9. Stella
STELLA
The blood is everywhere.
It soaks through the torn edge of his flannel sleeve and drips off his elbow in a slow, steady rhythm, hitting the floorboards in dark, quarter-sized drops, and my brain does this horrible thing where it just stops for a full two seconds.
Just stops. My vision narrows and my stomach rolls and I think, very clearly, I am going to pass out and that will be absolutely useless.
I don't pass out.
I grab the back of the kitchen chair and breathe through my nose and then I cross the room toward him.
"Sit down," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expect it to. "Sit down right now."
Kirk looks at his arm the way you'd look at a slightly inconvenient spill. No hiss of pain. No pallor under the beard. Just that flat, assessing look he gives everything, like he's deciding whether it warrants his attention.
"It's not deep," he says.
"You are bleeding on the floor."
He looks down at the floor. Apparently the evidence is not compelling enough to change his position, because he doesn't move.
"Kirk." I put myself in front of him, which forces the issue, and he has to actually look at me instead of past me. "Sit. Down."
Something shifts behind his eyes. Not softness exactly. More like acknowledgement. He pulls the chair out from the kitchen table and drops into it with the kind of controlled weight that makes the whole chair creak, and he holds his arm out to the side to keep the dripping off the rug.
"First aid kit," I say, more to myself than to him, already moving.
"He has a first aid kit. Every mountain man has a first aid kit, this is fine, this is totally manageable.
" I go to the shelf where I saw it yesterday while I was reorganising.
The red canvas pouch shoved behind a tin of kerosene rags, and I drag it down and set it on the table beside him.
"This is the part where I tell you I'm great in a crisis.
I am, historically, not great in a crisis. But I'm going to be great in this one."
He watches me unzip the kit.
"Okay." I inventory out loud because it keeps me focused and keeps the rising nausea at bay. "Gauze. Steri-strips, good. Antiseptic wipes. Non-stick pads." I lay everything out in a row. My hands are completely steady. I am choosing to be proud of that. "Let me see your arm."
He puts it on the table between us, forearm up, and I have to roll his sleeve back further to get to the wound properly.
The flannel is soaked through, heavy with cold and blood, and I work it up past his elbow and push it past the thick swell of his bicep, and the cut is there, two inches maybe, running clean along the outer forearm.
Clean-edged. Not ragged. The axe was sharp, at least, and I focus on that.
"It's not as deep as it looks," I say, tearing open an antiseptic wipe. "The bleeding makes it look worse." I press the wipe to the cut and he doesn't flinch. Not even a flicker. I look up. "Does that hurt?"
"Yes."
"You're not reacting."
"No."
I look back down. Press again, firmer, clearing the blood away from the edges of the cut so I can actually see what I'm working with.
"You're going to need steri-strips. I don't think it needs stitches.
" I glance up again. "Unless you have a suture kit in here, in which case I've never done that and I'd rather not start today. "
"No sutures."
"Great. Good. Strips it is." I reach for the first packet and tear it with my teeth. "This is going to pull."
"I know."
I press the first strip across the mouth of the cut, pulling the edges together, and I feel the tension in his arm.
Not a flinch. Not a sound. Just a slight, almost imperceptible tightening of the muscle under my fingers, like he's contracting it from the inside, and then releasing.
I work my way down the cut with three more strips, spacing them evenly, checking the closure before I go to the next one.
The cabin is absolutely quiet around us. The storm doesn't stop, the wind doesn't stop, but it all recedes to some background frequency and the only real thing is the small bright square of the table, his arm under my hands, the precise work of placing each strip correctly.
I reach for more gauze and my fingers graze lower on his forearm, below the cut, pressing lightly to keep the skin taut, and my thumb slides over an older scar.
Raised and thick, running horizontal just above his wrist. Then another, further up, longer, silvery-pale against the dark hair of his arm.
I don't say anything. I keep working. But my hands slow down, just fractionally, because there are more of them, these old marks in the skin, and every one of them represents something I wasn't there for, something that happened before this cabin, before now.
I start wrapping gauze around the dressing, over and under, and I have to hold his arm to do it, cradling it in my left hand while my right winds the gauze, and he is very still. Not the stillness of discomfort. The stillness of a large animal holding itself carefully, measuring something.
"There." I tie it off and check the tension.
"That's as good as I can do without a medical degree.
" I keep looking at the bandage, checking my work, because it's easier than looking at his face.
"Keep it dry. If it starts bleeding through the dressing, we do this again.
" I smooth the tape down. "Does it feel too tight? "
"No."
I finally look up.
He's been watching me the whole time. Not the quick, cataloguing look he uses when he's assessing a problem, but something slower.
Something that doesn't immediately break away when I meet it.
His ice-blue eyes are steady on my face and there's a quality to the attention that makes my breath do something complicated.
I'm still holding his arm. Both hands, cradling his forearm on the table between us, and the skin there is warm, warmer than I expect from someone who just came in from the cold, warm the way the rest of him is warm, like there's a furnace running permanently behind his ribs.
My thumb rests over the old silvery scar near his wrist and I'm not moving it.
"You were somewhere else," I say. Quiet.
Not a question. "Before here. Before all this.
" My thumb traces, just slightly, just once over the scar.
It's not delicate, the scar. Nothing about him is delicate.
But there's something about the age of it, the permanence, that makes my chest ache in a way I wasn't prepared for. "A long time ago."
The fire settles. One of the logs collapses in on itself, sending a brief rush of orange light across the room.
"Yes," he says.
"And it was bad."
He doesn't answer that one. He doesn't need to.
I look back down at his arm. At the new white bandage sitting over the old landscape of scars, and I am very aware that I am still holding on, and he is very aware of it too, and we do nothing about it. My heart has picked up some new, stuttering rhythm. I can feel it in my throat.
"I'm glad you found me," I say, almost to myself. "In the snow." I look up again. "I don't think I would have lasted another hour out there."
"You would have." His voice drops another register. "You're tougher than you look."
"That is genuinely the nicest thing you've said to me."
One corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Something more restrained than that, something he keeps tightly leashed, but it changes the whole landscape of his face and I feel it like a small electric thing spark in my body.
I should let go of his arm.
I don't let go of his arm.
He turns it slightly in my hold, not pulling away, just shifting, so that his forearm rotates and his palm comes up, and my hands adjust without deciding to and now I'm holding his hand, really holding it, both of mine around one of his, and the size of it is startling in the same way it's always startling when he's close, when I'm reminded of the sheer scale of him, his hand swallowing mine completely, his fingers longer than mine by a full joint.
The kerosene lamp on the table throws gold across his face and catches in the dark of his beard and the lines at the corners of his eyes, and I know I'm staring.
I know it and I can't stop doing it because there's something happening in the space between us that I don't have a name for yet, something building the way pressure builds before a storm breaks.
He leans forward. Just slightly. Just enough that the distance between us contracts, I smell the pine and cold smoke that lives in the fabric of his shirt, and the heat coming off him is something I feel on my skin. His gaze drops.
To my mouth.
The breath goes out of me.
His eyes come back up to mine. We are not touching anywhere except my hands wrapped around his, and the air between us has gone entirely solid, and my heart is doing something it's never done before, slamming against my ribs with this desperate, idiotic urgency, and his face is so close I can see the pale ring of grey around the blue of his irises, and I think?—
The pine tree hits the cabin with a sound like a cannon shot.
The whole structure shudders. The kerosene lamp rocks violently and kerosene sloshes inside the reservoir and I am on my feet without deciding to stand, my chair skittering back, and the window to the right of the door goes white with a rush of snow and shadow as the upper trunk scrapes down the exterior wall with a grinding, sustained shriek of bark on wood.
Kirk is already up.
He's across the room before I've processed the noise, moving with that huge, soundless efficiency, going straight to the window, pressing his forearm against the frame and looking out into the grey chaos of the storm.
His shoulders fill the window. Through the glass, through the swirl of blown snow, I can see the pale shattered wood of the broken trunk resting against the exterior , branches flattened against the glass, needles pressed flat.
"Structural damage?" My voice has gone thin.
He examines the window frame. Checks the ceiling beam above it. Puts his hand flat against the interior wall and holds it there for a moment, feeling for something I don't understand.
"No," he says.
I put my hand on the table. My legs are doing something unsteady and I'd rather he not notice.
The fire burns on. The storm howls around the fallen tree and through the broken space in the canopy and the home holds, the way it always holds, and the moment between us is gone as completely as if it never existed, swallowed by the crack and the cold and the sudden bright rush of adrenaline in my blood.
Kirk turns from the window. His eyes find me immediately, a single sweeping check from my feet to my face, the way he does when he's assessing whether something requires action.
I am holding the table. My knuckles are white.
His bandaged arm hangs at his side.
We look at each other across the length of the home and the fire burns between us and the pine tree creaks and settles against the exterior wall and says nothing.
I say nothing. The moment has collapsed into something different now, something charged and unresolved and sitting in the room with us the way cold sits in a room, permeating everything, and I don't know what to do with it.
I grab my chair. I set it back at the table. I start putting the first aid kit back together, wrapping the remaining gauze, capping the antiseptic, tucking the unused strips back into their sleeve.
"I'll make coffee," I say.
My voice comes out completely normal.
I have no idea how.