Chapter 5
Bianca
Sleep should be easy tonight. I’m tired in the way that means my whole body is ready to shut down—legs heavy, shoulders loose, the bone-deep fatigue that drops me in ten minutes flat.
I’ve showered, brushed my teeth, changed into an old t-shirt and underwear.
The sheets are cool against my skin, and the apartment is dark and quiet, and perfect for sleeping.
I am not sleeping.
Just lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, replaying every second on the porch.
His voice. Low and rough, worn down from disuse. The way he answered my questions. Not with the polished ease of someone who’s practiced at conversation, but with the careful, almost reluctant honesty of a man who doesn’t give words away and was giving them to me anyway.
You learn to need it. And then you can’t go back.
I’d asked about the quiet. He’d answered about something else entirely, and I don’t think either of us acknowledged it.
I roll onto my side and pull the blanket tighter. The clock on the nightstand says 11:47. I’ve been in bed for an hour.
I think about the way he looked at me when I said I wasn’t good at loud.
That quick, assessing glance that felt nothing like the way other people look at me.
Most people hear I’m not good at loud and hear I’m shy and move on.
He heard something else. I could see it in his face. He heard the part I didn’t say.
The part where loud isn’t the problem. The part where the problem is that I’ve spent my whole life making myself quieter and smaller and easier to leave, and I’m so good at it now that sometimes I forget there’s a version of me that isn’t performing.
He looked at me, and my skin prickled. Not from exposure. Not from being stripped bare. From being recognized. From someone looking at me and finding the thing I hadn’t been showing anyone else.
I press my face into the pillow and make a small, frustrated sound that no one hears.
This is not how I planned to spend my Saturday night.
Riley picks up on the fourth ring. Her voice is groggy and amused, which means I woke her up and she’s already decided it was worth it.
“It’s almost midnight, B.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I can’t sleep.”
A rustle. She’s sitting up. I can picture her in her apartment in Evergreen Lakes, pushing her hair out of her face, reaching for the glass of water she always keeps on the nightstand. “Talk to me.”
“I went to a dinner tonight. At the B&B. Nora organized it.”
“The woman who adopted you. Okay.”
“And there was…” I trail off. Stare at the ceiling. Try to figure out how to say this without it sounding like what it is. “There’s this man in town. He delivered firewood to the clinic last week. He was at the dinner tonight.”
Silence. One beat. Two.
“Bianca St. James.” Riley’s voice has changed. The sleepiness is gone. She is fully, dangerously awake. “Are you calling me at midnight because of a man?”
“No. I’m calling because I can’t sleep.”
“Because of a man.”
“Because of—” I close my eyes. “It’s not like that.”
“Tell me what it’s like.”
I pull the blanket up to my chin and stare into the dark, trying to explain something I don’t understand myself.
“He’s quiet. Really quiet. He barely talks, and when he does, it’s…
careful. He doesn’t waste words. And he has this dog, this German Shepherd, who’s the same way. They move together. They’re both…”
“Broken?”
“Careful,” I say. “They’re both very careful.”
Riley is quiet for a second. When she speaks, her voice is softer. The real Riley. “What happened at the dinner?”
“We ended up on the porch. Both of us needed out of the noise. And we just… stood there. Talked a little. He asked where I was before, and I told him the burn unit, and he didn’t flinch.
He didn’t give me that look people give, the one that’s half pity and half, oh God, I don’t know what to say.
He just said it was a hard place to be. And that was it. ”
“That was it.”
“Riley, I’m being serious.”
“So am I.” She pauses. “B, you’re describing a man who let you be quiet, didn’t ask you to perform, and treated the hardest thing about your past like a fact instead of a tragedy. And you can’t sleep.”
I say nothing.
“Honey,” she says, and her voice is so gentle my throat aches. “That’s exactly what it’s like.”
I press my lips together. My eyes sting and I don’t want to cry on the phone at midnight over a man I’ve spoken to twice.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I whisper.
“You don’t have to know how. You just have to not run away from it.”
We talk for another ten minutes. She asks his name, and I tell her, and she says Rhett Hawthorne with the slow, savoring appreciation of someone tasting an expensive wine.
She asks what he looks like, and I tell her tall and broad and scarred, and she makes a sound that I choose not to interpret.
Then she tells me to breathe and to stop overthinking, and to call her tomorrow.
“Riley?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Go to sleep, B.”
She hangs up. The apartment is quiet again. The ceiling is still there. The clock says 12:23.
I’m not going to sleep.
It starts with his hands.
I’m not trying to think about them. I’m trying to think about nothing, to empty my mind the way the meditation apps always say to, let the thoughts float past without attaching to them. But his hands keep floating past and I keep attaching.
The size of them. The scars across his knuckles, with the calluses I noticed when he stacked the firewood, thick and rough in the places that come from years of gripping an axe handle, a saw, a steering wheel. The way he held the split wood. Firm. Sure.
I think about what those hands would feel like on skin.
My skin.
The thought lands in my belly and spreads.
A slow, liquid heat that has nothing to do with the blanket or the room temperature and everything to do with the image behind my closed eyes: Rhett’s hand on my hip.
The rough drag of calluses against the curve of my waist. The span of his palm, wide enough to cover the places I’ve spent years learning to hate.
I should stop, but I don’t.
His voice invades my thoughts. That low, rough sound that seems to start somewhere deep in his chest before it reaches the air.
Me neither. Two words. That’s all he said when I told him I wasn’t good at loud, and those two words did more to my nervous system than any full sentence has done in years.
What would that voice sound like closer?
Against my ear. Against my neck. Saying things quieter and rougher than anything he’d say on a porch with the door open.
My hand moves beneath the blanket. Slowly.
Not deciding. Just drifting. Fingertips trailing down my stomach over the cotton of my shirt, and the touch feels different because it’s not mine anymore.
In my head, the hand is larger. Rougher.
The fingers are scarred and sure, and they know where they’re going.
I think about his size. The way he filled the doorway at the clinic.
The breadth of his shoulders, the solid weight of him, the way the air in the room seemed to reorganize itself around his body.
I think about that weight above me. Beside me.
The press of his chest against mine, his legs between my legs, and my breath catches.
My fingers slip beneath the hem of my shirt and flatten against my bare stomach, and the heat there is startling, shocking me enough not to worry about the roundness I carry.
Real. I trace upward, and when my hand finds my breast, the touch pulls a sound out of me that I press into the pillow.
Soft. Involuntary. No one has touched me in so long that touching myself feels like a confession.
I think about Rhett’s mouth. The set of his jaw. The way he looked at me on the porch, guarded and careful, and how his guard slipped, just for a second, when I asked about the quiet. What would it take to make it slip further? To crack him open the way he’s cracking me open, without even trying?
My hand slides down. Over my stomach. Past the waistband of my underwear. And when I touch myself, the relief is so sharp my back arches off the mattress.
I’m wet. Embarrassingly, achingly wet from nothing but thoughts of a man I’ve spoken to twice, and the realization should make me stop, but it doesn’t.
It makes me press harder. Circle slowly.
My fingers know what I need better than my brain does right now, and what I need is Rhett Hawthorne’s hands on my body, his rough voice in my ear, the weight of him holding me down in a way that doesn’t feel like being trapped but like being found.
I think about his fingers instead of my own.
Thick. Calloused. Sliding through the wetness with a patience that has nothing to do with hesitation.
He wouldn’t rush. He would take his time the way he took his time stacking firewood, reading the grain before he placed each piece, and the thought of that deliberate attention makes my thighs tighten and my hips press up into my hand.
I think about the scar on his face. The tattoos on his arms. All the damage he carries and doesn’t hide. I think about pressing my mouth to the scar and I think about his hands in my hair and I think about what it would sound like if he said my name.
Bianca.
Low. Rough. It hurt him to say it, and he couldn’t stop.
My fingers move faster. The heat builds in a tight coil at the base of my spine, and I’m breathing hard now, my face turned into the pillow, my free hand gripping the sheet.
I’m close. I can feel it gathering, and I try to hold on to the image, but it keeps shifting.
His hands. His voice. The crack in his expression when Chief went to me and he couldn’t explain it away.
The way he looked back at me from the truck.
The way seeing him look back made something inside me fracture with wanting.
I want him.
Not the way I’ve wanted things before. Not carefully, not with the measured consideration I apply to every choice I make.
I want him in a way that terrifies me, a way that lives in my body instead of my head, and when I come it’s with his name between my teeth and my whole body curled tight around the ache.
Afterward, I lie in the dark and feel my pulse slow down.
The ceiling is still there. The quiet is still there. My hand is still pressed between my thighs, and the aftershocks are fading into something softer and sadder, the way they always do when you come alone and the person you were imagining isn’t there to hold you through the drop.
I roll onto my side and pull the blanket up.
I’m terrified.
Not of him. He’s been nothing but careful with me, and I don’t think he has it in him to be anything else.
I’m terrified of wanting. Of the specific, catastrophic vulnerability of wanting someone who might not want you back.
Of opening a door I’ve spent my whole life learning to keep shut, because every time I’ve opened it before, the person on the other side has walked through and kept going.
My parents walked through it. Every friend I made in LA who stopped calling when I stopped being useful. Every person who told me I was too quiet or too much work or so sweet but, and the but was always the door closing.
I can’t do that again.
I close my eyes and breathe. The mountains are outside my window, black and solid, and somewhere up in those mountains is a man with a limp and a scar and a dog who chose me, and I’m lying in the dark with his name in my mouth and the taste of wanting on my tongue.
“Rhett.”
I whisper it. Just once. Just to hear it in my voice, in the quiet of my apartment, where no one can see what it does to my face.
I hate how good it feels.
I say it again.