12. Jakob
JAKOB
The ATV shudders under my grip. The engine whines against me, tires chewing at the wet gravel, and the driver guns it once, twice, the vehicle jerking forward half an inch before my arms drag it back.
Four hundred pounds of steel and rubber and the full throttle of a government-issue engine and it is not going anywhere because I am not letting it go anywhere.
"Sir." The driver kills the throttle and twists around. Young guy. Clean uniform. Soft hands that have never held anything heavier than a steering wheel. "Sir, I need you to step back from the vehicle."
I don't step back. I don't move. I look past him, past the handlebars, past everything in this clearing that isn't her, and Kinsley is staring at me with those hazel eyes blown wide open, her lips parted, the dead phone clutched against her stomach like a shield.
She's wearing my shirt. The flannel I laid on the foot of the bed for her this morning because every piece of clothing she brought to this mountain was destroyed the night she arrived.
She rolled the sleeves four times and the hem still hangs past her thighs, and there is flour under her fingernails and a bruise on her collarbone from where I held her too hard against the kitchen table, and she is not getting on an ATV in my shirt and riding down my mountain and disappearing into some fluorescent-lit triage tent where strangers with smooth average-sized hands will wrap her ankle and hand her a phone charger and feed her back to Chicago like coins into a machine.
No.
"Leave." The word comes out lower and rougher than I intend. The driver blinks. Deputy Hernandez takes a half step forward, her hand drifting toward her belt out of reflex.
"Mr. Billsberry, we have a protocol here. Ms. Smart has been reported as a stranded civilian and we're obligated to transport her to the base station for medical evaluation. I understand this has been a stressful situation, but I need you to release the vehicle."
"She's not going."
"That's not your call to make, sir."
I look at Hernandez. She's calm, professional, her shoulders squared with the particular brand of authority that comes from a badge and a chain of command.
I know authority. I wore it for twelve years.
I know exactly what she's calculating right now, whether the giant bearded hermit with blood seeping through his bandage is a threat or just a complication, whether she needs to radio for backup or talk me down like a spooked horse.
"Her ankle needs imaging," I say. "I'll drive her down myself when the road is stable. Got a truck in the shed with four-wheel drive and a full tank."
"Sir."
"She stays."
Kinsley finds her voice. "Jakob, what are you doing?"
I release the handlebars. Walk around the side of the ATV in three strides, gravel crunching under my boots.
The orange-vest volunteer stumbles backward.
Smart man. I reach up and close my hands around Kinsley's waist, my fingers spanning her ribs through the soft flannel, and I lift her off the seat the way I'd lift a bag of flour off a shelf. She weighs everything.
"Put me down." She grabs my shoulders, her nails digging in through my henley.
"You don't get to do this. You said it was cabin fever.
You said it didn't mean anything. You packed my bag and you couldn't even look at me, and now you're manhandling me in front of the sheriff's department like some kind of unhinged... "
"I lied."
Her mouth snaps shut. Her fingers stop digging. The wind cuts across the clearing and presses the flannel against her body and I can feel her ribs expand under my hands as she sucks in a breath.
"You lied," she repeats.
"Yes."
"About which part?"
"All of it."
I pull her against me. She resists for exactly one second, her palms against my sternum, and then the fight goes out of her the same way it went out of her that first night when I wrapped her in the wool blanket and she stopped shivering and went limp.
I turn and walk back toward the cabin. She hooks her arm around my neck and I feel the hot press of her forehead against my jaw and I carry her up the porch steps and through the front door and I kick it shut behind me with my boot heel, the heavy oak slamming into the frame hard enough to rattle the oil lamp on the window ledge.
Outside, I hear Hernandez talking to her team.
Low voices. The scratch of a pen on a clipboard.
Then the engines rev, one after the other, and the ATVs grind back down the ridge trail, the sound shrinking and thinning until it's swallowed by the trees and the wind and the particular heavy silence of this mountain that I have loved for years and that has never, until two days ago, loved me back.
I set Kinsley down on the kitchen counter. She sits there in my shirt with her bad ankle dangling and her cheeks flushed and her eyes wet and furious.
"You lied," she says again.
I step between her knees. Brace my hands on either side of her hips. Lower my face until my forehead rests against hers.
"I'm not good at this."
"At what?"
"Any of it."
Her breath hits my chin in warm, uneven bursts.
I keep my forehead pressed against hers because I can't look at her while I say this.
Looking at her will make me stop talking, and if I stop talking I will go back to the silence that kept me alive for twelve years and slowly, methodically hollowed me out from the inside until there was nothing left but discipline and perimeter checks and the dull mechanical rhythm of a man who had forgotten why he was still breathing.
"I haven't spoken this many words in four years..
Not to anyone. I order supplies through a drop box.
I communicate with the ranger station by radio, and only when they contact me first. I built this place specifically so that no human being would ever have reason to come up that road.
And then you showed up on my porch holding a carton of pastries in a trench coat that costs more than my truck, and you passed out on my boots, and something broke. "
Her fingers curl into the front of my henley. She doesn't speak. The fire behind us pops and shifts, sending a gust of cedar-scented heat across the room.
"I don't mean something broke like a bone breaks.
I mean something broke like a dam breaks.
Like the thing I built to hold everything back just cracked down and I couldn't patch it fast enough.
" I pull back an inch so I can see her face.
Her lashes are wet, clumped together in dark spikes.
The hazel of her eyes catches the firelight and fractures into gold and green and a deep umber ring around the iris that I have memorized in the two days she has been in this building.
I have memorized it the way I memorize terrain.
Obsessively. Permanently. "The first night, when I stripped off your wet clothes and wrapped you in the blanket, my hands were shaking.
Not from the cold. I've operated in conditions that would kill most men and my hands don't shake.
They shook for you. Because you were so small and so frozen and so impossibly soft and I was terrified that I'd already failed to keep you alive before I'd even decided to try. "
She opens her mouth. I turn my thumb against her lower lip and she stops.
"Let me finish. I won't be able to start again."
She nods. One small dip of her chin. I drop my hand back to the counter.
"When you woke up and started panicking and rearranging my kitchen cabinets and talking about spreadsheets and quarterly reports while wearing nothing but my flannel, I wanted to pick you up and carry you back to the bed and keep you there.
Not because of sex. Because you were the first thing in this place that was alive.
Genuinely alive. Not just surviving. You filled every corner of every room you walked into with all that nervous energy and that ridiculous optimism and I hated it.
I hated it because it made the silence feel like what it actually is, which is just emptiness with a different name. "
The fire crackles. Wind presses against the boarded windows and finds the gaps, whistling thin and cold. Kinsley's knees tighten against my hips.
"When I wiped the flour off your face yesterday and almost kissed you, I didn't pull away because I didn't want to.
I pulled away because wanting you that badly terrified me more than any firefight I've ever been in.
Combat has rules. It has engagement protocols and clear objectives and an enemy you can identify.
You don't have any of those things. You are five foot four and you can't start a fire and you twisted your ankle walking six feet to a woodpile and you are the most dangerous thing that has ever set foot on this mountain. "
Her breath hitches. A tear slips down her cheek and catches in the corner of her mouth.
"And when that radio came on last night and Hernandez said the road was clear, I felt the same thing I felt the night the bear hit the porch.
The same adrenaline dump, the same combat tunnel vision, the same absolute animal certainty that something was coming to take what belonged to me.
So I did what I always do under threat. I fortified.
I pulled back. I shut down every access point and went cold because cold is safe and cold is controllable and cold means nothing can reach the perimeter. "
I wrap my hand around the back of her neck. My palm covers from her hairline to her shoulders. She is impossibly small under my grip and she leans into it instead of pulling away and that single gesture of trust takes what's left of my composure and grinds it to powder.