7. Kinsley #2
The porch boards are freezing under my back and the pain is a living thing, an animal with teeth chewing through my ankle and up into my calf, and I'm still trying to breathe through it when the cabin door explodes open.
Not swings. Not opens. Explodes. The latch cracks against the interior wall and Jakob fills the doorframe like a wall of rage made flesh, and even through the tears blurring my vision I can see his face and what's on it isn't anger, not exactly.
It's worse than anger. It's the look of a man who's failed at something he swore to do.
He's across the porch in two strides. No hesitation, no assessment from a distance, no careful approach.
He drops to his knees beside me and his hands are on my face, tipping it toward the light spilling from the cabin doorway, and I can feel them shaking.
His hands are shaking. This man who runs a whetstone along a blade with the steadiness of a surgeon, who splits logs with mechanical precision, who held me through a panic attack without a single tremor, his hands are trembling against my jaw.
"My ankle, I slipped. The wood was wet and I just wanted to grab some logs for the fire and I'm sorry, I know you said stay inside, I know the rules, I just thought the porch counted as inside and it doesn't, obviously it doesn't, and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
He doesn't respond. Not with words. He scoops me off the porch boards with one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, and the motion is so fast and fluid that my stomach drops the way it does on the first hill of a roller coaster.
I grab fistfuls of his thermal and press my face into his neck because the pain is making the world spin and he's the only fixed point, the only thing that isn't tilting.
Inside. Door shut. The warmth of the place hits my rain-chilled skin and makes me shudder violently, or maybe that's the pain, or maybe it's the way he's holding me against him with my injured ankle suspended in empty air, careful, so unbelievably careful, even while his jaw is clenched hard enough to crack teeth.
He lowers me onto the bed. Not the counter this time.
The bed, with its rough wool blankets and his pillow.
He props my back against the headboard and reaches for the oil lamp, moving it to the bedside table so the light pools warm and amber across the mattress.
Then he kneels at the foot of the bed and takes my ankle in both hands.
I suck air through my teeth. The pain flares white and hot and immediate, and a sound comes out of me that's somewhere between a whimper and a word.
His grip adjusts instantly, lighter, gentler, his rough fingers finding the precise joint and testing it with the kind of knowledge that doesn't come from a first aid manual.
He's done this before. Assessed injuries in bad light with limited supplies, figured out what's broken and what's only bruised by touch alone.
"Not broken. Sprained. Could be a partial tear."
"That's the good news?" I try to laugh and it comes out as a sob instead, which is mortifying, and I clap my hand over my mouth and squeeze my eyes shut because I will not cry in front of this man again.
I have already passed out on his doorstep and had a panic attack in his arms and climbed him like a jungle gym in his sleep.
There has to be a floor somewhere, a basement level of dignity I haven't yet crashed through.
He releases my ankle and stands. I see through wet lashes as he moves through the cabin with that efficient, deliberate economy of motion, gathering supplies.
A roll of cloth bandage from a metal first aid kit under the kitchen sink.
A battered plastic bag that he fills with snow from a bucket near the back door.
A folded dishcloth to wrap around the bag.
He returns and kneels again and the bed dips under his weight and he places the snow pack against my ankle so gently that I barely feel the pressure before I feel the cold, numbing and sharp and beautiful in its relief.
"Hold this."
I hold it. He waits. Two minutes, maybe three, while the snow does its work and the swelling gets the message.
"I should have locked the door." He says it to my ankle, not to me. The words land like stones dropped into still water.
"You shouldn't have to lock me in. I'm not a child."
His eyes snap to mine. Green and furious and full of something I can't name. "No," he agrees. He looks away first, which feels like a victory, except that victories aren't supposed to make your heart ache.
He removes the snow pack and begins to wrap.
The cloth bandage is faded military olive, fraying at the edges, and he unspools it with practiced hands, starting at the ball of my foot and working his way up in neat, overlapping layers.
His fingers are enormous against my foot.
Thick and scarred and callused, and they move with a precision that borders on reverence, each pass of the bandage snug but not tight, each layer smoothed flat before the next one starts.
He cups my heel in his palm and the size difference is almost absurd.
My entire heel disappears into his hand.
My entire foot could fit inside his fist.
He wraps around the ankle joint twice, three times, and his thumb traces the path of the bandage to check the tension, pressing lightly against the inside of my ankle where the skin is thin and the pulse lives close to the surface.
I feel my heartbeat jump under his touch and I know he feels it too because his thumb pauses there, resting on that tiny drumbeat, and his breathing changes.
Not faster. Deeper. The way breathing changes when someone is deliberately controlling it.
The bandage continues up. Over the ankle.
Past the ankle. His hands follow the cloth onto my lower calf, wrapping the support higher than strictly necessary, and his palms press flat against the muscle, warming the skin through the thin layer of bandage.
His fingers curve around the back of my calf and they span nearly the full circumference and the contact sends a current up through my leg that has absolutely nothing to do with my sprained ankle.
He stops wrapping. But his hands don't stop.
They stay where they are, cradling my calf, and then they move.
Slowly. A glacial, deliberate slide upward that tracks along muscle and the subtle flare where my calf meets the beginning of my knee.
His thumbs press into the soft hollow behind my knee and my breath catches audibly in the silent cabin and his eyes come up from my leg and find mine and stay.
The fire pops. Rain hammers the boards over the windows.
The oil lamp throws his face into gold and shadow, catches the green of his irises and turns them luminous, and what I see in them isn't the careful, controlled restraint he's been maintaining since I woke up in his bed.
The restraint is gone. Stripped away like bark from a log, and what's underneath is raw and hungry and so focused on me that I feel it on my skin like a physical pressure, like the heat from the woodstove, like weather.
His hands tighten fractionally on my leg. His calluses catch against my skin. And he doesn't look away.