16. Jakob
JAKOB
The words hang in the air between us like smoke from a spent round.
I don't know how to be in your world. I said it and I meant it and now it's out there, floating in the cold dark of this porch, and I can't take it back.
Don't want to. The truth has been lodged in my heart for days, maybe longer, since the first morning she woke up tangled around me and I understood with absolute clarity that I was ruined for solitude.
That the silence I spent four years building would never sound the same because I'd heard her laugh in it.
She doesn't flinch. Doesn't pull away. Her fingers stay in my hair, steady and warm, and her heartbeat thumps against my temple where my head rests against her.
I can feel it through the flannel. Through the thin cotton of whatever she's wearing underneath.
Sixty-eight beats per minute, calm and even, like she's been waiting for me to say this, like she already knew.
Her hand slides from my hair to the side of my face.
Her palm cups my jaw, her thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone through the beard, and she tilts my head up so I have to look at her.
The moonlight catches the hazel in her eyes and turns it to something close to gold, and her lips are parted slightly and her chin is trembling the way it does when she's fighting back something enormous, and she smiles.
Not the nervous, rambling smile she uses as armor.
Not the people-pleasing, everything-is-fine smile she wore the first night when she handed me pastries and pretended she wasn't hypothermic.
This is different. This is the kind of smile that has weight to it, gravity, the kind that pulls everything in its orbit inward and holds it there.
"Then don't."
Two words. She says them so quietly the owl almost drowns her out, but they hit my sternum like a .308 round at close range. Center mass. No exit wound.
"Don't what."
"Don't be in my world." Her thumb keeps moving across my cheekbone, back and forth, a rhythm so gentle it makes something behind my ribs crack open wider.
"That world burned me out, Jakob. It ground me down to nothing.
I was running from it when my GPS died and my car sank and I ended up on your porch holding soggy croissants like a complete disaster.
I didn't come up this mountain looking for you, but I found you, and nothing in Chicago ever made me feel the way I feel sitting on these frozen steps with your head in my lap. "
I don't say anything. Can't. My throat is a closed fist.
She leans down, pressing her forehead to mine.
Her breath ghosts across my lips, warm and sweet, and I can smell the woodsmoke in her hair and the faint remnant of the soap she's been using, my soap, cedar and pine tar, and the combination of her scent and mine tangled together does something primal to the base of my skull.
My hands find her waist. Grip hard. Not pulling her closer, not pushing her away, just holding on like a man on a cliff edge who has been offered a rope and doesn't trust himself to grab it.
"We build a new one," she says. "Right here. In these mountains. You teach me how to survive out here and I'll teach you how to let someone in. That's the deal. That's the whole deal, Jakob. You don't have to come down and I don't have to go back. We just stay and figure it out together."
My grip tightens on her waist. I can feel the softness of her body beneath the oversized flannel, her hips under my palms, the warmth of her skin radiating through the fabric into my frozen hands.
She is five-foot-four and a hundred and thirty pounds and she has no survival training and no practical skills and she twisted her ankle trying to carry firewood and she nearly got herself killed hiking down a mountain road alone and she is the strongest person I have ever met.
Stronger than anyone in my squad. Stronger than me.
Because she is sitting on a frozen porch in the vast wilderness with a broken man who just confessed he doesn't know how to exist in the civilized world, and instead of running, she's choosing to stay.
I pull back far enough to look at her face. Study every detail of it. The spray of freckles across her nose that the mountain sun brought out over the past few days. The chapped lower lip she keeps biting when she's nervous. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes where her smiles live.
"You don't know what you're signing up for."
"Probably not." Her smile widens. "But I brought pastries to a mountain in a pastel trench coat, so we've already established I don't make cautious decisions."
I pull her off the step and into my lap.
She lands with a soft sound of surprise, her legs folding on either side of my hips, her hands catching my shoulders for balance.
I wrap both arms around her and press my face into her neck and breathe her in, and I don't say the word because I don't know how yet, but I hold her like it's the only language I have and I let that be enough.
She shifts in my lap. Her fingers tighten on my shoulders and I know she feels it too, the way the air between us changes from tender to charged in the space of a single heartbeat.
My face is still buried in her neck and her pulse is hammering now, not sixty-eight beats per minute anymore, faster, harder, a rhythm I can feel against my lips where they rest against the soft skin beneath her ear.
I pull back and look at her. Really look.
Her eyes are wet but steady, her chin lifted, her jaw set with that stubborn determination she carries through every disaster this mountain has thrown at her.
She chose me. Not the version of me that exists in some fantasy where I come down from the ridge and learn to make small talk at dinner parties and pretend the world doesn't set my teeth on edge.
She chose the actual me. The one who grunts instead of speaks and boards up windows at the first sign of tracks and held a rifle in her face the night they met.
She looked at all of it, every jagged broken pieces, and said stay.
The last wall falls.
I don't think about it. Don't plan it. Don't run it through the tactical filter that's governed every decision I've made for fourteen years.
I just take her face in both hands and kiss her like I'm drowning and she's the surface, and when her mouth opens under mine I pour everything I can't say into it.
Every word I've swallowed. Every confession I choked back.
The three syllables I haven't earned the right to speak yet but feel in every cell of my body when she's close enough to touch.
She makes a sound against my mouth. Not a moan, not yet, something quieter.
A yielding. An answer. Her hands slide from my shoulders into my hair and she grips hard and I growl against her lips because the sting of it reaches something deep and feral in me, something that has been clawing at its cage since the moment I stripped her wet clothes off by the fire and forced myself not to look.
I stand with her wrapped around me. Her legs lock behind my back, her ankles crossing at the bottom of my spine. She is warm and soft.
The fire has burned low. Orange coals paint the room in amber and shadow, catching the angles of her face as I lower her onto the bed. My bed. Our bed now, if she'll have it. She looks up at me and her hair fans across the dark wool blanket
I yank the flannel open. My flannel, on her body, and that fact alone sends a possessive surge through my bloodstream that borders on violent.
Her skin underneath is pale and flushed and covered in goosebumps from the cold air or from my hands or both, and I flatten my palms against her stomach and drag them upward, slow, observing every tremor and twitch and sharp intake of breath.
"Jakob."
My name in her mouth. Wrecks me every time.
I lean down and press my lips to the hollow of her throat where her pulse beats wild and visible.
Taste salt and smoke on her skin. Work my way down, deliberate, unhurried for the first time since we started this.
The first time on the kitchen table was adrenaline and desperation.
The second time in this bed was apology and reunion.
This is different. This is a man who has finally stopped running from the one thing that could save him, and I intend to memorize every inch of the territory I've claimed.
She arches up when my mouth finds her breast. Her hands are in my hair again, pulling, guiding, and I follow her lead because this isn't just about what I need anymore.
I pay attention to every sound she makes, every hitch in her breathing, every place where my rough hands make her gasp.
I read her body the way I read landscape, with total focus, looking for the ground that gives beneath pressure, the paths that lead somewhere worth going.
When I finally settle between her thighs she hooks her good ankle around my hip and pulls me closer and the contact sends a jolt through my entire nervous system.
I brace myself on one forearm, my bandaged arm burning with the strain, and I don't care.
I look down at her. She looks up at me. And in the firelight her eyes hold no fear, no pity, no reservation, just a wide open acceptance that hits harder than any round I've ever taken.
I push into her and her back bows off the mattress and my vision whites.
She grabs my wounded forearm, not rough, just holding it, her fingers resting over the bandage she wrapped herself.
Holding the broken part of me while I move inside her.
I drop my forehead to hers and breathe her air and she breathes mine and I give her everything I have left.
Everything the mountain didn't take. Everything the war didn't kill.