the tips of his wool socks, my spine arched to reach him.
He makes a sound against my mouth. The sketchbooks hit the floor.
Both of them. Pages splay open on the planks.
His hands find my waist.
His hands lift me off the floor like I weigh nothing. Sets me on the rough-hewn table so our faces are level for once. His forehead drops against mine. We breathe the same air. The stove crackles. The storm howls. Neither of us speaks for a long time.
Then he lifts the sketchbooks. Opens one. Sits beside me on the bench and turns the pages himself.
That is how the wall comes down. Not with a crash. With a turning page.
The snow buries us.
By morning the drifts reach the bottom of the boarded windows.
By afternoon they swallow the woodpile. Justice digs a narrow trench to the covered lean-to where he stacked the split logs, and he works through the gap in the door, his breath a white column in air so cold it hurts my teeth from six feet away.
He moves with purpose. Efficient. Every swing of the shovel lands in exactly the right place.
When he comes back inside, ice crystals cling to his beard and his eyebrows and the dark hair curling at his temples, and I move my warm palms to his frozen face and hold them there until the ice melts into my skin.
We fall into a rhythm. It happens without negotiation or conversation.
Our bodies simply learn the choreography of the small space, and by the second morning I can navigate around him in the tiny kitchen without thinking.
He reaches for the kettle. I'm already filling it.
I open the stove door to add a log. He's already cut the kindling to the right size and stacked it beside my feet. We move around each other like water.
He won't let me near the exterior work. Refuses absolutely, with a grunt and a pointed look at my thin borrowed socks.
So I take the interior. I organize. I clean.
I find a bent wire brush under the bunk and scrub the cast-iron skillet until the black surface gleams. I fold and refold our limited clothing into the single shelf above the bed, arranging it by weight and warmth.
I inventory the dry goods and calculate days.
Oats, coffee, canned beans, a bag of rice, jerky, three cans of condensed milk, salt, a sad little envelope of black pepper.
Twelve days if we're careful. Fourteen if we stretch.
I write the inventory on a blank page torn from the back of one of his sketchbooks and pin it to the wall near the stove with a bent nail. He comes in from the cold, stamps his boots, and stops. Reads the list. Reads it again. His eyes find mine across the cabin.
"You rationed it?"
"Fourteen days. Sixteen if you let me get creative with the rice."
He grunts. But the corner of his mouth moves. Barely. It’s something he won't let fully form. He pulls off his gloves and hangs them on the nail by the door, right where I cleared a space for them.
The second day. He draws and I read.
There is one book in the cabin. A battered field guide to alpine wildflowers, the spine cracked, the pages swollen with moisture. I've read it cover to cover twice already. I read it a third time.
He draws the stove. The woodpile. The pattern of frost on the inside of the boarded window. At one point I look up from a description of columbine root systems and find him staring at me, his hand still on the page.
"What?"
He looks back down. Keeps drawing. Doesn't answer.
That night I find the sketch tucked between the pages of the wildflower guide. A woman curled on a bunk with a book against her knees. My face in his charcoal. My hair loose around my shoulders. My eyes soft. He drew me like something precious. Something worth keeping.
I close my eyes and let the tears come. They're warm and quiet and they don't taste like fear.
He cooks. This surprises me and it shouldn't.
His hands know their way around the small propane burner with the same confidence they show around an engine block.
Rice and canned beans seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper become something almost good because he toasts the rice dry first, and the beans simmer long enough to break down into something rich.
He serves me the bigger portion. I push half back onto his plate.
We go back and forth three times before he gives me a look so flat and immovable that I eat every grain under his supervision.
"You need weight on you."
"I'm fine."
"Eat."
I eat.
He washes the dishes in snowmelt he heated on the stove. I dry. Our elbows bump in the narrow space. His arm is warm against mine through the flannel sleeve. We don't move apart.
At night the cabin drops below freezing despite the stove.
The bunk is narrow. Built for one large body or two small ones.
He pulls me against him, my back against him, his arm locked around me, his breath warm on the crown of my head.
I fit into the curve of him like a key into a lock.
We sleep tangled and heavy and uninterrupted by alarms or headlights or gravel crunching under tires.
I wake up with his heartbeat against my spine.
I stop counting the days.
The fifth night. Or maybe the sixth. Time dissolves in the storm the way sugar dissolves in hot water, invisible but changing the taste of everything.