4. Jakob #3
She stands up slowly and walks to the bed and looks down at the pillow barrier and then up at me and her mouth does something complicated that involves pressing her lips together very hard. "Did you just build me a pillow demilitarized zone?"
"Get in the bed."
"That's not a denial."
"Kinsley."
The sound of her name in my mouth surprises both of us.
I haven't used it before. Didn't even realize I'd committed it to memory until it came out, low and rough and with more weight behind it than I intended.
Her eyes widen and the flush comes back, visible even in the dim amber glow of the dying lamp, spreading from her collarbones up her throat to the apples of her cheeks.
She gets in the bed. Slides under the blankets on the left side and pulls them to her chin and lies there stiff as a board, staring above me.
I adjust the lamp down to its lowest setting, just enough glow to navigate by if something goes wrong in the night, and add two more logs to the stove and close the damper halfway so it'll burn slow through the hours ahead.
Then I pull off my boots and set them heel-to-toe at the bedside where I can find them in the dark. Old habit. Necessary habit.
I get into the right side of the bed fully clothed.
Jeans, thermal henley, wool socks. I lie on my back with my arms at my sides and six inches of pillow-and-blanket barrier between us and I gaze at the beams I milled and planed and fitted into place myself, four years ago, when this cabin was a skeleton and I was something close to the same.
The bed shifts as she moves. A rustle of fabric. A small adjustment. Then she's quiet and close and aimed above her head.
"Thank you for the wall."
"Go to sleep."
"I'm just saying. It's a good wall. Very structurally sound."
"Sleep."
A pause. The fire ticks. The wind finds a seam in the north-facing wall and whistles through it in a thin, reedy note.
"Jakob?"
I close my eyes. "What."
"You're a good person."
I don't respond to that because she's wrong and explaining why would require telling her things about me that would make her stop believing it, and right now, in this bed, with the storm outside and the fire inside and her breathing three feet from my ear, I find that I don't want her to stop. Not yet.
Her breathing changes within minutes. The transition from awake to asleep is fast and total, the way it only happens when a body is truly spent, when every reserve has been emptied and there's nothing left to keep the conscious mind running.
One breath she's there. The next she's gone, dropped into the kind of deep, heavy sleep that doesn't dream, and the rhythm of it fills the cabin with something I haven't heard in this bed. Another person's rest.
I listen to it. I should sleep. My body knows how to sleep in shifts, how to drop under for ninety minutes and surface again, alert and functional, ready for whatever the dark brings.
But the sound of her holds me at the threshold, keeps me floating in that shallow water between waking and unconsciousness, because some part of my hindbrain has decided that monitoring her breathing is now a primary function, more important than rest, more important than the thirty things I need to do when daylight comes.
An hour passes. The fire settles. The cabin creaks under a gust and she mumbles something in her sleep, a fragment of a word that might be a name or might be nothing.
I turn my head and in the lamp's low glow I can see the pillow barrier and the shape of her beyond it, one hand tucked under her cheek, her lips parted, her hair spread across the pillow in dark tangles.
She looks like something the storm dragged in and the mountain decided to keep.
My eyes close. I begin to drift. Finally.
The exhaustion of vigilance starts to pull me under and I let it take me, one layer at a time, and the last thought I have before sleep wins is that the pillow wall is doing its job and the boundaries are holding and I am in complete control of this situation.
I come awake all at once.
Not the gradual surfacing of normal sleep. The instant, full-system activation of a threat response, every nerve firing, every muscle engaged, my hand reaching for the knife on the bedside table before my conscious mind even identifies what woke me.
Then I identify it and the knife becomes irrelevant.
The pillow wall is gone. Collapsed or kicked or absorbed into the general chaos of the blankets, it doesn't matter, because the barrier is no longer between us and neither is anything else.
She's rolled across the bed in her sleep, crossed the entire demilitarized zone like it never existed, and she is pressed against me with an intimacy that makes my vision white out.
Her leg is thrown over my hip. The full length of her thigh against my side, her knee hooked over my hipbone, the soft inside of her leg draped across my lower stomach.
The shirt has ridden up and there is nothing between her skin and my jeans except a thin layer of denim and whatever she's wearing underneath, which based on the heat I can feel transferring through the fabric is almost nothing.
Her face is buried in my neck, her breath a warm, steady pulse against my throat, and her arm is flung across me with her fingers curled into the fabric of my henley.
Every soft curve she owns is sealed against my side.
The full, devastating geography of her body is mapped onto mine, hip to shoulder, and she is warm now, finally completely warm, radiating heat like a coal pulled from the fire, and my body responds to that heat with a directness and an intensity that bypasses every disciplined thought I have ever trained into my skull.
I am hard. Immediately. Painfully. The kind of hard that has nothing to do with decision-making and everything to do with a biological response to a soft woman wrapped around me in the dark, her thigh resting directly against the evidence of exactly how compromised I am.
If she shifts, even an inch, she'll feel it.
There will be no ambiguity. No pretending it's a belt buckle or a fold in the blanket. She will know.
My jaw locks so tight my molars creak. I do not move my hands, which are flat at my sides, palms down, fingers spread, pressing into the mattress like I'm trying to push through it.
I do not adjust her leg. I do not touch the bare skin of her thigh which is right there, smooth and leaned against me with the full trusting weight of unconsciousness. I do not move. At all.
She sighs in her sleep. A contented, boneless sound.
Her fingers tighten in my shirt and she pulls herself closer, actually closer, nuzzling into my neck until her lips brush my pulse point and I stop breathing entirely because if I breathe I will move and if I move I will touch her and if I touch her right now, in this state, with her body against me and her mouth on my throat and her leg pressing against everything I can't hide, I will not stop at touching.
The fire is almost out and the structure is cooling and she presses tighter against my heat and makes a sound so quiet and so satisfied that it travels through my nervous system like a lit fuse.
It's going to be a very long night.