3. Kinsley
KINSLEY
The words settle over me like another layer of cold.
Stuck here. With him.
"Did you..." I can't finish the sentence. My throat closes around the question because the answer matters enormously and also terrifies me and I don't know which outcome is worse, that this enormous stranger undressed me or that I somehow undressed myself and have no memory of it.
"You were hypothermic. Wet clothes kill faster than the cold. I stripped them off and put you in dry layers."
He says it like it's nothing. Like peeling a frozen, unconscious woman out of her clothes is just Tuesday for him.
And medically, logically, I understand that this is correct.
I've read enough survival articles during my obsessive pre-trip research phase, between purchasing the matching luggage set and the cashmere beanie that is probably now entombed in river mud inside my Corolla.
Wet fabric against skin accelerates heat loss.
Remove the wet layers. Basic wilderness first aid. He kept me alive.
He kept me alive and I am wearing his shirt and nothing else and he is standing in the doorway watching me with those green eyes that don't blink enough and I need to not be in this bed anymore.
I throw the blankets off and swing my legs to the floor and the cold hits my bare thighs like a slap.
The shirt rides up and I yank it down with both fists and stand, wobbling, my muscles stiff and uncooperative, and the room tilts just enough to remind me that forty-five minutes ago I was unconscious.
I grab the bedpost for balance. He shifts his weight in the doorway, one arm uncrossing, and I register the movement as him almost stepping toward me.
Almost. He stops himself. Recrosses his arms. The restraint in that small gesture is somehow more unsettling than if he'd just moved.
"I need to call someone." I say it to the floor because looking at him directly is like staring into a solar eclipse. Too much. Too intense. "My phone. It was in my coat pocket. The pink coat. Where's my coat?"
"Drying by the fire. Phone's dead."
"It just needs to charge. If you have a charger, any charger, I can..."
"No electricity."
I look up. "What do you mean no electricity?"
He doesn't repeat himself. Just stands there.
His face does something that I think might be the world's most minimal expression of impatience, a slight tightening around the jaw, a fractional narrowing of those impossible eyes.
And I understand that he means exactly what he said and isn't going to explain further because he considers the statement self-explanatory, which it is, but my brain is rejecting the information on a fundamental level.
No electricity. No phone. No road. No car.
I push past him through the doorway and he doesn't move to accommodate me.
I turn sideways to squeeze through the gap between him and the doorframe and my shoulder grazes his ribs and heat radiates off him like a furnace, like a living, breathing woodstove, and I stumble into the hallway and then the main room and the fire is going and the space is bigger than the bedroom but it's still a cabin, still four walls, still the midst of nowhere with rain battering the roof like fists.
I pace. It's what I do when the anxiety spikes, when the carefully maintained scaffolding of my plans starts to buckle.
I pace. My bare feet hit cold pine floorboards and I wrap my arms around myself, his shirt swallowing my hands, the flannel soft and worn against my skin in a way that is almost obscenely comfortable, and I walk the length of the room.
Past the heavy oak table with one chair.
Past the kitchen area with its cast iron hanging from hooks and its hand pump sink and its complete absence of anything that plugs in.
Past the stone fireplace where my pink trench coat hangs from a peg, dripping, looking like a deflated flamingo.
Past a bookshelf crammed with field guides and topographic maps and not a single novel.
I reach the far wall and turn and walk back and he's there.
He's leaned against the hallway entrance, arms still crossed, shoulder braced against the log wall, watching me with the quiet, viewing the patience of someone observing weather patterns.
Not concerned. Not entertained. Just watching.
And I am intensely, burningly aware that his gaze tracks me the entire length of the room, back and forth, and that the shirt barely covers what it needs to cover, and that every time I turn the hem lifts and the fabric shifts and he can probably see the entire landscape of my bare legs from ankle to hip.
I grab the hem again. Hold it down. Keep pacing.
"There has to be a way. A neighbor. A ranger station. Someone with a satellite phone or a... a ham radio, people in the mountains have ham radios, I've seen documentaries..."
He says nothing. Just watches me walk.
The silence is a living thing in this room.
It presses against my eardrums and fills the spaces between the rain hitting the roof and the fire popping and the sound of my own bare feet on wood.
I can't stand it. Silence is where the bad thoughts live, where the three a.m. panic spirals breed and multiply.
Silence is what I came up here to find and now I'd rather chew glass than sit in it with this man watching me like I'm a weather system he's tracking for potential damage.
So I do what I always do. I talk. And I organize.
"This was supposed to be different." I pull open a cabinet above the hand pump sink.
Three tin mugs, a cast iron skillet, a dented saucepan.
All arranged with military precision. Of course they are.
"The retreat was supposed to be, like, yurts.
Heated yurts with those little woodstoves that look like Pinterest but actually work.
And essential oil diffusers. And a woman named Meadow who does sound baths.
" I rearrange the mugs so the handles all face the same direction, realize they already faced the same direction, and move them back.
"I wasn't supposed to be on an actual mountain.
In an actual storm. With no electricity. "
He hasn't moved from the wall. I open the next cabinet.
Canned goods. Beans, tomatoes, condensed milk, some unlabeled jars with dark contents I don't examine too closely.
All lined up with the labels facing forward like little soldiers.
I rotate a can of kidney beans forty-five degrees for absolutely no reason and keep talking.
"My therapist said I needed to disconnect.
That was the word she used. Disconnect." I laugh and it comes out too sharp, too bright, bouncing off the log walls.
"I told my boss I was taking three weeks.
Three weeks. Do you know what happens when you tell a managing partner at a consulting firm you're taking three weeks?
Especially when that managing partner also happens to be the man you are engaged to?
His face did this thing. This specific thing that faces do when you've told them the building is on fire but also you don't care. "
I open a drawer. Utensils. Four forks, four knives, four spoons, a can opener, a hunting knife that looks like it could field dress a bear.
Everything nested in a carved wooden organizer.
Handmade, from the looks of it. I close the drawer because there is nothing to fix in there and my fingers are itching for something to fix.
"I worked ninety-hour weeks for fourteen months straight.
" I open another cabinet and find a burlap sack of flour, a tin of salt, a jar of rendered fat.
"Fourteen months. I stopped sleeping. Then I stopped eating.
Then I started crying in the bathroom between client calls but only for exactly ninety seconds because that's how long the hold music lasted before the system auto-reconnected.
" I stack the salt tin on top of the flour sack, then move it back beside the flour sack, then angle it slightly.
"And one day I'm sitting in a glass conference room on the forty-second floor of a building in the Loop and I look out at Lake Michigan and I realize I cannot remember the last time I went outside.
Not walked-to-my-car outside. Actually outside. Where things grow."
Behind me, I hear him move. Not toward me.
Toward the kitchen. Heavy footsteps, deliberate and unhurried, the floorboards groaning under weight that my body doesn't come close to producing.
I step sideways, still holding the salt tin, and he reaches past me and takes it from my hands without a word.
His fingers brush mine and the contact sends something electric straight up my forearm and I let go like the tin is hot.
He sets it back in the cabinet exactly where it was.
Closes the cabinet. Opens the one with the canned goods and pulls out two cans of beans and a jar of the dark unlabeled substance and then he reaches past me again, close enough that I catch the scent of him, woodsmoke and cold rain and something warmer beneath, and retrieves the cast iron from the shelf above the sink.