11. Stella
STELLA
The cold is not like anything I've felt before.
It's not the polite, manageable cold of a Chicago winter where you walk two blocks from the car to the coffee shop and complain about it to whoever will listen.
This cold is a living thing. It has weight.
It presses against my face and eardrums and crawls immediately inside my collar and down my spine and my lungs take one breath and seize up like they've been dipped in ice water.
The wind up here on the ridge moves sideways at a pitch that isn't quite sound.
My arms are still out at my sides. I don't know why I held that posture except that it felt like something.
A demonstration. I've never been good at walking away from an argument cleanly, I always need the last gesture, the final punctuation mark, and this one is perhaps the most dramatic I've ever deployed, which is saying something because I once dramatically exited a book club by pretending I had food poisoning.
This is not pretend. The porch is three feet of covered wood and the wind is still finding me around the corners of the eaves and my fingers are already going numb.
In my defence, I did not think he'd let me stand here this long.
I hear him behind me in the doorway for exactly four seconds.
One. Two. Three. Four.
And then the growl comes. It isn't a word.
It's low and rough and comes from somewhere deep in his chest, a sound that is entirely animal and entirely furious, and then his boots are on the porch boards and one massive arm wraps around my waist from behind and lifts me completely off my feet like I weigh nothing at all, like I'm a piece of luggage he's retrieving from a conveyor belt, and he carries me backwards through the door and kicks it shut behind us.
The warmth hits me like walking into a bakery. The fire. The lantern light. The aroma of pine and wool and the dinner we cooked.
He sets me down.
He doesn't step back.
"What the hell," he says.
His voice is not the low, controlled rumble I've come to read as his baseline. It's ragged , like something tore through it on the way out. He's still behind me and I can feel the heat radiating off his chest and he is breathing, actually breathing, each inhale audible.
I turn around.
He's closer than I expect. In the low lantern light his eyes are very bright and very blue and he is not wearing his careful, blank expression. He looks furious. He looks undone.
"I needed air," I say.
"That's not air. That's minus twenty with wind chill. Another ten minutes out there and you'd be back in hypothermia."
"I wasn't going to stay ten minutes."
"You were going to stay until I came out after you." He says it flat, not like an accusation, more like a diagnosis, and the accuracy of it makes heat crawl up the back of my neck. "You knew I would."
"I didn't know anything."
"Stella."
"Okay. I had a reasonable suspicion."
He exhales through his nose and turns away, one hand going to the back of his neck, fingers pressing into the muscle there, and he walks three steps toward the fire and then stops.
He doesn't sit down. He stands with his back to me and his shoulders up around his ears and the wood in the stove pops and throws a fan of orange light across the floor.
"Why are you doing this?" he says to the fire.
I cross my arms, my fingers curling against my own arms for warmth. The chill is still leaving me in waves. "I don't know what you mean."
"Yes you do."
"I want you to say it. Because I've been taking your conversational hints and your silences and your very meaningful grunts for three days and I would like, just once, a full sentence."
He turns around.
The lantern on the mantle is behind him and it throws shadows under his jaw and across his cheekbones and he is enormous in this room, his presence takes up the physics of the space in a way I genuinely don't know how to explain to anyone who hasn't stood in a small cabin with Kirk Jotham.
It's not just height or bulk, it's something else, a density, like his gravitational pull is slightly stronger than the average person's.
"You push," he says. "Every time I step back, you push again. Why?"
"Because stepping back is a reflex, not a decision.
" My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
"Because you were about to kiss me, and then you spent the next two hours being actively rude, and I understand that you're scared but the way you manage scared is to be mean, and that I'm not willing to accept. "
Something moves across his face.
"I wasn't being mean."
"You said, and I quote, 'the city girl shouldn't touch what she doesn't understand.' About your coffee pot, Kirk. You said that about your coffee pot."
A beat.
"That's a specific kind of coffee pot."
"It is a Moka pot! I know what a Moka pot is!" My voice rises and I don't stop it. "I was trying to help and you were trying to drive me back behind some invisible line you've drawn around yourself, and I won't stay behind it. I'm not built for fences."
"I know." He says it quietly and the quiet lands differently than the yelling. "I know you're not. That's the problem."
"How is that a problem?"
He moves away from the fireplace, toward the kitchen, and picks up a dish towel and puts it down again, a displacement gesture, something to do with his hands. He picks up a tin cup, sets it back. He is restless in the way that large, contained animals are restless, not frantic, just pressurised.
"You've been here three days," he says, his back to me again.
"In three days you have reorganised my kitchen, made friends with my dog, and somehow made this cabin feel like a place people live instead of a place I exist. And I cannot—" He stops.
The silence is thick. "I cannot have that and then watch you leave. "
Barnaby shifts on his rug.
"So your solution," I say carefully, "is to run me off early."
"My solution is to remember what I am." He turns around and his expression is stark and open in a way I haven't seen from him and it is arresting, it stops the air in me.
"I came up here because I kept breaking things.
People. Relationships. I have a temper and I have nightmares and I wake up some mornings and I don't recognise myself in the mirror, and I came up here so the only things I could damage were wood and stone. "
"Kirk."
"I'm not finished." His voice cracks on the last word, not dramatically, just at the seam, and he presses his lips together and then continues.
"You're bright. Not just your coat, which is a genuinely alarming colour—" and there it is, the almost-thing, the near-joke, but his eyes don't change, they stay serious and locked on mine, "—but you.
Everything about you. The way you talk, the way you dragged Barnaby into your lap like you'd known him ten years, the way you sang half a pop song this morning when you thought I was still outside and then went completely silent when I walked in.
You're bright and you're warm and I have been filthy with dark since I came off that ridge in Kandahar and I will not put that darkness in the same room as something like you and call it acceptable. "
My eyes sting.
I blink it back.
"Something like me," I repeat. My voice is not entirely steady. "You mean someone. I'm someone."
"I know what I mean."
"I don't think you do." I step toward him.
He doesn't move back, but his posture shifts, a bracing.
"You've been treating yourself like a hazard to be managed and everyone around you like civilians to be protected from the blast radius, and maybe that made sense once, maybe you needed that distance to get through whatever you got through, but it's not nobility, Kirk, it's just loneliness with a story attached. "
"Stella—"
"And I'm not—" my voice breaks now, just at the edge, and I'm angry at it for breaking, "—I'm not a bright thing in a dark room that you have to protect from yourself.
I'm a person who has been genuinely terrified for three days and the only time I haven't been terrified is when you were in the same room.
Do you understand what I'm saying to you?
You, specifically. Not the cabin or the fire or the fact of shelter.
" I stop. I make myself hold his gaze. "You make me feel safe.
You, with all your dark. And you don't get to tell me that's wrong. "
The wind screams outside, a long sustained note that rattles the small window above the sink, and the lantern nearest the door sways on its hook and casts moving shadows up the log walls.
"You don't know what you're saying."
"I know exactly what I'm saying." I take another step. We're close now, maybe four feet, I see the texture of his flannel and the steady, hard rise and fall of his chest. "You are not your worst days. You don't get to assign yourself a permanent rank based on your worst days."
"You don't know my worst days."
"Then tell me." My voice drops. "Tell me, or stop using them as a wall. You can't hide behind something you won't let me see."
His jaw works. His hands, hanging at his sides, close into loose fists and then open again.
"You have no idea," he says, and it is very quiet, "how much I want to."
And something in me goes entirely still.
Because that is not the voice of a man building a wall. That is the voice of a man who has had his hands against the wall for years, pressing to keep it standing, and is exhausted by it. That is what exhaustion sounds like at the very bottom of itself.
"Then stop wanting to," I say, just as quiet. "Just do it."
He looks at me for a long moment and something enormous and complex moves behind his eyes and then he takes three long steps across the distance between us and he is right in front of me and the heat of him hits me like opening an oven door.
For one second I think he's going to speak. His mouth opens.
He doesn't speak.
His hands come up and they're big and they're warm and they cup my face, his thumbs at my cheekbones, and I feel the roughness of his palms, the calluses and the scars, and his face comes down toward mine and for one suspended, motionless moment we are just breathing the same air, foreheads almost touching, his eyes very close and very blue.
"You're going to wreck me," he says. Barely above a whisper. "You know that."
"Maybe that's not the worst thing." My voice is barely there at all. "Maybe some things need wrecking."
He makes a sound, low and raw, somewhere between a word and not-a-word.
And then his hands drop from my face to my wrists, both of them, his grip encircling them completely in a way my whole hand couldn't encircle his wrist if I tried, and he steps into me and I take one reflexive step back and my shoulders hit the heavy wooden door behind me with a solid thud and his arms go up, pressing my wrists above my head, and he pins them to the wood with a gentleness that has nothing gentle inside it.
He looks down at me.
I look up at him.
All that height, all that mass, the breadth of his shoulders blocking the firelight entirely so that I am standing in his shadow, and his chest is heaving and his jaw is tight and his eyes have gone from blue to something darker, something that has weight and heat and an urgency in it that I feel in the base of my sternum.
My pulse is very loud.
His grip on my wrists does not tighten but it does not loosen.
Outside the storm howls and the door at my back is cold through my thin layers but I am not cold, not remotely, my skin is burning at every point of contact and he is looking at me with an expression that is the furthest possible thing from the blank, careful mask he's been wearing for three days, and I realise I'm not breathing normally.
I realise I don't care.
"Kirk." His name comes out unsteady, something between a question and a request.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
Doesn't move.