Chapter Ten #2
He reaches out. His hand moves slowly enough that I can track every inch of it and could pull back, turn my head, pretending I don’t know what’s coming.
He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, the one loose piece that’s been falling across my face for the last hour, and I have been pushing it back with the back of my hand every time it falls, and his fingers don’t withdraw.
They stay at my jaw, just resting there, warm against the cold of my skin, his eyes on mine, and his whole body has gone absolutely still.
Not pushing or asking, just present.
My heart kicks hard enough to hurt.
He smells of woodsmoke and something underneath it, warm, mineral, and faintly electric. I have a ridiculous moment of thinking about the crater again, about the particular smell of ozone, struck lightning, and understanding that it wasn’t just the fall... it’s him. It’s always been him.
I want to close the small distance left between us so much it scares me.
That’s the thing. That’s the whole problem, sitting right there in the lamplight with nowhere to go, not the wanting, which I could probably handle, which I have filed under survivable for the past few weeks, but the fear underneath it.
Five years ago, I was certain of myself in ways I will never be certain of myself again.
He is sitting three feet away from me, looking at me as if I’m something worth the trouble of seeing, and I cannot afford to be wrong about this too.
I look at him, then I look away.
His hand withdraws. Slowly, no sharp edge to it, no hurt. He brings it back to the table and wraps it around his coffee cup, and gives me time to breathe, the way he always gives me time.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m not—” I stop, then start over. “It’s not that I don’t—”
“Lily.” His voice is quiet. “You don’t have to explain it.”
I press my lips together hard.
The lamp burns on.
Outside, the storm screams and screams and does not stop.
“I know I don’t,” I say. “I want to.”
He waits.
“I’m not good at this,” I tell him. “I was, once... before. I used to know how to be a person who let people in.” I look at my hands flat on the table.
Surgeon’s hands, my professors used to call them.
Wasted now on snares, firewood, and not trembling when I want them to. “I’ve forgotten the sequence.”
“There’s no sequence,” he says.
“There has to be. Everything has a sequence.”
“Not this,” he says with no cruelty or urgency. “This is just two people in a room during a storm.”
I look at him then, properly, the way I’ve been carefully not looking at him for weeks.
The lamplight sits at the angle of his jaw and picks out the silver in his dark hair, and I let myself look at the way it falls across his forehead, the particular weathered quality of his face, not worn down but worn in, the way good tools are worn in.
He has laugh lines at the corners of his eyes that I don’t think belong to whatever life came before the fall, because nothing about him suggests easy laughter.
They suggest something better, a life that had enough worth smiling at to leave a mark.
I find myself wanting to know what put them there.
I find myself wanting to know a lot of things I have been careful not to want.
His hands are wrapped around his coffee cup, big, scarred, and still.
I have watched those hands carry wood, dress wounds, and hold a snare wire with the delicate precision of someone who has learned the difference between force and control.
Whatever he was before the fall, those hands remember it.
I used to think about hands the way surgeons think about them, as instruments, as the difference between good work and great work.
I have been thinking about his hands differently for weeks now, and I have been pretending not to notice.
“Two people in a room,” I repeat.
“And a dog,” he says.
Bear’s tail thumps once from the direction of the stove, without Bear bothering to lift his head.
Something loosens in my chest.
Not all of it, not enough.
But something.
When the lamp begins to flicker, and the storm shows no sign of relenting, I go to bed at midnight. He’s still at the table. I pause at the edge of the bed with my hand on the frame and look at the dark corner where the stove barely reaches.
“The temperature’s going to drop overnight,” I say. “It always does when the wind holds this long. It pulls the warmth out through the walls.”
He looks over at me.
“The bed retains heat better,” I say it to the frame, to the quilt, to anywhere but him. “If you wanted... for warmth.”
A pause that lasts long enough to make my face hot.
“For warmth,” he says.
“Yes.”
He gets up from the table and crosses the room without another word. The mattress dips when he lies down on the far side, leaving enough space between us that he couldn’t touch me accidentally if he tried. Somehow that makes me more aware of him, not less.
“You can come closer,” I say.
His head turns on the pillow. “For warmth?”
I glare into the dark. “Don’t ruin it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” I can hear the smile in his voice.
He shifts closer. Not against me, just close enough that the heat coming off him reaches me. It shouldn’t feel intimate, but it does.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling.
The storm screams against every surface of this cabin with a violence that should feel threatening, but the cabin holds, the way it always holds, the way this country holds if you know how to read it and give it the respect it asks for.
The sound is cotton-thick in the silence between gusts and then enormous when the gusts hit, a rhythm like breathing, as if something very large cycling through exhale and inhale, indifferent, eternal, and far bigger than any of us in here.
He is warm beside me. More than warm, Prophet radiates something even in sleep, that same low heat I’ve been aware of since the night I ran my hands over a chest that healed itself in the firelight and understood nothing would be simple after that. I’m aware of every inch of the space between us.
I think about what he said. ‘Someone who sees you. The whole of you.’ I think about the way his hand felt at my jaw, and the fact that he held still, that the moment he knew I was stepping back, he let me go without a single word of pressure.
Then, I think about the surgeon I was, who went into a room certain and came out of the hospital changed, and the five years of quiet I built after as a kind of proof that I could survive without certainty, without competence that mattered, without anyone.
And I think about how, for the past several weeks, surviving has started to feel less like the point.
Beside me, Prophet sleeps. Bear breathes slow and heavy at the foot of the bed. The storm keeps hammering at the cabin, but with Prophet’s heat reaching me beneath the quilt, it feels farther away than it has all night.
I watch the dark ceiling and don’t sleep for a long time.