9. Kinsley #2
I position the needle at the wound and look at him one last time. His green eyes are steady. Patient. Trusting me with something he's never trusted anyone with, and I don't mean his arm.
I push the needle through.
I make eleven stitches. Each one takes forever.
Each one takes no time at all. My fingers find a rhythm that doesn't belong to me, something borrowed from adrenaline or desperation or the quiet, unshakable certainty that this man will bleed out on his own kitchen chair if I don't hold myself together for the next twenty minutes.
Jakob counts for me. Not out loud, not in words.
He taps his right index finger against the table surface with each stitch I complete, a steady percussion that keeps me anchored.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Eleven taps. When I tie off the last knot with fumbling fingers and snip the thread with the tiny surgical scissors from his kit, his tapping stops and he lets out a breath that seems to deflate him by two full inches.
"Gauze next," I say before he can speak. "And tape. And you're going to sit there and let me do it."
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
"I can?—"
"No." I'm already pulling the rolled gauze from the kit, already tearing open a packet of non-stick pads with my teeth because both my hands are occupied holding his forearm steady on the table.
The metallic taste of the foil wrapper sits on my tongue and I don't care.
"You sat in this chair and let me put a needle through your skin eleven times.
You can sit here for five more minutes while I wrap it. "
He doesn't argue.
I lay the non-stick pad along the length of the sutured wound, careful not to press too hard, careful to keep my touch light against the swollen, angry skin on either side of the closure.
His forearm is thick and roped with muscle even in its injured state, and the contrast between my small, flour-dusted fingers and the brutalized terrain of his arm is so stark it almost makes me laugh.
Almost. Instead I start wrapping the gauze in slow, overlapping passes, wrist to elbow, the way I've seen it done in movies and on the back of Band-Aid boxes and never once in real life because my real life until two days ago involved spreadsheets and conference calls and a slowly suffocating apartment in Lincoln Park where the most dangerous thing was the expired yogurt in my refrigerator.
"Tighter," he says. Low. Not a command this time. A request.
I wind the gauze tighter and he nods, one of those barely-there movements that passes for communication in his world.
His skin is hot under my hands. Not feverish, not yet, just the volcanic baseline temperature that seems to radiate from him at all times, the same heat that turned his bed into a furnace, the same heat that seared through me on this very table when he pressed his mouth to the hollow of my throat and made a sound like something caged finally breaking free.
I tear the tape with my teeth again. Secure the gauze at his wrist, then at the crook of his elbow, then one more strip for good measure. The bandage is lumpy and uneven and a combat medic would probably weep at the sight of it, but it's holding. It's clean. It's mine.
"There." I smooth the last strip of tape with my thumb, running it along the edge where adhesive meets skin, and I don't lift my hands away.
I just stand there between his knees with his bandaged arm resting heavy across my palms and I look at him in the lamplight and I understand something with the sudden, irreversible clarity of a bone snapping.
I'm in love with him.
Not falling. Not sliding. Not any of the gentle, gradual metaphors that people use to describe this thing.
I'm just there. Already at the bottom. The fall happened somewhere between the first grunt and the flour on my cheek and the way he said "you're safe" in the pitch dark like it was the only prayer he knew, and I didn't notice because I was too busy being terrified and cold and out of my depth to recognize what was building beneath all of it.
He's watching me. Those green eyes, ringed with exhaustion, tracking the shift in my expression the way he tracks movement in the treeline.
He sees it. I know he sees it because his jaw works once, hard, and his right hand comes up to cover both of mine where they're cradling his injured arm, and his fingers curl around my knuckles with a pressure that is the opposite of letting go.
"Kinsley." Just my name. Rough as unfinished lumber.
But the way he says it has a weight to it that sounds like a door opening, like the first syllable of something he's never said to anyone and doesn't have the vocabulary for because he's spent a decade building a language entirely out of silence and distance and loaded rifles.
I open my mouth to respond, to say something, anything, to fill the unbearable, precious, terrifying quiet between us with words because that is what I do, that is my only survival skill in this wilderness of a man.
The radio screams to life.
Static first. A harsh, crackling burst that shatters the silence like a rock through glass, and I flinch so hard I nearly drop his arm.
The emergency radio mounted on the wall above the woodstove, the one Jakob had spent hours painstakingly reassembling yesterday afternoon only to declare the storm interference too thick for a signal, is suddenly alive and spitting noise into the cabin.
Jakob is on his feet before I process the sound, chair scraping back, his good hand already reaching for the receiver.
A sound punches through the static. Male. Official. Tinny with distance but intelligible.
"...all residents on the north ridge, this is Sheriff Beaumont with Knox County Search and Rescue.
Be advised, highway crews have cleared Route 191 through the slide zone.
Repeat, Route 191 is passable. We have a rescue team moving up the ridge access road at first light.
ETA to the Billsberry homestead approximately 0700 hours tomorrow morning.
If you can hear this transmission, sit tight. Help is on the way."
The static swells, crests, and dies. The cabin falls silent again, but it's a different silence now. Heavier. Full of a countdown that wasn't there before.
Jakob's hand rests on the radio. He hasn't turned around. The bandage I wrapped is bright white against his dark forearm, the tape catching lamplight, my uneven work visible across every inch of the gauze. His shoulders rise once with a breath he doesn't release.
Tomorrow morning. Rescue. The road. A way out. A way back to Chicago and spreadsheets and conference calls and expired yogurt and the slow, gray, airless life I drove away from two days ago in a sedan that's now buried under ten feet of mountain mud.