Chapter 3 #2
"I'm sure you have." He doesn't move from the doorway. Doesn't come closer. The choice registers, and I file it in the category of things Alex does that don't match the template I keep trying to fit him into. "Storm's going to pick back up. You've got maybe an hour."
"Then I've got an hour."
The corner of his mouth moves. It isn't a smile.
It's the shadow of one, barely there, just a shift in the set of his jaw that lasts half a breath.
On another man it would be nothing. On him, a man who keeps his face as locked down as his front door, the crack in that composure hits me low in the stomach.
Not butterflies. Heavier than that. The kind of pull that has teeth.
He comes to the railing. The porch boards don't creak under his weight, which shouldn't be possible for someone built like him, but he moves with a deliberate placement that absorbs impact.
He stands to my left, close enough that his body blocks the wind from that side. The cold on my right sharpens by contrast, and the warmth radiating off him through the borrowed coat is steady and solid, the heat of a body that runs hot and doesn't seem to notice.
His hands rest on the railing. I am looking at those hands again, at the width of his knuckles, at the rough skin across them.
The looking is becoming a habit I need to break before it becomes something worse.
The distance between us feels chosen. Close enough to share warmth. Far enough that I'd have to reach for him. The restraint in it makes my skin prickle.
"First time seeing the ridge?" he asks.
"Hard to see anything through a whiteout."
"Fair point." He looks out at it the way a person looks at something they've seen a thousand times and still haven't gotten tired of. "It's called Sawyer's Ridge. My grandfather named it after himself, which tells you everything you need to know about the family ego."
"Your grandfather named a mountain after himself."
"A ridge. Technically."
"Oh, well. If it's technically a ridge, that's very humble."
The almost-smile comes back. My body registers it like a change in atmospheric pressure, felt in the bones before the brain catches up.
"You're funny," he says. The observation sounds like it costs him something.
"You sound surprised."
"People who show up at my lodge at midnight in a blizzard aren't usually funny."
"What are they usually?"
"Lost. Drunk. Both."
"And which one am I?"
He looks at me. The look is direct and unhurried, and the weight of it lands on my skin like a physical thing.
A day ago this would have sent me calculating escape routes.
Right now, standing on this porch with the ridge behind me and the cold pressing in from every direction, the look holds me in place.
Not the way Gary's attention held me, which was the sensation of being pinned under glass.
This is someone who likes what he's looking at and isn't pretending otherwise.
My body's response to that directness is immediate, inconvenient, and centered low enough that I'm not examining it on this porch.
"I haven't decided yet," he says. His voice has dropped half a register, and the roughness of it in the cold air runs down the back of my neck.
"Well. When you figure it out, let me know."
"You'll be the first."
The banter is a sparring match and we both know it. Every line is a test, a probe, a small risk offered to see what the other person does with it. He gives me dry honesty and waits to see if I match it. I give him deflection with a sharp edge and wait to see if he pushes through.
Neither of us is saying what we mean, and the conversation happening underneath the words is louder than the wind.
"How long have you been running this place alone?" I ask, because the question is personal enough to push without being personal enough to cost.
"I have three brothers."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I've got."
I look at him, and the stubbornness sitting in the line of his shoulders is so complete it almost makes me smile. "You've done that twice now. Answer a question with a different question's answer."
"And you've asked two questions you already knew the answer to."
He's right. I do know. The lodge runs on Alex the way a clock runs on its mainspring. His brothers help, support, occupy their roles.
But the weight sits on him, visible in the way he holds every room he walks into. It's in his shoulders. In his hands.
I haven't watched his nightly check, but I've heard it. The sequence of doors, the methodical pause at each one, the creak of floorboards tracking a route that never varies. The thoroughness of it was audible, and it told me everything I needed to know about the man performing it.
I recognize the pattern because I lived inside one just like it. Gary checked things too. Locks, accounts, my phone, my schedule. The method was different. The need underneath it was the same: the absolute conviction that control was the only barrier between order and catastrophe.
Alex isn't Gary. The comparison is unfair. But familiar patterns don't stop being dangerous just because the man running them is better looking and makes you want to laugh at his brother's bear stories.
"The ridge," I say, because I need to change the direction of my own thoughts. "Is there anything on the other side?"
"More ridge. Then forest. Then another valley. Then Canada, eventually."