Chapter 5
HARTLEY
Iwoke up in the loft.
Not the loft above the garage—the loft in Dash’s cabin, where the mattress sat on the floor and a wool blanket served as a curtain between the bedroom and the rest of the house.
We’d hiked back from the boulder as the sun dropped behind the ridge, and somewhere between the back door and the stairs, he’d pulled me against him and kissed me in a way that made the loft feel like the only logical destination.
That had been last night.
Now it was early—gray light filtering through the single window, the sound of birds starting up in the trees outside.
Dash was asleep beside me, one arm slung across my waist, his breathing deep and even.
He slept the way he did everything else—completely, without reservation, like it hadn’t occurred to him to hold anything back.
I lay still for a long time, watching the light shift on the ceiling, feeling the weight of his arm and the soreness in muscles I’d never used before, and the steady drum of my heartbeat, which hadn’t fully settled since yesterday afternoon.
Then I looked around.
The loft was Dash in miniature. A flannel shirt draped over a chair that also held a coil of climbing rope.
A stack of trail maps on the floor beside the mattress, held down by a rock he’d apparently brought inside for that purpose.
Boots—three pairs, all caked with dried mud—lined up near the top of the stairs in the only evidence of order in the entire space.
Beyond the loft, through the gap in the wool blanket, I could see the kitchen I’d reorganized yesterday morning. The mugs I’d sorted. The table I’d cleared. The countertop where a chainsaw air filter had lived until I’d moved it to the windowsill.
My throat tightened. What was I doing here? Not here in the loft—I knew how I’d gotten here, and I didn’t regret it. But here, in this cabin, in this town, in this man’s life.
I was an events coordinator from a mid-sized city four hours away. I owned a label maker. I had a color-coded filing system for my tax receipts. The most rugged thing in my apartment was a succulent, and even that was on a watering schedule.
Dash built footbridges with his hands and cleared trails with a chainsaw and knew the difference between a red oak and a white oak by looking at the bark.
His life was this mountain—the mud, the timber, the predawn mornings, the physical labor, and the kind of bone-deep competence that came from years of doing hard things in hard places.
I reorganized kitchens. That was my skill. I walked into chaos and made it make sense, and then I left, because the event was over and my job was done and nobody needed me to stay for the part that came after.
I was the girl who planned the party.
I was never the one who got to stay for it.
I slid out from under his arm carefully, pulling on my jeans and his hoodie—which I’d apparently claimed permanently, though neither of us had discussed it. I crept down the loft stairs and into the kitchen, where my phone was charging on the counter.
Three texts from Brooklyn, sent late last night.
Paisley submitted her scavenger hunt entry. She’s weirdly confident about it. Also, she’s basically moved into Evan’s cabin.
I’m doing one of the harder trails tomorrow morning. There’s a high-point species on the checklist that only grows near the north ridge, and I need it if I’m going to have any shot at the prize money. If I don’t text you by noon, send a search party.
How’s the lumberjack situation?
I stared at that last text for a long time. Then I started making coffee, because that was what I did when I didn’t know what to feel. I made coffee. I cleaned things. I organized.
I did the next task on the list because the list was safe and the list made sense, and the list never asked me to be something I wasn’t sure I could be.
The coffeemaker gurgled. I wiped the counter. I checked that the mugs were still sorted.
“You’re doing the thing.”
I turned. Dash was at the bottom of the loft stairs in boxers and nothing else, his hair wrecked, sleep still in his eyes. He looked like a man who’d woken up and found that the best part of his morning had left the bed—and had come to get it back.
“What thing?” I said, even though I knew exactly what thing.
“The thing where you start cleaning instead of saying what’s going on.
” He leaned against the wall at the base of the stairs, arms crossed.
Not confrontational. Just there, steady and patient—like a tree that had decided not to move.
“You did it the first day. Walked into my kitchen and started rearranging things because it was easier than being in a space you couldn’t control. ”
“That’s not—”
“Hartley.”
I set the mug down harder than I meant to. “I don’t belong here, Dash.”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look surprised. Just waited—the way he’d waited at the bottom of the stairs when I’d been hauling my suitcase up to the garage apartment two days ago.
“I can’t tell a hemlock from a hickory,” I said.
“I’ve never used a chainsaw. I’ve never built anything with my hands.
I plan corporate galas, and I label my packing cubes, and I have a spreadsheet for my grocery list. That’s who I am.
And you—” I gestured at the cabin, the mountain outside the window, the boots by the door.
All of it. “You’re this. And at some point, the novelty of the girl who sorts your mugs is going to wear off, and you’re going to realize that I don’t actually fit here.
I just organized your stuff, and you mistook it for belonging. ”
The words came out sharper than I intended, and the worst part was that I wasn’t angry at him.
I was angry at myself—for wanting this, for letting myself have it, for waking up in his bed and feeling like I’d found something I hadn’t known I was missing and then immediately looking for reasons it couldn’t be real.
Dash pushed off the wall and crossed the kitchen in three steps. He didn’t touch me. He just stood close enough that I had to look up at him, close enough that I could smell pine and sawdust and sleep, and he looked at me with an expression that had nothing uncertain in it.
“You think I need you to be a mountain girl?” he said. “You think I fell for you because you’re going to learn to run a chainsaw?”
“You didn’t fall for me. It’s been two days.”
“It took me less time than that to know I was done selling kayaks. Some things don’t need a long timeline to be obvious.
” He reached out and tugged the sleeve of his hoodie—the one I was wearing, the one I’d grabbed without asking, the one that smelled like him.
“I didn’t fall for you because you fit my life, Hartley.
I fell for you because you walked into my disaster and made it make sense.
Not the kitchen. Me. You made me make sense. ”
My eyes were burning. I blinked hard and stared at his collarbone.
“My whole life has been instinct and duct tape,” he said.
“And it works—I’m not apologizing for it.
But you know what I’ve never had? Someone who thinks ahead.
Someone who makes a plan and actually follows through.
Someone who looks at a mess and sees what it could be instead of walking away from it.
” His hand moved from the hoodie sleeve to my chin, tilting my face up.
“You don’t have to fit into my world. You already changed it.
You changed it the second you moved that air filter off my counter and told me ‘no promises.’”
A sound came out of me that was somewhere between a laugh and something more raw.
He pulled me in, and I let him—pressed my forehead against his bare chest and breathed him in while his arms wrapped around me and held on like he had no intention of letting go.
“I’m not good at this,” I said into his skin. “I don’t know how to not have a plan.”
“Then make one. I’ll be in it. Put me on a spreadsheet. I don’t care. Color-code me. Just don’t leave before the festival’s over because you’ve convinced yourself you don’t belong in a place you’ve already made better.”
I stood there in his kitchen—the kitchen I’d reorganized, the kitchen with the sorted mugs and the cleared counter and the coffee I’d made—and I let go of the plan.
Not forever. I’d probably have a new spreadsheet by tomorrow. But for right now, standing in this man’s arms in a cabin on a mountain I hadn’t known existed a week ago, I let the next thing on the list be nothing.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stay.”
“Through the festival?”
“Through the festival. And then we figure it out.”
He kissed the top of my head.
“I’ll clear out a drawer.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Already did it. While you were still asleep.” He paused. “Top drawer. I moved my stuff to the second. Fair warning, though—the second drawer doesn’t close right, so I might need you to fix it.”
I laughed, and this time it didn’t shake. “You’re impossible.”
“And you’re staying. So we’re both getting what we want.”