15. Kinsley #2
The six feet between us is nothing. It's a handful of steps across rutted mud and gravel, and I cross it without deciding to, without thinking about my ankle or the cold or whether touching him right now is the strategic move.
Strategy is for boardrooms and quarterly reviews and the version of Kinsley Smart who used to sit in glass conference rooms crafting five-year plans that looked beautiful on paper and meant absolutely nothing.
That woman would have weighed the options, calculated the risk, considered the possibility that she was projecting her own need onto a broken man who might never be able to love her back in the way she needed.
I am not that woman tonight.
I lower myself onto the porch step beside him, and the wood is cold and damp through the shirt that hangs past my thighs, and my ankle sends a bright flare of pain up my calf when I bend it wrong, and none of it matters.
I don't speak. I don't ramble to fill the silence the way I always do, the way I've done since I was a kid and discovered that if you talked fast enough and bright enough, people forgot to notice that you were falling apart underneath. I just reach for him.
His head is enormous. That's the first absurd thing I think as I pull it toward me, my fingers sliding through the dark hair at his crown that's thick and coarse and slightly damp from the night air.
His skull is heavy in my hands, real and alive and anchored to a body that could snap me in half without effort but trembles now under my palms like something caught in a trap.
I guide him down and he resists for one second, maybe two, the muscles in his neck rigid with the reflex to hold himself upright, to stay vigilant, to keep watch over everything including his own grief. And then the resistance breaks.
His forehead hits my collarbone and his breath punches out of him in a sound I will never forget.
Not a sob. Not a groan. His arms don't come around me right away.
They hang at his sides like he's forgotten what they're for when they're not holding a rifle or an axe or boarding up windows against things that want to get in.
I wrap my arms around his head and his neck holding on.
I kiss his head and breathe him in and I feel his entire body shudder, a seismic thing that rolls through him from his shoulders to his spine and rattles through the porch step into my bones.
His hands finally move. They find my waist and grip, and his fingers are so large they nearly span the width of me, and he pulls me closer with a desperation that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with a man who has been drowning in two feet of water for four years because he refused to let anyone pull him out.
I hold him tighter. I put my chin on his head and I look out at the tree line and the thin silver light filtering through the canopy and the dark, breathing wilderness that he chose as his penance.
I think about those men. Cortez with no legs, holding Jakob's hand.
Miller. Briggs. The others whose names I don't know yet but will learn, because I will ask him again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, not to make him relive it but to share the carrying of it.
I think about a twenty-seven-year-old soldier crawling out of a drainage ditch covered in mud and blood and finding his entire world dismantled in thirty seconds, and then spending the next four years dismantling himself to match.
Living up here with his generator and his traps and his boarded windows and his absolute conviction that isolation was the same as atonement.
His breathing evens out against my body, each exhale warm through the clothes, and I realize that I am doing the thing he has done for me since the moment I collapsed on his porch.
I am holding him in the dark. I am being the wall between him and the thing he's afraid of.
The only difference is that the thing he's afraid of isn't a bear or a storm or the cold.
It's himself. It's the story he tells himself about what he is and what he deserves and the future he decided he forfeited in a valley on the other side of the world, and that story is a lie, and I will spend however long it takes proving it to him because I have never been more certain of anything in my entire chaotic, burnout-ravaged, plan-derailed life.
His grip on my waist shifts. His thumbs trace slow circles against my hip bones, not a conscious gesture but the involuntary movement of a man relearning what it means to touch someone without checking for a pulse or applying pressure to a wound.
I keep my fingers in his hair, scratching gently against his scalp the way you'd soothe something wild that has finally stopped running, and I feel the tension leave his neck one degree at a time, his head growing heavier against me, his body surrendering to the simple, devastating permission to be held by someone who isn't going anywhere.
The owl calls again from the tree line. Its partner answers.
The two voices braid together in the dark, overlapping and separate all at once, and the sound is so clean and uncomplicated that it makes my heart ache with something that isn't sadness.
It's recognition. This is what it sounds like when two creatures find each other in the wilderness and decide to stay.
Minutes pass. Maybe ten. Maybe more. The cold deepens around us and my toes go numb inside the wool socks he put on my feet three days ago when I was shivering in his bed and he was pretending he didn't care, and the moon slides behind a cloud and the yard goes dark and neither of us moves because the dark isn't frightening when you're not alone in it.
I learned that from him on the first night when he scooped me off the floor and rumbled two words into my hair and rewired my entire nervous system.
You're safe. I want to give those words back to him now.
I want to pour them into his scalp through my fingertips, push them through his skin and into his blood until they reach whatever shattered place inside him still believes he walked out of that valley because the universe made a mistake.
Jakob lifts his head. The movement is slow, reluctant, like surfacing from deep water, and his face comes up into the thin light and I see it.
The wet tracks cutting through the dust on his cheekbones, disappearing into his beard.
His eyes red-rimmed and raw and stripped of every wall and fortification and barricade he has built in the four years since Korengal.
He looks at me and he is not the terrifying man who opened his door with a rifle.
He is not the stone-faced protector who carried me inside and stripped my wet clothes off with mechanical efficiency.
He is not the possessive, growling force of nature who pinned me to a kitchen table and claimed me with his body.
He is just a man, looking at a woman in the dark, with nothing left to hide behind.
"I don't know how to be in your world," he whispers.