Chapter 20
SAWYER
Icooked for them.
It was not something I planned. I woke up that morning and watched Chloe move through the kitchen the way she had every morning since she and Emma arrived, opening cabinets like she knew where everything was, humming something low under her breath while the coffee brewed, and something in me decided that it was my turn.
She had been feeding us. Every meal. Every day.
Like it was her job, like it came naturally, and maybe it did, but she was not the only one who lived in this cabin.
So I told her to stay out of the kitchen.
She raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“I said stay out. I am cooking tonight.”
“You can barely make toast without burning it.”
“Sit down, Chloe.”
She sat. But she watched me from the table with the kind of amused skepticism that made me want to prove her wrong about everything she had ever doubted about me.
I made roasted chicken. Potatoes with garlic and butter.
Green beans. Simple things, nothing that required any kind of genius, but I followed every step carefully.
Measured the salt. Checked the temperature.
Treated it the way I treated lumber, with precision and patience, because if you do the thing right, it holds.
Emma sat next to her mother, drawing dinosaurs on a napkin while stealing glances at the stove. The smell had filled the cabin, warm and rich, and I could see her nose twitching every time I opened the oven.
I plated the food. Three plates. Set them on the table. Took my seat across from them and waited.
Emma picked up her fork. She cut a piece of chicken, chewed it slowly with the serious expression of someone making a very important decision, and then her whole face opened up.
“This is delicious, Papa!”
I smiled.
Not the half thing I sometimes gave when Emma caught me off guard.
Not the shadow of one that I used to deflect.
A real smile. Wide and open and using muscles I had not used in so long they felt stiff.
It broke across my face before I could stop it, before I could even think about stopping it, and it stayed there, warm and unfamiliar and terrifying in how easy it felt.
Chloe put her fork down. She stared at me. Her blue eyes went soft in a way that made my chest tight, and she tilted her head like she was seeing something she had been waiting a long time to see.
“She really got your soft spot,” Chloe said quietly. “Smiling looks good on you.”
“You have the same effect, Chloe,” I said, looking straight at her. “But with a mix of irritation. You are always testing my patience.”
She laughed. Not the polite one she gave strangers or the careful one she used when she was trying not to make too much noise.
The real one. Full and bright and loud enough to fill the room, the kind of laugh that made her throw her head back and press her hand to her chest, and the sound of it hit me the way it always did.
Like a fist to the sternum. Like something I had been missing without knowing I was missing it.
“You know, Emma,” I said, turning to my daughter. “Your mama pursued me.”
Emma’s eyes went wide. She turned to Chloe with her mouth open, the kind of shocked delight that only a child can produce when they learn something scandalous about their parent.
“Really, Mama?”
Chloe’s face turned red. Not pink. Red. The kind of red that started at her neck and climbed all the way to her ears, and she pressed her lips together and looked at me with a warning in her eyes that I ignored completely.
“Next question,” she said.
Emma giggled. I watched Chloe try to recover her composure while her daughter bounced in her seat demanding details, and something settled inside me.
The three of us at this table. Food I had made.
Laughter that filled the spaces between the walls.
It felt right in a way that nothing had felt right in a very long time.
We finished eating. Emma talked about school and Sir Chomps-a-Lot and the boy in her class who kept trying to trade his sandwich for her cookies, and Chloe and I listened and passed the green beans back and forth, and the normalcy of it wrapped around me like something I did not deserve but was going to hold onto anyway.
After dinner, Chloe took Emma to get ready for bed.
I washed the dishes. Scrubbed the pots. Wiped down the counter.
I could hear the routine through the thin walls of the cabin.
Water running. Emma negotiating for one more story.
Chloe’s voice, soft and patient, reading something about a rabbit who was brave even when the world was big and scary.
The creak of the small bed as Emma climbed in. Then quiet.
I dried my hands. Walked down the hallway. Stopped outside Emma’s door and leaned against the wall.
I waited.
My heart was doing something I was going to need to have a conversation with it about.
Too fast. Too loud. The kind of pounding that belonged on a battlefield, not in a hallway outside a six-year-old’s bedroom.
But I stood there. Patient. Still. The way I had learned to be still in places far worse than this, waiting for the right moment.
The door opened. Chloe stepped out, pulling it shut behind her with the practiced care of a mother who had spent years perfecting the art of the silent exit. She turned and saw me and stopped.
“She is asleep,” Chloe whispered. “Out like a light.”
I took her hand. She blinked, looked down at my fingers wrapped around hers, looked back up at me. I did not give her time to ask questions. I pulled her down the hallway toward my room.
“Sawyer, what…”
I opened the door. Guided her inside. Closed it behind us.
The room was dark except for the moonlight coming through the window, silver and pale, casting everything in shades of blue and shadow.
She stood in the middle of the room looking up at me, her lips parted, her eyes searching my face for something I was about to give her.
I pulled her against me. Both arms wrapped around her, one across her lower back, one cradling the back of her head, and I held her.
Tight. The kind of hold that said I am not letting go this time.
Her body fit against mine the way it always had, her head against my chest, her warmth bleeding into me, and I pressed my face into her hair and breathed her in.
“Let me pursue you this time,” I said.
Her breath caught. I felt it against my chest. The sharp inhale. The stillness. She lifted her head to look at me, her lips already forming the beginning of a word, a question maybe, or a protest, or one of those deflections she was so good at.
I kissed her before she could speak.
Hard. Hungry. The kind of kiss that had nothing to do with tenderness and everything to do with seven years of wanting and three weeks of restraint snapping all at once.
My mouth covered hers and I swallowed whatever she had been about to say, my hand tightening in her hair, tilting her head back so I could deepen the kiss and take everything she was willing to give me.
She made a sound against my lips. A gasp that turned into a moan that vibrated through both of us, and then her hands were grabbing my shirt, pulling me closer, her body arching into mine with a need that matched the fire burning through my blood.
I lifted her. My hands gripped the backs of her thighs and she wrapped her legs around my waist, her arms locking around my neck.
I carried her to the bed and laid her down, my body covering hers, and the press of her beneath me, warm and soft and real, made something crack open inside my chest that I had no intention of closing again.
“Tell me to stop,” I said. Because she deserved the choice. Always.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she breathed, and pulled my shirt over my head.
Her hands found my chest. Her fingers traced the scars, the ones from the war and the ones from the mill, running over muscle and rough skin with a touch that was half worship and half desperation.
I felt every point of contact like a brand.
Like she was marking me all over again, claiming territory that had always been hers.
I stripped her shirt off in one motion. Unhooked her bra and tossed it to the floor without looking where it landed.
The moonlight fell across her bare skin and the sight of her hit me so hard I had to brace myself, my arms trembling on either side of her head, because she was more beautiful than the memory I had been carrying for seven years and I had not thought that was possible.
My mouth found her neck. The hollow of her throat where her pulse was hammering.
The curve of her collarbone. I kissed down between her breasts and took one nipple into my mouth, and the sound she made, a sharp cry that she bit off behind her teeth because our daughter was sleeping down the hall, sent heat flooding through my body like gasoline hitting a fire.
I gave the other the same attention. Slower. My tongue circling, my teeth grazing, until she was arching off the bed with her fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to leave bruises. I wanted every mark she would give me. I wanted to wake up tomorrow and see the evidence of her on my skin.
I kissed lower. Down her stomach. Across her hip. I hooked my fingers in her waistband and pulled everything down in one motion, and she lifted her hips to help, and then she was bare beneath me and the moonlight was painting her body in silver and I could not breathe.
I settled between her thighs. My mouth found her center and she nearly came off the bed, her hips jerking up, her hands flying to my hair and gripping tight.
I pinned her hips down with one forearm and worked her with my tongue, slow and deliberate, learning the rhythm that made her shake, the pressure that made her voice crack, the exact spot that made her say my name like it was the only word she knew.
“Sawyer. Oh God. Sawyer.”