18. Jakob #2
Seven weekends booked through the summer.
Full. Every single one. She built a website with photos she took herself, shots of the valley at sunrise and the guest cabin framed by pines and the firepit she designed using river stones I hauled up from the creek bed.
She handles the guests and the planning and the emails and the social media accounts I refuse to acknowledge exist. I handle the land.
The firewood. The trail maintenance. The safety briefings where I stand in front of a group of city people and explain in as few words as possible how not to die.
She looks up from the laptop and her face opens into that sunrise grin, the one that hits me in the sternum every single time.
I pick up the ax. Swing. The wood splits and I'm smiling when it falls.
The last round splits and I stack the halves on the cord without looking, my hands operating on four years of muscle memory while my brain is somewhere else entirely.
Somewhere it's been for three weeks, ever since I rode the truck down to Harlan's forge in town and sat at the old man's workbench for six hours while he showed me how to shape the metal.
Mountain silver. Not the polished, sterile stuff that comes in velvet boxes behind glass counters where salespeople in pressed shirts ask about clarity and carats.
This is raw native silver I pulled from the quartz vein in the creek bed last autumn, a vein my grandfather knew about and never mined because he said the mountain would give it up when there was a reason worth having.
I panned it over two weeks of early mornings while she slept, crouching in water cold enough to turn my fingers white, picking flakes and small nuggets from the black sand and storing them in a tobacco tin I kept hidden behind the ammunition shelf where she'd never look because she still won't touch my guns.
Harlan melted it down. Showed me how to pour the liquid metal into the clay mold we carved together, the old man's arthritic fingers steadier than mine because my hands wouldn't stop shaking and he had the decency not to mention it.
The band came out rough. I filed it smooth on the cabin workbench during those late nights she thought I was building replacement shelving for the guest cabin pantry.
I wasn't building shelves. I was sitting under a single shop light with a jeweler's file I ordered off the internet, which is something I never thought I'd do, taking tiny strokes off the inside curve of the ring until it was seamless against my pinky finger, which is the closest approximation I have to the size of her ring finger because I measured while she slept by pressing my smallest finger against hers and hoping she wouldn't wake up.
She didn't wake up. She sleeps deep now.
Not the restless, twitching sleep of that first night when she'd jolt upright at every sound the cabin made.
She sleeps like someone who knows where she is and isn't afraid of it.
She sleeps with her face leaning on me and one hand fisted in my shirt and her breathing slow. This is planning a permanent position.
The ring is in my left front pocket. I carry it the way I carry my sidearm, always aware of its weight, always conscious of its location relative to my body.
I've reached for it eleven times. At breakfast when she burned the eggs and laughed about it.
Outside when she read me a five-star review from the Portland couple.
Last night in bed when she traced the scar on my forearm, the one from the bear, and pressed her lips to it without saying anything.
Eleven times I reached and eleven times I stopped because the moment wasn't right, or I wasn't ready, or the words wouldn't assemble in my throat in the correct order, or I was terrified. That last one. Mostly that last one.
I'm not terrified of much. I have been shot at and blown up and buried under rubble and charged by an eight-hundred-pound black bear in my own living room.
I have held friends while they died and walked into rooms that no one was supposed to walk out of and I did those things with steady hands and a pulse rate that never broke ninety.
But the idea of kneeling in front of this woman and asking her to be permanent makes my heart slam against my ribs like it's trying to escape the cage.
Enough.
I pull my work gloves off and toss them on the woodpile.
Cross the yard. My boots are heavy on the new porch planks, the cedar stain warm under the afternoon light, and she doesn't look up until I'm standing right over her because she's deep in whatever spreadsheet has captured her attention, her lips moving around numbers, the pencil in her hair threatening to fall.
I close the laptop. Not hard. Just fold it shut with one hand and set it on the arm of the empty chair.
"Hey, I was in the middle of the September pricing and I think we can actually raise the weekend rate by fifteen percent because the reviews are so strong and there's a waitlist forming for the fall foliage weekends which, by the way, we need to talk about adding a fourth guest cabin because the demand is just... "
She trails off because I'm pulling her up out of the chair by both hands.
The wool blanket falls from her lap. Her reading glasses slip down her nose.
She's looking up at me, those hazel eyes shifting from confused to curious, and she scans my face the way she does when she's trying to decode whatever is happening behind my silence. She won't find it there. Not this time.
I go down on one knee.
The porch plank is solid under my kneecap.
I built this porch. Replaced every rotten board, sank every nail, planed every surface.
I built it for her and now I'm kneeling on it for her and the symmetry of that feels like something she would appreciate even if I'll never have the vocabulary to say it.
I pluck the ring from my pocket. The mountain silver catches the late afternoon sun and throws a band of light across her face. The metal is imperfect. Slightly uneven in width, with a faint hammered texture that Harlan said gives it character. It looks like the mountain made it. It did.
Her hands fly to her mouth. The pencil falls from her hair and clatters on the floor.
"Kinsley."
Her name is the only word I can manage for a long moment because my throat has closed around everything else.
I grab the ring between my thumb and forefinger and hold it up to her, this woman who showed up at my door half-dead in a pastel trench coat with pastries, who saw every jagged edge of me and cut herself on most of them and stayed anyway, who took my silence and didn't try to fill it but sat inside it with me until it became something we shared instead of something I hid behind.
"Stay."
It's the same word I said when I pulled her off the ATV. But it's different now. That word was desperate, an animal sound ripped from panic. This one is a question. The only question that has ever mattered.
Her eyes are overflowing. Tears run down both cheeks and drip off her jaw onto the henley, my henley, and she's nodding before I even finish, nodding so hard her whole body shakes with it, and the word comes out broken and laughing and soaked.
"Yes. Yes, you ridiculous, impossible, beautiful man, yes."
I slide the ring onto her finger. It fits. Not perfect, slightly snug past the knuckle. She'll probably need Harlan to adjust it by a fraction of a millimeter, but it's on her hand and the silver sits against her skin like it grew there.
She drops into my lap, her knees on either side of my hips, her arms locked around my neck, her face buried against my throat, and I wrap both arms around her and hold on with everything I have. Which is everything. She is everything.
The amber porch lights flicker on as dusk settles over the ridge. The pines darken to black against a sky turning purple and orange. Somewhere down the valley a coyote calls and another answers and the sound rolls up the mountain and washes over us like music.
She pulls back just far enough to look at the ring on her hand, turning it in the fading light.
"You made this."
Not a question. She knows me.
I press my forehead against hers. "Creek bed silver. Harlan's forge."
"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
I look at her. Flour ghosts in her hair from this morning's bread. A smudge of wood stain on her collarbone from the porch rail she touched before it dried. My henley slipping off one shoulder. Reading glasses still crooked on her nose.
She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I don't say it. She knows.