8. Jakob
JAKOB
The pulse under her skin hammers against my thumbs. Rabbit-quick. I count it the way I count everything, automatic, a habit drilled into bone by years of monitoring vitals in places where a change in heart rate meant incoming fire. Sixty-two when I started wrapping. Seventy-eight now. Climbing.
Mine is worse.
My hands are on her leg and they need to come off.
I know this. I know the math of it, the geometry of what happens next if they stay, the inevitable trajectory of my palms continuing their path up the warm curve of her calf toward the softer skin above her knee where I can already feel the heat radiating through the fabric of the borrowed flannel shirt she's wearing.
My shirt. Hanging to mid-thigh on her, three sizes too large, the collar slipping off one shoulder to expose the pale ridge of her collarbone and the faint scatter of freckles across her body that I catalogued two nights ago when I stripped her out of those useless pastel clothes and have been failing to forget every waking minute since.
My hands need to come off.
They don't.
Her eyes are enormous. Hazel with a ring of gold near the pupil that only shows in firelight, and right now they're all gold, wide and unblinking and locked on mine.
I've catalogued her fear. Mapped every variant.
The wild-eyed terror of the panic attack.
The tight-jawed anxiety of the dark. The startled-deer flinch when the thunder cracks too close.
This isn't any of those. This is something else entirely.
Her lips are parted, the lower one still slightly swollen where she bit it when her ankle twisted, and her breathing matches the rhythm of mine now, deep and deliberate and insufficient.
"Jakob." My name in her mouth. Soft. Not a question. Not a demand. An offering, the same way she held out that crushed box of pastries on my porch, rain-soaked and shaking, giving me something sweet simply because it was the only thing she had.
"I can't." The words come out rough. Gravel through a sieve. My hands tighten on her calf and the contradiction between what I'm saying and what my body is doing would be funny if anything about this were funny. "Can't keep doing this."
"Doing what?"
"Not touching you."
The admission lands in the space between us and sits there, ugly and honest, and she processed it.
The gold in her eyes go molten. The flush climb from her collarbone up the side of her throat, pink and warm and visible even in the low lamp light, and I track its progress the way I track movement in a tree line, with total focus and the absolute certainty that what comes next will change everything.
She doesn't move away. She moves toward me. Barely. A fractional lean forward, a tilt of her chin, an almost imperceptible shift that closes two inches of the gap between us, and that's it. That's all it takes. Two inches. The entire discipline of my self-control collapses over two inches.
I surge forward and my mouth finds hers and the sound she makes against my lips, a small broken noise that's half gasp and half relief, destroys me.
She tastes like the pine needle tea I brewed her an hour ago, and underneath that, something warm and sweet that's just her, and I drink it in like a man who's been rationing water for four years and just found a spring.
My hand comes off her calf and slides into her hair, gripping, tilting her head back to give me a better angle, and my other hand wraps around her lower back and pulls her to the chair until her knees bracket my ribs where I'm kneeling on the floor in front of her.
The size difference is staggering. My palm spans the entire back of her skull.
My arm wraps nearly twice around her waist. She is small and soft and warm against every part of me that is large and hard and cold and the contrast should feel wrong but instead it feels like the first thing that has made any sense in years.
She kisses me back. Not tentative. Not careful.
She fists the front of my henley with both hands and pulls, dragging me closer, and her mouth opens under mine and I take what she gives with zero grace and zero restraint.
I kiss her like I do everything else, thorough and relentless.
I kiss the corner of her mouth. The swell of her lower lip.
I bite down gently and her hips jerk forward against me and the broken noise comes again, louder, needier, and my blood roars in my ears.
I pull back half an inch. Breathing hard. Forehead pressed to hers.
"Don't stop," she whispers.
"Wasn't planning on it."
I take her mouth again. Slower this time but deeper, my tongue sliding against hers, and her fingers release my shirt and travel upward, skating over my shoulders, my neck, into my beard, scratching lightly along my jaw, and every point of contact burns.
Her injured ankle hooks carefully behind my back, pulling me in, and I let her. I let her pull me into the undertow.
Her fingers tug at the hem of my henley and I let her pull it over my head because denying her anything at this point is a physical impossibility.
The fabric clears my face and she's staring at my body.
At the scars. The shrapnel puckering across my left ribs.
The knife wound below my collarbone that healed white and jagged.
The burn mark on my shoulder that never smoothed out.
I've seen women flinch at this map of damage before, the few times I let anyone close enough to see it in the years before I stopped letting anyone close at all.
Kinsley doesn't flinch. She leans forward and presses her mouth to the worst of it, the shrapnel scar, and the heat of her lips on that ruined skin sends a tremor through me that starts in my spine and doesn't stop.
I'm done being gentle.
I stand and she makes a sound of protest at the loss of contact that dies in her throat when I hook my hands under her arms and lift her out of the chair.
I move her three steps to the kitchen table, the heavy slab of reclaimed pine I built myself, eight inches thick and bolted to legs I carved from a downed oak, and I set her on it.
The oil lamp casts her in amber. The flannel hangs open where the top two buttons gave up during the kiss, exposing the valley between her breasts and the soft pale skin of her stomach.
"Your ankle."
"I don't care about my ankle."
"I do." I grasp the back of her neck with one hand, holding her still, and check the wrap with the other. Secure. Not swelling further. I'm done thinking about her ankle because her hands find my belt and the sound of the buckle coming undone echoes off the log walls like a gunshot.
I push her hands away. Not yet. Not until I've had what I need first.
I unbutton the flannel. One button at a time.
Slow. She's shaking but not from cold, the fire is high and the home is warm, and each inch of skin reveals itself.
No bra. Her breasts are small and perfect and the nipples are tight pink peaks and I lower my mouth to one without preamble, cupping the other in a hand that covers it completely, and she arches off the table with a cry that echoes in me.
Her skin is impossibly soft. Everywhere. Under my calloused palms, against my beard, between my teeth when I graze the sensitive underside and feel her whole body jolt. She tastes like warm sweetness.
I strip the flannel off her shoulders and lay her back on the table.
Her hair fans out across the dark wood like spilled honey.
She's wearing nothing but the plain cotton underwear I gave her from my emergency supplies and they're ridiculous on her, too large, bunched at the hips, and I hook my thumbs into the waistband and drag them down her legs, careful over the wrapped ankle, and drop them on the floor.
She's bare on my kitchen table and the sight of her strips the remaining rational thought from my brain with surgical precision.
I get my belt open. Shove everything down far enough.
Her eyes drop and widen and her throat works on a swallow and I would laugh if I could remember how.
Instead I grip her hips and pull her over the table, positioning her, and the height is perfect because I built this table for a man my size which means it puts her exactly where I need her.
I pause. One second. Looking down at her. The gold eyes, the parted lips, the wild pulse visible in her throat, the flush spreading down her body.
"Tell me yes."
"Yes." No hesitation. "Yes, Jakob, please."
The please finishes me.
I push into her and the world goes white.
She is tight and hot and her body resists and then yields and the sound she makes is something I will hear for the rest of my life, a long broken moan that vibrates through the table and into my hands where I'm gripping both sides of her hips.
I hold still. Shaking with the effort. Giving her time to adjust to the size of me because I am not a small man in any capacity and she is looking up at me caught between overwhelmed and desperate.
"Move," she breathes. "Please move."
I move.
I set a pace that is not gentle. Not careful.
Not anything remotely resembling the tender restraint I should probably be showing a woman with a sprained ankle on a wooden table in the wilderness.
My hips drive forward and the table holds because I built it to hold and she grabs my forearms, her nails digging crescents into the muscle, and she takes every thrust. Her back arches off the pine and I slide one hand under her spine, holding her there, angled up, and the change in position makes her choke on my name.
"Look at me," I order.
Her eyes snap open. Gold and wild and glazed.
"Don't look away."
She doesn't.
She falls apart twice more before I let myself follow her over the edge, and when I do, it's with her name ground between my teeth and my forehead buried in her neck and my hands gripping the table hard enough to leave dents in wood I spent forty hours sanding smooth.
The cabin settles around us. Fire popping.
Wind pushing against the boarded windows.
Rain finding every gap in the eaves and drumming out a pattern on the floor that I stopped hearing twenty minutes ago and am only now registering again.
The world reassembles itself in layers, sound first, then smell, woodsmoke and sweat and the warm salt of her skin, then the gradual return of rational thought, dim and reluctant, like a soldier dragging himself back to a post he never wanted to man.
I don't move. Not yet. I stay where I am with my weight braced on my arms, careful not to crush her, and I look down at her lying on my table.
Her eyes are closed. Lashes dark against flushed cheeks.
Her lips are swollen, red where my beard scraped the skin raw, and there's a mark blooming on her collarbone where my mouth got away from me.
Her breathing is slowing in stages, each exhale longer than the last, and her fingers are still wrapped loosely around my forearms like she forgot to let go.
I pull out of her gently and she makes a soft, protesting sound that hooks into my ribcage and stays there.
"Don't move," I tell her. Unnecessary, since she looks incapable of moving, but the command instinct runs deep. I find a clean cloth by the sink, run it under warm water from the kettle on the woodstove, and come back to clean her up. She opens her eyes when the cloth touches her inner thigh.
I toss the cloth in the basin. Tuck myself back together.
Then I slide one arm under her shoulders and the other under her knees and lift her off the table.
She curls into me immediately, her face pressing into the hollow of my throat.
I bring her across the cabin to the bed, shouldering past the wool blanket I hung as a draft barrier, and lower her onto the mattress.
The sheets are cold and she shivers so I lift the heavy quilt up and over her and then stand there like an idiot, not sure which side of the boundary I'm supposed to be on now.
She solves it for me. Her hand snakes out from under the quilt and finds my wrist, her fingers circling barely halfway around, and she tugs.
Doesn't say anything. Doesn't need to. I strip off my boots and my jeans and slide in behind her, pulling her back against me, and the fit is obscene.
She slots into me like a component I didn't know was missing from an assembly I thought was complete.
My arm locks across her waist. My chin rests on top of her head.
Her injured ankle I arrange carefully on a folded blanket at the foot of the bed and she lets me fuss over it without comment, just a sleepy hum that vibrates against my collarbone.
Three minutes. Maybe four. Her breathing goes deep and even and her body goes heavy and boneless in my arms and she's out. Gone. Sleeping with the total abandon of someone who feels completely safe, and the trust embedded in that surrender rewires something fundamental in my brain.
I lie awake. I lie awake holding her and I listen to the rain and I think about Chicago.
Chicago with its glass towers and its burning pace and its ability to chew through a woman like her until there's nothing left but the anxious shell she was when she washed up on my porch.
Chicago where she worked sixteen-hour days for people who didn't deserve her.
Chicago where she had a panic attack so bad she booked a solo wilderness retreat she wasn't remotely equipped for.
Chicago, that great grinding machine, sitting seven hundred miles east of this bed, waiting patiently for her to come back so it could finish the job.
No.
The word forms in me, solid and immovable as the foundation stones I laid under this cabin.
She is not going back. Not to the burnout.
Not to the panic attacks. Not to whatever hollow life convinced her she needed to prove she could survive alone when what she actually needed was someone big enough and mean enough and stubborn enough to stand between her and every single thing that ever tried to diminish her.
She has that now. She has me. And I am not the kind of man who lets go of what's his.
I push my lips to her head. Breathe her in. Close my eyes.
The crash comes at 2:47 AM. I know the time because my internal clock never stops running, the same way my perimeter awareness never stops scanning, the same way the part of my brain responsible for threat assessment never fully powers down no matter how deeply the rest of me is buried in the warm smell of her hair.
Wood splinters. The front porch groans under a massive, shifting weight. Then the roar comes, guttural and raw and deep enough to vibrate the floorboards under the bed frame, and Kinsley jerks awake in my arms with a gasp.
I'm already moving. Already reaching for the rifle.