5. Kinsley
KINSLEY
Something is wrong with my pillow.
That's the first thought. Half-formed, swimming up through layers of the deepest sleep I've had in months, maybe years. My pillow is wrong. It's too hard, too warm, and it has a heartbeat.
The second thought comes faster, sharper, dragging consciousness behind it like a net. My pillow is breathing.
I open my eyes.
Green. That's all I see. A wall of deep, saturated green, close enough to drown in, and it takes my sleep-stupid brain a full three seconds to understand that I am looking directly into Jakob Billsberry's eyes from approximately two inches away.
His jaw is granite. His expression is perfectly, terrifyingly still.
And his eyes are not the cool, dismissive green from yesterday.
They are dark. The pupils blown so wide they've swallowed most of the color, leaving just a ring of hunter green around something vast and black and barely contained.
Then sensation catches up to sight and I become aware of my body all at once, every point of contact registering simultaneously like a full-body alarm system going off.
My leg is over his hip. Not resting politely but hooked over, thigh draped across his stomach, the bare skin of my inner leg pressed against denim that is warm from hours of contact.
My face is in his neck. My lips, my actual lips, are touching the hard tendon that runs from his jaw to his collarbone.
My hand is fisted in the front of his shirt, the gray thermal bunched between my fingers like I grabbed it and refused to let go, and every single one of my soft parts is crushed against every single one of his hard ones and there are so many hard ones.
He is rigid muscle and unyielding bone from shoulder to hip and I am draped across him like a human blanket, like I climbed him in the night and set up camp.
And between us, against my inner thigh, pressing into my leg with an insistence that leaves absolutely no room for interpretation, is the unmistakable evidence that he is aware of exactly how I'm positioned.
The mortification hits like ice water.
"Oh my God." The words come out against his throat, muffled and horrified, and I feel his whole body tighten at the vibration of my mouth on his skin.
I rip my face back and his eyes are right there, that dark burning stare, and my leg is still hooked over him and my brain is screaming at my limbs to move but they won't cooperate because they are warm and heavy and traitorous.
"Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I didn't, I was asleep, I don't, this isn't..."
I disentangle. That's the generous word for it.
The accurate word is flail. I yank my leg back and the shirt rides up past my hip and I grab for it with one hand while shoving against him with the other and the shoving accomplishes nothing because pushing him is like pushing a warm stone wall.
He doesn't move. Doesn't shift. Doesn't help me escape.
He just lies there with his hands flat at his sides, palms pressed into the mattress, fingers spread, like he's been holding that exact position for hours.
Like he's been awake this entire time.
The thought sends a flush so violent through my body that I feel it in my scalp.
I scramble backward and my foot catches in the twisted blankets and I nearly pitch off the side of the bed, catching myself on the headboard at the last second, the flannel gaping open over one shoulder.
I yank it closed. My face is on fire. My neck is on fire.
The inside of my thigh where it pressed against him through denim is on fire and tingling with a ghost sensation that won't stop replaying itself.
"How long were you awake?"
He sits up. Slow, controlled, the way he does everything, like his body is a machine he operates with perfect mechanical precision. The henley pulls across his shoulders. His jaw works once, twice. He doesn't look at me.
"A while."
Two words. Low and rough and scraped raw.
And there is something in those two words, in the gravel-over-glass texture of them, that tells me exactly what kind of "a while" it was.
He lay there, with my body draped over his, and he did not move.
Did not touch me. Did not wake me. Just held still and endured it, held himself in rigid military discipline while I burrowed into him like he was mine.
I clutch the flannel tighter. The blush has reached my bosom spreading hot and visible, across every inch of skin the gaping collar reveals. His gaze drops. Just for a second. Down to where my fingers grip the fabric closed over my collarbone. Then back up.
His pupils are still enormous.
"I'm going to go... not be here," I manage, gesturing vaguely toward the bathroom, already sliding off the bed. "For several minutes. Possibly forever."
He grunts.
I flee.
The bathroom is a lean-to addition off the back of the cabin, all rough-hewn timber and a composting toilet that I refuse to examine too closely.
I splash ice-cold water on my face from a basin he's filled from some source I haven't identified yet and stare at myself in a small, cloudy mirror nailed to the wall.
My hair is a disaster. Not the cute, tousled kind of disaster that magazines promise when they talk about "effortless waves.
" The kind of disaster that suggests a small animal nested in it overnight and then departed in a hurry.
My mascara has migrated to places mascara should not go.
The flannel hangs almost to my knees, the cuffs dangling six inches past my fingertips, and I look exactly like what I am.
A woman wearing a mountain man's shirt with nothing underneath but underwear and humiliation.
I splash more water. The cold helps. Marginally.
By the time I emerge, Jakob has vacated the bed and stationed himself at the far end of the house near the front door, where he appears to be doing something purposeful with a whetstone and a knife that is longer than my forearm.
He doesn't look up. The space between the bed and his position by the door feels like a demilitarized zone, and I'm grateful for every square foot of it.
It is small. I noticed this last night in pieces, in the warm glow of firelight and the fog of exhaustion, but daylight makes it ruthlessly clear.
One room. The bed, a woodstove that doubles as his cooking surface, a rough table with one chair, shelves of canned goods and dry stores, and a rack of tools and outdoor equipment that takes up an entire wall.
No television. No radio that I can see. No books, except for a battered field manual and what appears to be a topographical map tacked above the stove.
This is not a home. It's an outpost. A place designed for one person to survive in without comfort, without company, without any of the soft, unnecessary things that make life bearable.
I last approximately forty-five minutes before the silence starts to eat me alive.
Forty-five minutes of sitting in the one chair at the rough table, knees together, hands in my lap, listening to the rhythmic scrape of stone on steel while rain hammers the roof and the wind makes sounds against the cabin walls that I refuse to assign meaning to.
Forty-five minutes of not checking my phone because my phone is dead.
Not checking my email because email doesn't exist here.
Not scrolling, not scheduling, not responding, not performing. Just sitting.
I'm going to lose my mind.
"Do you have flour?" The question erupts from me like a cough, startling us both.
The scraping stops. His eyes lift. One brow, the scarred one, moves a fraction of an inch upward.
"On the shelf."
I'm already up. Already moving toward the pantry shelves with the desperate energy of a woman who has not been idle for more than twenty minutes in six years.
The shelves are a survivalist's dream and a baker's nightmare.
Bulk containers labeled in Jakob's aggressive block handwriting.
FLOUR. RICE. OATS. SALT. POWDERED MILK. LARD.
Canned goods in neat rows, labels facing out with military precision.
Beans, tomatoes, condensed milk, something labeled PROTEIN MIX that I choose not to investigate.
"Sugar?"
"Don't use it."
Of course he doesn't. I yank the flour down, then the powdered milk, then the lard.
The condensed milk will have to serve as sweetener.
I find baking soda in a small tin near the salt, and I send a silent thank-you to whatever version of Jakob packed this pantry.
There are no eggs. No butter. No vanilla extract, no chocolate chips, no parchment paper, no stand mixer, no measuring cups with cute illustrations of little birds on them.
But there is a woodstove throwing heat and I have two hands and six years of stress-baking at 2 a.m. in a Chicago apartment when I couldn't sleep, and that has to count for something.
"What are you doing?"
"Baking."
A pause. The scraping does not resume. I carry my armload of supplies to the stove and set them on the rough counter beside it.
I have no measuring cups, so I grab a tin mug from the shelf and decide it's a cup now.
I have no mixing bowl, so I use the only large vessel I can find, which appears to be some kind of enamel camp pot.
I have no recipe. The last time I baked without a recipe was never.
I always follow recipes. I follow instructions, I follow plans, I follow the carefully plotted trajectory that my parents and my firm and my own anxious brain laid out for me from the moment I could hold a day planner.