7. Kinsley
KINSLEY
The word mine hits me.
Not the keep alive part. Not the bear part.
Not even the part where he just picked me up like a bag of groceries and put me on his kitchen counter with my thighs spread around his ribcage.
It's that single word, the possessive growl of it, the way his mouth shapes it like he's biting down on something he can't swallow.
Mine. Like I'm territory. Like I'm something he's already claimed and is simply informing me of the fact.
Not the anxious quiet I've been chasing with meditation apps and weighted blankets and that disastrous sound bath in Lincoln Park that gave me a migraine.
Real quiet. The kind where every thought in my head stops competing for bandwidth and there's just one signal, one frequency, and it's the heat of his palms burning through cotton to my skin.
"Yes," I whisper.
His jaw tightens. A muscle jumps in his cheek, just above the beard line, and his fingers flex once on my hips like he's testing whether I'm real.
His body expands with a breath that seems to cost him something.
The wet thermal clings to him like a second skin, and from this distance, this angle, I can see him.
Not just big. Built. Constructed by years of whatever it is he does out here with axes and logs and sheer stubborn refusal to exist in the modern world.
His shoulders block the firelight behind him and throw his face into shadow and warm amber in equal measure, and I realize that my hands are still gripping his shoulders and I haven't let go and I don't want to let go.
"Yes," I say again, steadier this time, because the first one came out like air leaking from a tire. "I understand. No door. No sugar. No hesitating. I'll follow your rules."
Something passes across his face. Not relief exactly.
More like a lock clicking into place, a decision confirmed, a perimeter secured.
He nods once, a single sharp dip of his chin, and I expect him to step back.
To release my hips and retreat to his corner of the building the way he's been doing every time the space between us shrinks below a certain threshold, like there's an invisible tripwire he's terrified of crossing.
He doesn't step back.
His thumbs shift. A micro-movement, barely perceptible, but I feel it like a brand.
They trace two small arcs on the crest of my hip bones, back and forth, and I don't think he knows he's doing it.
His gaze drops from my eyes to my mouth and then lower, to the collar of the flannel where the top two buttons are undone and the fabric gapes against my collarbone, and his throat works around a swallow.
The building is dead silent except for the fire and the rain hammering the boarded windows and the sound of my own breathing, which has gone shallow and fast in a way that has nothing to do with panic.
This is the opposite of panic. This is every nerve ending in my body standing at attention, leaning toward him like plants toward sun, and the realization hits me with the force of that mudslide that took my car.
I'm not scared of him. I was never scared of him.
Not when he answered the door with a rifle.
Not when he stripped my clothes off while I was unconscious.
Not when he scooped me up in the dark or pressed me against him or growled commands at me like I was a recruit.
The thing I've been feeling since I opened my eyes in his bed and saw him watching me from the corner, the thing that makes my skin prickle and my stomach flip and my pulse hammer in my throat, isn't fear.
I am in so much trouble.
His hands release my hips. The absence of pressure is almost painful, a cold rush where his warmth was, and he steps back.
One step. Two. The tripwire wins again. He turns toward the woodstove and adjusts something that doesn't need adjusting, giving me his back, and the muscles under his wet shirt move like cable under canvas.
"Stay put," he says, without turning around. "Floor's cold."
I sit there in his flannel with my bare legs dangling and my heart slamming against my ribs and the ghost imprint of his thumbs still burning on my hips, and I scoot my hands on the wood surface to keep them from shaking.
"Okay," I say to his back. "Staying."
The hours crawl. Rain drums the boarded windows in relentless sheets, and I occupy myself the way I've always occupied myself when things get uncomfortable. I make myself busy.
Jakob's cabin operates on a logic I'm slowly learning to decode.
Everything has a place. Everything serves a purpose.
There are no decorative throw pillows, no cute mason jars repurposed as vase holders, no evidence that anyone has ever lived here for any reason other than pure, stripped-down survival.
The kitchen has three pots, two cast-iron pans, a stack of mismatched enamel plates, and enough canned goods to outlast a nuclear winter.
The living area has one chair, one oil lamp, one bookshelf packed with field guides and topographic maps and a few battered paperbacks with cracked spines.
And then there's the bed. The one bed. Which I am not thinking about right now.
I reorganize the canned goods by category, then by expiration date, then alphabetically, because my brain needs the dopamine hit of imposing order on chaos.
Jakob sits in his single chair near the fire with the dismantled pieces of the two-way radio in his lap, his large hands working a tiny replacement capacitor and copper wires with a delicate precision that seems entirely at odds with the rest of him.
He hasn't spoken since the counter. Since the thumbs on my hips.
Since "stay." The silence should bother me. Back in Chicago it would have.
Back in Chicago I filled every silence with nervous chatter, with podcast episodes played on double speed, with Slack notifications and email pings and the ambient noise of a coworking space designed to make you feel productive while slowly grinding your soul to powder.
But this silence has texture. Weight. The fire pops and hisses. The soft click of the radio casing finally snapping back together cuts through the quiet, and I watch him stand up to mount it back on the wall.
Rain finds every crack and seam in the cabin's armor and reminds us it's still there, still winning, still turning the mountain into something liquid and treacherous.
I glance at the woodpile next to the stove.
It's getting low. Not critically low, not yet, but I've been watching Jakob feed the fire every hour, and the stack that was waist-high this morning is barely knee-high now.
The wet weather eats through fuel faster.
I know this because I read seventeen articles about cabin life before booking the glamping retreat, back when I thought "roughing it" meant a yurt with limited Wi-Fi.
Through the gap in the boards over the front window, I can see the porch.
The covered porch, with its overhang that keeps the worst of the rain off the massive split-log woodpile stacked against the cabin's exterior wall.
Ten feet from the door. Maybe twelve. That's it.
That's not outside, not really. That's still the cabin's footprint, still his territory, still the zone that counts as safe and inside and following the rules.
I glance at Jakob. His head is down, beard against him, and the rhythm of the whetstone has gone slow and hypnotic. His eyes are half-lidded. Not asleep, not exactly, but somewhere deep inside himself, somewhere I haven't been invited.
I ease off the counter. My bare feet hit the cold plank floor and I hiss through my teeth, curling my toes.
I find the pair of his wool socks he gave me this morning, enormous things that come up past my calves and bunch around my ankles like leg warmers.
I put them on. I button the flannel to my throat. I look at the door.
The porch. Just the porch. I'll grab an armload of split logs and be back inside in thirty seconds.
He won't even notice. And when he does notice, he'll see the restocked woodpile and understand that I'm not dead weight, that I can contribute, that keeping me alive isn't a one-man operation.
That I'm worth the trouble of being stuck with.
I ease the door latch up with both hands, slow and careful, and the mechanism releases with a soft click that's swallowed by the rain. I slip through the gap and pull the door almost shut behind me.
The cold hits me like a wall of broken glass.
I gasp, hunching my shoulders up around my ears.
The covered porch keeps the rain off but does nothing about the wind, which drives sideways across the mountain in gusts that carry ice and grit and the smell of torn earth.
The temperature has dropped since this morning.
Plummeted. My breath comes out in visible clouds and the flannel is suddenly tissue paper, a joke, nothing.
The woodpile is right there. Eight feet to my left, stacked neat and tight against the cabin wall, each log split clean with the kind of precision that speaks to practice and fury in equal measure.
I shuffle toward it in Jakob's massive socks, and that's when I learn that wool on wet wood is essentially an ice rink.
My right foot shoots forward. My left foot tries to compensate and finds no purchase on the slick, rain-glazed boards.
My ankle rolls sideways with a sound I hear before I feel, a wet pop that travels up my shin like an electrical current, and then the pain arrives all at once, white-hot and enormous, and I'm going down.
My hip hits the porch boards. My elbow cracks against the railing post. The scream that tears out of my throat is raw and involuntary, the kind of sound I didn't know I could make, and it carries out across the rain-soaked darkness like a flare.