3. Kinsley #2
"So I booked the retreat." I back up to give him room because he takes up the entire kitchen the way a truck takes up a single-lane road, and I lean against the table and keep talking because if I stop talking I will have to exist in the quiet with the reality of my situation and I am not ready for that.
"I found it on Instagram. 'Wild Sage Mountain Retreat.
Reconnect with nature. Reconnect with yourself.
' Beautiful photos. Women in linen pants doing yoga on a deck overlooking a valley.
A girl holding a ceramic mug with both hands, steam rising, golden hour lighting.
" I pull his shirt tighter around my thighs.
"Nobody in the photos looked like they were stranded in a survivalist bunker with a man who hasn't spoken a full sentence since I arrived. "
He grunts. It might be acknowledgment. It might be disagreement. It might be gas. The grunt reveals nothing.
He works the hand pump and water splashes into the saucepan and he moves to the woodstove beside the fireplace with the ease of someone who has performed this sequence ten thousand times.
Opens the stove door, stokes the coals, adds a split log from the pile beside the hearth.
Settles the cast iron on the flat cooking surface.
Pours rendered fat from the jar and it sizzles and spits and the sound is so domestic.
I watch him open the cans with the manual opener, his forearms flexing with each rotation, tendons standing out beneath skin that is tanned and scarred and dusted with dark hair.
He dumps beans into the skillet, adds the dark substance from the jar, which turns out to be some kind of thick broth or stock, rich and brown.
The smell hits me within seconds and my stomach clenches so hard I actually flinch.
I haven't eaten since a protein bar somewhere outside Rockford, eight hours and a lifetime ago.
"You don't have to feed me." The words come out quieter than anything else I've said.
He doesn't look up. Just cracks four eggs into the skillet beside the beans, one-handed, each shell discarded into a tin on the counter.
The eggs hiss in the fat and the whites go opaque and I watch him move with a competence that borders on grace, this huge man in this small kitchen, and the contrast between his size and the delicacy with which he handles the food is amazing.
He slices bread from a dense, dark loaf.
Thick slabs. Lays them on the stove surface to toast. Doesn't measure anything.
Doesn't reference anything. He just knows.
The bread goes golden. The eggs go crispy at the edges.
The beans bubble in the stock and the home fills with warmth and the smell of real food cooked by hands that know what they're doing and I stand against the table in his giant shirt with tears burning behind my eyes because it's the first time in fourteen months that someone has made me a meal without me organizing it, scheduling it, paying for it, or apologizing for needing it.
He loads a tin plate. Slides it across the table toward me without ceremony, without presentation, without a single word. Beans, eggs, toast. A fork. He pours hot water from the saucepan into one of the tin mugs, drops something dried and leafy into it, pushes that across too.
I sit in the single chair. He leans against the counter and eats standing up, straight from the skillet, the fork small and almost comical in his grip. He doesn't watch me eat. Gives me that, at least. Stares at the fire instead while I pick up my fork and take the first bite.
The beans are smoky and rich and seasoned with something I can't identify, something deep and peppery that blooms across my tongue.
The eggs are perfect, runny yolks pooling into the bread when I stack them together, golden and indulgent.
The toast is dense and nutty and I eat all of it.
Every bite. I scrape the plate with my bread and drink the tea, which is bitter and herbal and cuts through everything and settles my stomach like a hand pressed flat against a spinning wheel.
I look up when the plate is empty. He's still leaning against the counter, still looking at the fire.
"Thank you," I say. And I mean it in a way that contains the whole night, the catching, the dry clothes, the food, the fact that he let me pace and ramble and rearrange his already perfect kitchen without saying a single sharp word.
He grunts.
I wash my plate at the hand pump because it's the only useful thing I can think to do and because my hands need a task or they'll start shaking again.
The water is so cold it makes my knuckles ache, but I scrub the tin with a rough cloth I find folded beside the sink and set it upside down to dry and feel a tiny, absurd bloom of accomplishment.
One clean plate. One small act of normalcy in a night that has abandoned the concept entirely.
Jakob takes the skillet and wipes it with a scrap of cloth and rendered fat, quick and efficient, and hangs it back on its hook without looking at me.
We move around each other in the kitchen like mismatched gears, me shuffling sideways to avoid his bulk, him not adjusting his trajectory at all because he doesn't need to, because this is his space and I am the foreign object orbiting his gravity.
The rain has been hammering the roof in waves, each surge louder than the last, but I've almost started to tune it out the way you tune out a car alarm after the first ten minutes.
Background noise. Unpleasant but survivable.
I settle back into the single chair at the table and wrap my hands around the tin mug, which still holds a residual ghost of warmth, and stare at the fire and let my breathing slow to something that approximates normal.
Then the wind hits.