14. Jakob #2
I close the distance in two strides and my hand wraps around her upper arm, not hard enough to bruise but firm enough that she understands this is not a discussion.
I pull her away from the spot where the truck was parked and point her uphill, back toward the switchback, back toward the cabin, back toward the only place in the mountains where I can guarantee her safety.
She stumbles on her bad ankle and I adjust my grip instantly, taking more of her weight, but I don't slow down and I don't stop.
"Jakob, wait. Those men, they just appeared out of nowhere and I didn't know..."
"Walk."
"I was just going to town to get cell service. My family doesn't even know if I'm alive, my mother is probably filing a missing persons report right now and..."
"Walk faster."
She does, because she's smart enough to read the temperature of my voice and understand that right now is not the time to push.
I keep my hand on her arm and my body between her and the downhill side of the road.
My ears are still cataloging every sound in the tree line.
The truck engine is gone but that doesn't mean those two won't grow a spine and circle back, and the bear is still in this drainage somewhere, and the road is uneven and half-washed-out and she's navigating it on a sprained ankle in canvas sneakers in the dark.
The fury builds with every step. It lives in my jaw and my shoulders and the tendons of my forearm where it connects to the hand holding her.
Not fury at the men. They were nothing. Predictable, fragile, easily managed.
The fury is at her. At the hollow space in my cabin where she should have been.
At the neatly folded blankets and the cold stove and the carefully arranged evidence of her departure, as though she was checking out of a hotel instead of walking into darkness with no weapon, no light, no knowledge of the terrain, and a compromised left ankle.
We hit the first switchback and she's breathing hard, her lungs working against the elevation and the pace I'm setting.
I don't ease off. The headlamp bounces light across the road ahead, catching the sheen of ice forming in the ruts where standing water is freezing as the temperature drops.
Below zero by midnight. She would have been out here in that.
In a flannel shirt and canvas sneakers with no heat source and no shelter and no understanding of what hypothermia does to the human body when it stops being a concept and starts being a countdown.
"I can't keep up this pace," she gasps. "My ankle. Jakob, please."
I stop. I turn. I crouch and wrap one arm behind her knees and the other around her back and I lift her against me in a single motion.
She weighs nothing. She always weighs nothing.
A hundred and thirty pounds of soft skin and hazel eyes and stubborn, reckless, infuriating sweetness that is going to get her killed if I ever let her out of my sight again.
She doesn't fight the carry. Her fingers curl into the collar of my jacket and she presses her face against my neck and I can feel the cold of her nose and the warmth of her breath and the fine trembling that runs through her entire body.
Adrenaline crash. She's processing now, the reality of what almost happened back there filling in the spaces that her shock left empty.
I lift her up the mountain without speaking.
The second switchback. The long straight where the road cuts through the fir stand.
The final approach where the grade steepens and my boots dig into the frozen mud with each stride.
The cabin appears through the trees, dark and solid against the hillside, and I take the outside steps two at a time and kick the door open with my heel.
Inside. I set her down on her feet next to the woodstove and immediately start feeding kindling into the coals, building the fire back up because the cabin temperature has dropped fifteen degrees since she let it die.
The kindling catches. I add split pine, then a quartered round of fir, and the heat pushes outward in waves that make the cold glass in the windows tick and pop.
I stand up and look at her. She's standing exactly where I put her, her arms wrapped around her, her lower lip trembling.
Her hair is tangled with pine needles. There's a smear of mud on her cheekbone from where she stumbled on the switchback.
And she's watching me with those enormous hazel eyes that see too much and ask for too much and make me want to tear this cabin apart and rebuild it into something worthy of containing her.
"You left."
The words come out flat. Two syllables. They don't carry even a fraction of the devastation underneath them but they're all I've got because I am not a man who has ever been good with language and right now my vocabulary has been stripped down to its most essential components. Safety. Perimeter. Threat. Mine.
"You left the cabin without telling me. You left the perimeter in the dark.
No weapon. No light. Bad ankle. No knowledge of the terrain or the road conditions or the wildlife displacement patterns from the slide.
You walked straight into a situation that could have ended in three different ways and all of them end with you dead or hurt or gone. "
I'm pacing now. I don't pace. I am a man who stands still and speaks quietly and maintains control of every square inch of his physical presence at all times, and right now I am pacing the length of my own kitchen like something caged.
The fury has nowhere to go. It bounces off the walls and comes back hotter each time.
"Those men. If I had been ten minutes later.
Five minutes. If I had stayed on the trapline the way I wanted to because I was too much of a coward to come back and face you after this morning, those men would have had you in that truck and down the mountain and there is nothing in this world, nothing, that would have stopped what came next. "
I stop pacing. I look at her. I feel the muscles in my jaw flex against the words that want to come out, the ones about the photograph and the crossed-out faces and the reason I live way out here, because the last time people I was responsible for were outside my perimeter they came home in boxes, and I cannot do that again, I cannot carry that weight again, and she is making me carry it by being alive and being here and being something I can't afford to lose.
"You don't leave this cabin without me. That's not a request."
The fire crackles. The home is warming. The shadows move across the walls.
Kinsley's trembling stops. Her spine straightens, vertebra by vertebra.
Her chin comes up. The fear drains out of her face and something else fills the space, something hot and bright and utterly familiar because I've seen it every time she pushes back against me, every time she refuses to be managed, every time she stands her ground with that ridiculous, magnificent defiance that makes me want to shake her and kiss her in equal measure.
She yanks her arm away from me so violently that she stumbles backward into the kitchen table. The oil lamp rattles. Her eyes are blazing and wet at the same time, tears and fury mixed together.
"I am not your prisoner, Jakob! You can't lock me in here because you're afraid of the world!
You can't keep me in a box on a mountain because everyone you ever cared about got taken from you and you think if you just hold on tight enough, if you just control everything, you can stop it from happening again! "