16. Jakob #2
Afterward, she sleeps and I don't. The fire dies to embers and listen to the wind press against the walls and hold her against me and think about water.
About the gravity-fed tank on the ridge that feeds the cabin's crude plumbing, snowmelt and spring runoff filtered through gravel and charcoal into the copper pipes I soldered myself three winters ago.
The shower is barely more than a converted utility closet off the back of the kitchen, cedar planks I milled by hand, a salvaged showerhead that gives about twelve minutes of hot water when the woodstove heater is properly fed.
I've never thought about it as anything other than functional.
A way to get clean after a day of work and sweat and dirt.
I think about it differently now.
She stirs at first light. Winces when she flexes her wrapped ankle.
Stretches against me with a small groan, her body stiff from days of sleeping on a mattress designed for a man who doesn't care about comfort.
I nuzzle her head and she tilts her face up, squinting at me through the gray dawn filtering through the window boards.
"Morning."
I grunt. Pull her closer. My hand finds her hip and rests there, heavy.
"I need to move." She pushes at me. "Everything hurts. My ankle, my back, muscles I didn't know I owned."
I'm on my feet before she finishes the sentence.
I feed the stove heater two split logs of seasoned oak and open the damper until the firebox roars.
Check the water gauge on the wall. Full tank.
The pipes tick and groan as the heat works through them and I test the flow with my hand under the showerhead until steam starts curling against the cedar planks.
She's sitting on the bed when I come back, the wool blanket clutched around her shoulders, her hair a tangled wreck, her face creased with pillow lines.
She looks wrecked and perfect and I want her again with an intensity that should alarm me but doesn't. Not anymore.
Not after last night. Not after she told me to stay and I believed her.
I pick her up. She makes a sound of protest that dies when I take her past the kitchen and into the narrow shower room.
The steam has already fogged the small mirror I hung on a nail.
The space is barely big enough for me alone, which means with both of us inside it there is no gap, no distance, no room for anything but skin against skin.
I set her down carefully, keeping her weight off the bad ankle, and she braces her hands on me for balance.
I shove the blanket away from her shoulders and it drops to the wet cedar floor with a heavy, sodden sound.
She stands before me in the steam, bare, her skin already flushing pink from the heat, holding her gaze while I strip off my thermal shirt and step out of the rest.
The water hits my back first when I guide us both under the showerhead.
She gasps at the heat and presses closer, her forehead against my sternum, her hands flat against my ribs.
I wrap one arm around her waist and brace the other against the cedar wall and let the water cascade over both of us while the stiffness and the cold and the last three days of mud and blood and smoke wash down the drain in gray rivulets.
I take my time. There's a bar of soap on the small shelf and I work it between my hands until the lather is thick and I start at her shoulders.
Press my thumbs into the knotted muscles along the ridge of her neck and feel her go boneless against me, a low moan vibrating through her and into me.
I wash her arms, her hands, lacing my fingers through hers one at a time.
"What are you doing?"
Worshipping. But I don't say it. I turn her around, her back to my front, and soap her shoulders and the long line of her spine and the flare of her waist where my hands fit like they were built for exactly this purpose.
She leans back into me and my mouth finds the junction of her neck and shoulder and I kiss there and hold them while my soapy hands slide around to her stomach, her ribs, higher, cupping her breasts and feeling her nipples harden against my palms. She inhales.
Reaches back and grips my thigh, her nails biting into the muscle.
I wash every part of her. Slowly. Deliberately.
The crease behind her knees. The arch of her good foot.
The bruised and swollen ankle, so gently my fingers barely make contact, and she makes a broken little sound when I kneel in the steam to do it, my face level with her navel, looking up at her through the water streaming down my face.
"Jakob."
She says my name like a prayer she didn't know she was offering. I stay on my knees. Press my mouth to her hip bone. Then lower. The flat plane below her navel. The soft skin of her inner thigh where the heat has brought blood to the surface and she trembles against the wall.
I grip the back of her good knee and lift it over my shoulder and she gasps, her hands flying to my wet hair, and when my mouth finds her she buckles.
The wall catches her back and my shoulder catches her thigh and I catch the rest of her, one arm banded around her hip, anchoring her to me while I take her apart with nothing but patience and precision.
I read every tremor like sign-cut in fresh snow.
Follow every trail. When her grip tightens in my hair and her thigh shakes against my shoulder I don't rush, don't change pressure, just hold the line until her entire body locks and her head drops back against the cedar and she shatters in pulses I feel against my lips.
I stand before the aftershocks finish. Gather her up, her back against the wall, her legs wrapping around me on instinct, the water hammering my shoulders.
I push into her in one slow, controlled stroke and the sound she makes fills the small room and bounces off the wet planks and I will hear it for the rest of my life.
The steam wraps around us. The water runs hot down the channels of our bodies where they press together and I move inside her with conscious, measured intention.
Not desperate. Not frantic. Every stroke is a promise.
Every grip of her fingers on my shoulders is an answer.
I brace her weight against the wall, one hand under her thigh, the other flat on the cedar beside her head.
Her eyes are half-closed and her lips are parted and water beads on her eyelashes and she is so impossibly beautiful in this crude, rough-hewn space that the contrast almost breaks me.
"Stay." The word comes out raw, scraped from somewhere below my sternum. "Stay here. Stay with me."
Her eyes open fully and she takes my face in both hands, water streaming between her fingers, and she kisses me while I move inside her.
Her mouth gives me the answer her words can't form and I feel it in the way she tightens around me, pulling me deeper, her heels pressed into the small of my back.
I lean my forehead to hers and let the rhythm build, slow and relentless, the cedar wall creaking under our combined weight, the water running cooler now but neither of us notices because there is enough heat between us to outlast any tank.
When she comes the second time she says my name and nothing else and I follow her with a groan that starts in my gut and tears through my entire body holding her pinned against the wall, buried as deep as I can go, and I don't let go.
Won't let go. She is mine and this mountain is ours and for the first time in four years the silence in my head isn't empty. It's full.
The water turns cold. I shut it off and wrap her in the heavy wool towel from the hook and carry her back to the bed and dry her hair with the rough terry cloth and she laughs and swats at me and the sound fills the cabin with something it has never contained before.
I feed the fire. I make coffee. I bring her a tin mug and a plate of venison jerky and dried apples and she sits cross-legged on the bed wearing my shirt and nothing else, eating breakfast like this is the most normal morning of her life.
Then she reaches for her bag.
The phone has been dead for days. But the road is clear now and the ridge catches a thin signal from the tower in town, barely a single bar, and when she presses the power button the screen blinks to life and immediately starts buzzing.
Not once. Not twice. The phone vibrates continuously for thirty seconds, a furious swarm of notifications filling the cracked screen, and her face changes.
The softness drains away. The color leaves her cheeks and she goes rigid on the mattress, her eyes scanning the screen.
I set down my coffee.
"Kinsley."
She doesn't answer. She's scrolling, her thumb moving fast, and then she taps the voicemail icon and a man's voice fills my cabin. Sharp. Clipped. The kind of voice that belongs to someone who has never once doubted his authority over another human being.
"Kinsley, it's David. I don't know what kind of stunt you're pulling, but you have seventy-two hours to get back to this office or I file a formal abandonment claim.
You understand what that does to your portfolio?
To your client list? I built your career.
I can dismantle it in a phone call. Stop being dramatic and get on a plane. "
The message ends. Another begins. Same voice, angrier. Then another, colder, the threats more specific. Legal action. Blacklisting. Professional destruction delivered in the calm, measured cadence of a man who does this for sport.
Eight voicemails.
Kinsley's hand is shaking.