4. Jakob
JAKOB
Her fingers are in my flannel like she's hanging off a cliff.
Like if she lets go, the dark swallows her whole.
The sounds coming out of her are bad. Small, hitched, broken things that don't belong in a human throat, and every single one of them drives a spike straight through me, a place I thought I'd cauterized shut years ago.
I don't sit down. Don't set her down. I stand in my cabin in the pitch black with a hundred and thirty pounds of shaking woman clamped against me, and I breathe.
Slow. Deliberate. In for four. Hold for four.
Out for four. Hold for four. Box breathing.
The only thing the Army gave me that I still use.
I push my ribs out against her grip so she can feel the rhythm, the expansion and contraction, the steady, mechanical proof that lungs work, that air moves in and out and the body keeps going.
She doesn't match me at first. Her breathing is all jagged, catching and snagging on itself like a saw blade biting into green wood.
But she's pressed so hard into me that my diaphragm becomes hers, the physical movement of my torso forcing her body to follow, and after a minute, maybe two, the gasps start to lengthen.
The spaces between them grow. The whining stops.
What replaces it is worse in a different way.
Quiet, wet, exhausted crying, the kind that happens after the terror burns out and all that's left is the sheer humiliation of having fallen apart in front of a stranger.
I adjust my grip. Shift her higher so her head tucks under my chin.
She weighs absolutely nothing and she is so cold still, the skin of her bare legs like river stones against my forearms, and I widen my stance and hold her tighter and something inside my heart unlocks.
A door I welded shut when I came up this mountain.
When I drove a truck full of everything I owned away from the last person who tried to know me and aimed it at a place where no one would ever touch me again.
She's touching me.
She is wrapped around me like I'm the only solid thing in the universe, her wet face against my neck, her fingers twisted so deep in my shirt that the flannel pulls across my shoulders, her knees drawn up so she's curled into a ball against my torso, and the sensation is so foreign and so total that my brain can't categorize it.
Threat? No. Nuisance? The word doesn't even form all the way.
What it is, what it actually is, lands in my gut like a round punching through Kevlar.
I want to keep holding her. Not because she needs it.
That's dangerous.
I know it's dangerous the same way I know thin ice and unstable ridgelines and the specific click of a firing pin on an empty chamber.
Knowledge that lives in my spine, not my skull.
My arms don't care. My arms hold her and my hands spread wide against her back, one palm covering the distance from her spine to her side, and I can feel every rib.
Her breathing evens out. Steadies. She's not asleep but she's close to it, that half-conscious drift where the body gives up fighting and just surrenders to whatever's holding it upright.
Her fingers loosen. Not all the way. Just enough that the fabric stops pulling at my shoulders.
Just enough that the grip becomes something else.
Something that isn't holding on for survival but is choosing to stay.
I need to put her down. Light the oil lamp. Check the cabin's structural integrity in this wind. There are things to do, practical things, necessary things, and I am standing in the dark holding a stranger because I can't make my arms open.
One more minute. I give myself one more minute with her breathing against my Adam's apple and then I move. That's the deal. One minute.
The minute passes.
I take another one.
Her body is warming now, finally, my heat transferring into her through every point of contact, and I can feel the exact moment the last of the shivering stops.
A full-body release, muscles letting go one group at a time, shoulders dropping, jaw unclenching, the death grip on my shirt going soft.
She makes a sound. A sigh or something close to it, a long exhale that ghosts across my collarbone, and my entire nervous system lights up in a way I haven't experienced since the first time someone shot at me, every nerve firing at once, but this time the adrenaline routes somewhere lower than my brain and I lock my jaw and breathe through it.
Enough. The lamp.
I carry her to the bed. Not the chair. The bed.
Because putting her back in the chair feels wrong in a way I won't examine, and the bed is close to the wall where the oil lamp sits on its iron bracket.
I lower her onto the mattress and her fingers tighten again, a reflexive clutch, and the noise she makes is a protest, soft and wordless and devastating.
"I'm right here." Gravel in my throat. I peel her hands off my shirt one finger at a time and the loss of contact registers in my body like stepping out of a heated room into a blizzard. Immediate. Total.
I find the lamp by memory. Sixteen inches above the headboard, three inches from the wall.
My hand closes around the glass chimney and lifts it and I strike a match and the sulfur flare is blinding after this long in the dark.
The wick catches. I lower the chimney and adjust the flame until it throws a warm, amber circle across the bed and the wall and the woman lying in my sheets.
She blinks up at me. Hazel eyes swollen and red-rimmed and wet, lashes clumped together, her hair a tangled disaster across my pillow.
My flannel has ridden up to the tops of her thighs and she hasn't noticed or doesn't have the energy to care.
She looks wrecked. Hollowed out and raw and impossibly small in a bed I built for one person who is twice her size.
I look at her and the locked door inside me doesn't just open. It comes off the hinges.
"Don't go," she whispers. The lamplight catches the tears still tracking down her temples into her hair and she reaches for me
I bring the chair to the bedside. It scrapes loud across the floorboards and she flinches at the sound and I put my hand over hers on the mattress. Her fingers curl around mine instantly. Her hand doesn't even cover half my palm.
"Not going anywhere."
Her eyes search my face. Whatever she finds there makes the tension drain from her jaw and her lids grow heavy and her grip on my hand softens into something that isn't desperation anymore. Something that looks, in the unsteady lamplight, a lot like trust.
I sit in the hard chair with her hand in mine and listen to the storm trying to tear the roof off and I do not move.
I do not sleep. I see the flame in the lamp and the rise and fall of her breathing and I understand, with the grim clarity of a man who has walked into an ambush he cannot walk out of, that I am in serious trouble.
She sleeps for three hours. I know because I count them by the lamp's oil level, gazing at the reservoir drop in precise increments, my thumb resting on the back of her hand where the bones are so fine I can feel her pulse ticking against my skin.
Sometime around hour two the storm downshifts from assault to siege.
The wind stops throwing itself at the walls and settles into a steady, grinding pressure, the kind that doesn't break things all at once but wears them down over days. I know the type.
When she stirs, it's gradual. A shift in her breathing first, then her fingers tighten around mine, then her eyes open and she gazes up for a long ten seconds before she turns her head and finds me in the chair.
The lamp has burned low and the light is the color of old honey, barely enough to see by, but enough to catch the moment recognition replaces confusion on her face.
She doesn't pull her hand away. She looks at our joined fingers like she's working out a math problem, then up at me, and her cheeks flush in the dim glow.
"You stayed."
I don't answer because I told her I would and I did and that's the end of it.
I let go of her hand and stand, the chair groaning in relief, and cross to the woodstove.
The fire is embers and ash and the cabin's temperature has dropped enough that I can see the faintest ghost of my breath.
I open the stove door, rake the coals forward, layer kindling in a crosshatch, and blow until the flames catch.
Then split logs. Two on the bottom, one across the top.
I close the door and adjust the damper and the iron begins to tick as it heats.
Behind me, I hear the bed creak and the shuffle of bare feet on wood and the whisper of flannel moving.
She appears near the stove's warmth like a moth that's already been burned once but can't help itself.
My shirt hangs to her mid-thigh. She's rolled the sleeves six times and they're still past her wrists.
She holds them bunched in her fists and stands there with her tangled hair and her ruined mascara and her swollen eyes and she looks at the fire through the stove's glass window like it's a television playing something important.
I put the kettle on the stovetop. Pull two tin mugs from the shelf. Loose leaf black tea, nothing fancy. The kind keeps you vertical. I measure the leaves and pour the water and she doesn't say anything for almost a full minute, which based on yesterday's performance might be a personal record.
"Thank you. For, um. Before."
I set her mug on the stove where she can reach it. "Drink."