Chapter 9 Greta
Greta
I hang the CLOSED sign on the diner door and, for once, it doesn’t feel like failure.
It feels like choosing us—choosing safety, choosing the quiet I’ve been craving since the note.
Tom promised to put a cruiser out front after dark.
Nate changed the back door lock on his way out last night with a tool kit that lives in his truck like an extra organ. And today? Today we’re staying put.
“Your boss cool with you playing hooky?” Nate asks as we pull up the mountain road, the tires chewing through a dusting of fresh snow.
“I’m the boss,” I say, smug. “The boss said I needed a mental health day. She’s very persuasive and extremely pretty.”
He huffs a quiet laugh. “Can’t argue with management.”
The cabin is warmer than yesterday, like it remembered us. The fire Nate banked before we left sighs back to life with a little encouragement.
“What’s on the agenda?” I ask, shucking my coat and hanging it on the hook by the door. “We gonna do more combat lessons? Because my thighs still hurt.”
“Training later,” he says, tipping his chin toward the kitchen. “First: breakfast.”
“You cooked me dinner and now you’re cooking me breakfast?” I fold my arms, pretending to consider it. “What’s next, Bishop, knitting me a scarf?”
“Don’t tempt me,” he deadpans. “I’m dangerous with a crochet hook.”
I grin so hard my face hurts.
He makes pancakes—real ones, thick and golden, the kind that soak up butter like it’s a calling.
He flips them with an ease that makes me suspect he’s done this for other people before and then feel a tiny, ridiculous flare of jealousy.
He watches me take the first bite like he’s waiting for a verdict.
I close my eyes and make an inappropriate noise.
“Okay,” he says, satisfied. “Good.”
We spend the morning with small things that feel big.
We puzzle through a battered thousand-piecer he found tucked in a closet (“I’m not saying this missing edge piece is a metaphor for my life, but—”), and when my fingers start to go cold he shoves wool socks on my feet like he’s annoyed I have toes at all.
We walk the tree line—me in his spare beanie, him pointing out animal prints in the snow like I’m the student in a tracking class I never signed up for.
“Deer,” he says, toeing the two-toed print. “Coyote. Rabbit.”
“Please don’t say bear.”
“You’re safe.”
I look up at him then—really look. Wind-pinked cheeks, lashes feathered with tiny flakes, a mouth that refuses to smile unless I wrestle one out of it.
Traces of last night live at the corner of his eyes, in the loosening of his shoulders, in the way he keeps brushing his knuckles against mine like he can’t help it.
“You keep saying that,” I say softly. “That I’m safe.”
“I’ll keep proving it.”
We make lunch and don’t burn anything. We talk about nothing and everything.
He tells me about summers spent in a double-wide with a mother who worked two jobs and taught him how to make beans taste like dinner.
I tell him about my grandma’s duck slippers and how I learned to hide cash in the hems of my jeans, just in case.
We don’t say Travis much. We don’t have to.
He’s a shadow, and today the light is good.
In the late afternoon, a lazy snow starts to fall. I stretch on the couch and watch it through the window, the flakes soft and slow, the kind that make even silence feel like it’s humming. Nate sits in the chair across from me, feet bare, an open book face-down on his thigh.
“What?” I ask, smiling.
He shakes his head, almost sheepish. “Wasn’t sure I’d ever get this.”
“What?”
“Quiet,” he says. Then, after a beat, “You.”
My heart does that messy, high-kick thing. I flop onto my stomach and prop my chin on my hands. “Tell me something true.”
He tips his head. “About what?”
“You.”
There’s a pause.
“I don’t think I deserve nice things,” he says. Matter-of-fact. No self-pity. Just truth. “Not after what I’ve done. Not after who I’ve been.”
The words hit me like a hand to the sternum. Not because they surprise me—because they explain him. The careful control. The distance he builds and dismantles a brick at a time, like he’s not sure the foundation can hold.
I push up, cross the space, and climb into his lap without asking. He catches me by the waist, and then settles his hands there like that’s where they live.
“Listen to me,” I say, palms framing his jaw.
“You apologized last night for protecting me. Today you apologized for making me breakfast. You just apologized for being in love with the quiet. You don’t need forgiveness for existing.
” I lean in until our foreheads touch. “And if you think you don’t deserve nice things, then I’m going to be the nicest thing and you’re going to have to deal with it. ”
A breath of a laugh shakes out of him. “Bossy.”
“Management,” I remind him.
Something flickers in his eyes—want, affection, relief. He curls a hand around the back of my neck and kisses me like the day’s been heading toward this exact second the whole time.
It starts soft. It doesn’t stay there.
His mouth tastes like maple and something that’s only him.
I open for him; he deepens it, patient turning hungry, slow burning hot.
I slide my fingers into his hair and he makes a low sound that lives somewhere I’m not lending out to anyone.
We kiss until my lips feel a little swollen and the room feels warmer and the snow outside turns to a blur.
We come up for air and I stay close, nose brushing his. “Tell me something else.”
His thumb strokes the line of my throat like he can read a pulse instead of a book. “I didn’t sleep much last night,” he admits.
“Did I snore?”
“You breathed.” A ghost of a smile. “And my idiot heart kept saying, don’t sleep through this.”
I melt like butter on his pancakes.
“Your turn,” he says. “Tell me something true.”
I hesitate—then I let it out. Quiet. Clean. “When you told me you didn’t think you deserved me, I fell a little in love with you.”
His throat works. His fingers tighten at my waist, like the gravity just shifted and he needs an anchor. “Greta—”
“You didn’t say it to make me feel something.
You said it because it was true for you.
And I like the man who tells the truth even when it makes him feel small.
” I tip my head, searching his face. “I like the man who says he’s going to protect me and then does.
I like the man who sleeps on the floor and pretends it’s comfortable. I like the man who—”
He cuts me off with a kiss, but it’s not because he doesn’t want to hear it. It’s because he does and he can’t in that exact second without unraveling.
He stands with me in his arms—show-off—and my legs wrap around him like they were waiting for instruction. He carries me to the bed and lowers me onto the covers, coming down over me with his weight braced on his forearms, careful and sure.
“Tell me to stop,” he says, the same way he did last night. Like a vow.
“I won’t,” I say, the same way I did last night. Like a promise.
We undress each other slow this time, a button at a time, a laugh at a time, a story at a time—how I chipped a tooth on a cinnamon stick when I was eight, how he broke his wrist and refused to tell anyone, how we both thought the first day we met that the other one was too much trouble.
“Still think that?” I ask, breathless as his mouth finds the curve where my neck meets my shoulder.
“Yes,” he murmurs against my skin. “But I want the trouble.”
Heat gathers, sweet and heavy. We learn each other again—what makes me gasp, what makes him grind his teeth, what pace turns our edges to liquid.
He’s reverent with me, like he’s saying grace; I’m greedy with him, like I’m starving.
Somewhere in the middle, soft turns to want and want to need and then there’s only us, moving, breathing, giving, taking.
“Eyes on me,” I whisper when he starts to look away like the feeling is too big.
He does. It breaks something open in both of us.
When we crest, we do it together, the world narrowing to a bright, quiet point that feels like coming home and setting the house on fire in the same breath.
We collapse in a mess of limbs and laughter, and he rolls, tugging me on top so I can sprawl across his chest and listen to his heart hammer the same rhythm as mine.
Outside, the snow keeps falling. Inside, the fire ticks and I draw patterns on Nate’s sternum with one finger, and he draws circles at the base of my spine until my muscles go lax.
“You’re staying,” he says after a while, not a question.
“You asked nicely,” I tease.
“You’re staying,” he repeats, lower now, like he’s telling a secret to the ceiling. “If you want. With me. Here or in town. In my quiet. In my loud. I’ll fix the door at your place and you can keep the diner and I’ll lurk in a booth and terrify teenagers who forget to tip.”
I laugh into his chest, then press a kiss right over his heart. “Okay.”
He freezes. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” I tip my head to see his face. “I’m not running. I’m done. I want pancakes and perimeter checks and you glaring at people who ogle my legs.”
“They better not.”
“They will.”
He groans. I grin.
We lie there until the light changes and the sky turns the color of lavender milk.
Later, we’ll text Tom and Micah and Hale and talk about plans and patrols and the very real man who still needs to be found and ended.
Later, we’ll train and eat and wash dishes shoulder-to-shoulder and watch a dumb movie that makes him roll his eyes but secretly enjoy it.
Right now, it’s just us. The snow. The quiet. The soft, steady truth we keep saying with our hands and our mouths and our careful, reckless promise:
We’re choosing this.
We’re choosing each other.