10. Jakob #2
She rounds the table. Not carefully, not favoring the ankle, just moving with a directness I haven't seen from her before.
She plants herself between me and the duffel and puts both hands flat against me and shoves.
Hard. I don't move. She weighs a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet and I'm braced against the table, but the contact burns through the button down shirt and the thermal underneath and lands somewhere in the marrow of my ribs.
"Look at me."
I look at her. That's the mistake. Her eyes are wet and blazing and her jaw is set in a way that transforms her entire face from something soft into something fierce, and I realize I've never seen her angry.
Not real anger. I've seen her frustrated and scared and embarrassed and delirious with cold and breathless underneath me with her teeth in my shoulder, but never this.
Never fury directed at me with the full weight of everything she's feeling behind it.
"You don't get to do this. You don't get to pack a bag and fold a map and check a zipper and pretend like the last two days were a supply run."
I wrap my hand around both of hers against me and I lift them off me and set them back at her sides. Gentle. Controlled. Like handling something fragile that I'm about to put back on a shelf.
"You need to eat before morning. I'll heat the rest of the stew."
"I don't want the stew, Jakob."
"You burned through twelve hundred calories today minimum. Between the adrenaline from the bear and the blood pressure spike from the radio, you're running a deficit. You need protein and you need sleep and you need to be ready to move at first light."
She makes a sound. Not a word. Something between a laugh and a sob that catches in her throat and comes out ragged, and it hits me harder than the bear's claws did, harder than the concussive thump of a mortar round landing fifty meters out, harder than anything that's ever reached me through the walls I built.
"Did it mean anything?"
Four words. She fires them at point-blank range and they punch through every layer of armor I've constructed in the last thirty minutes of packing and planning and refusing to look at her. I hold onto the back of the chair beside the table. The wood groans under my hand.
"Kinsley."
"No. You say my name like that, like it's a complete sentence, like it answers something, and it doesn't. It doesn't answer anything.
" She steps closer. "I woke up in your bed two days ago terrified of you.
Terrified of this mountain, of the dark, of every sound this cabin made.
And you held me through a panic attack and cooked me dinner and wrapped my ankle like I was made of glass and then you put me on that table and looked at me like I was the only thing in this world you wanted to keep.
So I am asking you. Did it mean anything. Or was I just convenient."
The word "convenient" lands like a blade across my throat. I release the chair. My knuckles ache from the grip. I look at the fire through the grate of the woodstove because looking at her right now will break whatever thread of resolve I'm holding together with my teeth.
Tell her the truth and she stays. She stays in the wilderness with a man who hasn't filed a tax return in six years, who wakes up swinging three nights out of five, who chose to disappear because the alternative was to become someone dangerous in a world full of soft things.
She stays and Chicago loses her and her career loses her and her family, whoever they are, whatever life is waiting for her at the bottom of this mountain, loses her.
For what. For a cabin with no running water and a man who communicates in grunts and learned tenderness from field medicine manuals.
Tell her the lie and she leaves. She heals.
She goes back to the world where she belongs, the world of boardrooms and brunch and whatever artisanal pastry shops produce the kind of woman who shows up at a stranger's door in a pastel trench coat with a hostess gift during a natural disaster.
She goes back and she forgets. Eventually.
People do. They forget the intensity of isolated experiences once the context changes, once normal life reasserts itself and the adrenaline fades and the memory softens into something they can file away under "that crazy time I got stuck on a mountain.
" She'll laugh about it at dinner parties.
She'll tell the story and leave out the parts that matter and some man in a pressed shirt will refill her wine glass and she'll let him, and the thought of that makes me want to put my fist through the wall but the wanting is exactly why I have to do this.
I look at her. Straight on. I let my face go flat. I empty it out the way I was trained, stripping the expression down to nothing, and she searches for something in my eyes and find exactly what I want her to find, which is blank. Cold. Stone.
"Cabin fever. Proximity does things to people. Adrenaline, isolation, stress. Amplifies whatever's there. Doesn't make it real."
Her face changes. Not all at once. In stages, like observing a structure take damage, the way the surface holds for a fraction of a second after the impact before the cracks spider out and the whole thing begins to give.
Her lips part. Her chin drops a quarter inch.
Her eyebrows draw together and her eyes go wide with something worse than anger, worse than hurt, something that looks exactly like recognition, like she's seeing something in me she suspected was there all along and was hoping she was wrong about.
The first tear falls. Just one. It tracks down her left cheek and catches the firelight.
"You're lying. You're lying to me right now. I can see it."
I don't move. I don't blink. I hold the blankness like a position under fire, like my life depends on it, because hers does. The version of her life that doesn't involve wasting itself on a hollow man on a dead-end ridge.
"It was what it was," I say. "We both needed something. Storm's over."
The sound she makes is so small and so wounded that it takes everything I have, every scrap of discipline the military drilled into my bones across twelve years of service, to stand still.
To not reach for her. To not drop to my knees on this floor and press my face into her stomach and tell her that she's wrong, that she's right, that cabin fever doesn't make a man pack boots with wool so carefully his fingers cramp, that cabin fever doesn't keep a man awake counting someone's heartbeats through the wall of their back, that cabin fever is a lie and I know it's a lie and I'm choosing it anyway because the only thing I've ever been good at is taking damage so other people don't have to.
Her hand comes up fast. I see it the way I see everything, the flex of her shoulder, the rotation of her elbow, the open palm accelerating on a clean arc toward my face, and I have more than enough time to catch her wrist, to block it, to stop it cold.
I don't. I stand there and I let it come.
Her palm connects with my left cheek, hard enough to snap my head sideways, hard enough that the crack rings off the timber walls and hangs in the silence like a gunshot, and the sting blooms hot and immediate across my jaw and into my teeth and I taste copper where the inside of my cheek splits against my molars.
I look back at her. Slow. Holding my face exactly as open as the blow left it, which is not open at all but rearranged, and I find her staring at me with tears running freely now, both cheeks, her hand still raised and trembling in the space between us.
"You're a coward." She says it quiet and clear and devastating, each syllable carrying the precise weight of someone who means it with everything they have. "You're the biggest, strongest, most capable man I've ever met and you are a coward, Jakob Billsberry."
She drops her hand. Turns away from me. Walks to the bedroom with her uneven gait, each step on the bad ankle a small flinch she refuses to acknowledge, and closes the door behind her without slamming it. The soft click of the latch is worse than any slam could be.
I stand in the room. My cheek throbs. The fire pops behind the grate.
The packed duffel sits on the table like a body bag and the boots wait on the floor with their surgeon-knotted laces and outside the mountain is silent for the first time in two days, the storm finally spent, and I am alone in exactly the way I've spent a decade engineering my entire life to be.
It's unbearable.