15. Stella
STELLA
The sun doesn't care about any of it. It just keeps pouring down over the ridge in great flat sheets, illuminating every tree, every drift, every buried fence post on the slope below, as though the week of darkness never happened.
The world outside is stunning and ruthless and completely indifferent to the fact that it has just announced the end of everything good.
I wrap both hands tighter around my mug and make myself breathe.
Two days. He said two days, and the way he said it, flat and measured, like he was reading a weather report, told me everything about how he intends to spend them.
I know this man. I have slept on his chest. I have watched him at the woodstove in the dark hours of early morning when he thinks I'm still sleeping, moving through his own kitchen with that quiet, massive competence, and I have memorised the exact set of his shoulders when he is decided about something.
They are set like that right now.
Barnaby leans his warm weight against my shin and I reach down and scratch behind his ears without looking away from the valley, because if I look at Kirk right now I am going to say something I haven't figured out how to say yet.
Something that will land badly on a man who has already started building distance around himself like a stone wall, one deliberate block at a time, since the moment Jack's voice crackled through the radio yesterday and reminded both of us that I belong to somewhere else.
The coffee is getting cold. I make myself drink it anyway.
"I should check on the radio signal," Kirk says.
"Sure," I say.
He goes back inside. The door closes with its familiar solid thunk and Barnaby looks up at me with his liquid brown eyes and I look back down at him and I scratch his ears again and I say very quietly, "I know, buddy. I know."
He wags once and follows Kirk inside, because even the dog has already picked a side.
I stay on the porch until the cold gets past my collar and starts working on the back of my neck in earnest. The sun is beautiful.
I genuinely hate it. I watch it move a few degrees higher over the ridge and then I go inside, because standing out here in my socks accomplishing nothing is not a plan, and if there are two days left I am not spending them on the porch feeling sorry for myself.
The cabin is warm. The woodstove is going in its low, efficient morning way, the iron flanks radiating steady heat out across the floor, and the light coming through the windows now is different from anything we've had all week, sharp and directional and filled with actual warmth, and it makes the whole interior look different.
The table where we ate dinner last night.
The rug in front of the fire. The thick quilt draped over the arm of his chair where I left it when I got up.
Kirk is at the radio, bent over it with his big hands bracketing either side of the unit, working the dial with focused precision.
His back is to me. The flannel across his shoulders is tight when he moves, the fabric pulling over the broad muscle underneath, and I study the back of his head, the dark curls at his nape, and I think about putting my face there last night and I make myself look away.
I refill my coffee.
I sit at the table with it and look at the window and I think about Jack's voice on the radio, sharp and condescending and absolutely certain of its own authority over my time and my choices and my body's location in space.
I think about the tight knot that formed in my stomach when I heard it, the knee-jerk response that kicked in, all that trained professional anxiety sitting up immediately like a dog that has been called.
And then I think about the way Kirk went very still beside me while Jack talked, and how the line of his jaw went harder and harder the longer it went on, not from anger at me but from something else, something that looked from the outside like a man watching someone he cares about get pushed around and not having the right to stop it.
He cares about me. I know he does. The evidence is not subtle.
It is in every meal he cooked, every blanket he added to the pile, every time he put himself between me and the cold or the dark or the noise.
Kirk Jotham shows what he feels through his hands and his actions and the particular quality of his attention, which is absolute and unwavering and nothing at all like indifference, and if he thinks he can spend the next two days pretending otherwise I am going to need him to look me in the eye and say so.
The radio crackles. Kirk's voice, low and unhurried, exchanges a few words with Miller about road conditions, about the plow schedule, about whether the county boys can manage to get a truck up the ridge by tomorrow afternoon or whether it'll be the day after.
He puts the radio down and turns around and his ice-blue eyes find me across the table and something moves through them, a flicker of something raw and real, and then it's gone, clamped down behind the neutral expression.
“After the plow goes through," he says. "Plow hits the main road by end of today. They'll be up the mountain by late morning the day after."
"Great," I say, and I mean it to sound steady, and I think it does.
He nods. He doesn't say anything else. He moves toward the bedroom with the particular deliberate quality that tells me he's already got a task organised in his head, something useful to do with his hands so he doesn't have to sit at the table with me and be looked at.
I hear the bedroom door open. The soft drag of something across the floor.
I know that sound.
I sit with it for three seconds. Four. Five. Then I put my mug down on the table and I get up and I walk to the bedroom doorway and I stop.
He has my yellow coat. He has folded it in half and laid it on the bed with the kind of neat precision that does not come naturally and therefore means he has been deliberate about it.
My designer leggings are folded beside it.
My ruined heeled boots, cleaned of their mud, are sitting on the floor next to the bed.
He has my small bag open on the mattress and he is placing the folded leggings inside it with the same focused attention he gives to everything, large hands moving with careful efficiency, packing me up.
Packing me away.
Something hot and sharp fires through my chest.
"What are you doing?" My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
"Getting your things together." He doesn't look up. "Better to have it ready."
"It's two days away, Kirk."
"Still better to be ready." He smooths the coat flat. Reaches for the boots.
I walk to the bed and I put my hand flat on top of my folded coat and I look at him until he has to acknowledge it. His jaw tightens. He sets the boot down instead of putting it in the bag.
"Stop," I say.
"Stella."
"No." I yank the bag off the bed and I hold it at my side and I look at him.
He is so much bigger than me in this small room.
The ceiling comes within inches of his head and he fills the space between the bed and the window completely, and the sunlight is coming through the frost at the glass and catching the dark of his hair and the line of his jaw, and I look at all of it and I refuse to be intimidated by it.
"What is this? What are you actually doing right now? "
"Being practical."
"You're packing my bag two days before I leave so you don't have to think about it."
He says nothing. He picks up the boot again.
I step between him and the bag. He goes still. I am nearly a foot shorter than him and the top of my head barely reaches his collarbone and I know perfectly well how this looks from the outside but I plant my feet on the wooden floor and I look up at him and I do not move.
"Put the boot down," I say.
He looks at me. His expression is the one he uses when he's decided something and is waiting for the situation to confirm it. The shut-down look. The mountain in winter, everything locked under ice.
"We have a day and a half," I say. "And you're spending it packing my things like I'm a problem that has been solved. Like this week was a logistics situation that is now concluding." My voice wants to break and I refuse to let it. "I am not a logistics situation."
"I know that."
"Then act like it."
He sets the boot on the floor. He does not step back.
We are standing so close I feel the heat coming off him in waves, that familiar furnace warmth that I have been sleeping against for days, and my heart is doing something frantic and irregular but I keep my chin up and I keep my eyes on his face.
"I'm making it easier," he says. His voice is low and rough. "For both of us."
"Making it easier." I repeat it back to him and I hear the edge in my own voice. "You're making it easier by acting like the last week was just a survival exercise. By folding my coat like you're clearing out a spare room."
"It was. You needed shelter, I had shelter. That's what it was."
The words land exactly the way he meant them to, flat and final, and for a moment I just stand there and feel the shape of them, the deliberate bluntness of it, the way he has said the most reductive possible version of the truth and is now watching me to see if I'll accept it.
I don't accept it.
"Look at me," I say.
His gaze is already on me. It hasn't moved.
"No," I say. "Really look at me. Look me in the eye and tell me that's all this was."
Something shifts in the room. The woodstove crackles from the other side of the wall. Barnaby's claws tick across the floor in the other room and go quiet. The sunlight through the frosted window sits on the floorboards between us, warm and accusing.
Kirk looks at me. The flat expression cracks , just slightly, just enough that I can see what's underneath it, something bigger and more frightening than the blankness, something that has weight and heat and a very specific shape, and for a moment I think he's going to say it, the real thing, whatever it is.
Then the wall goes back up.
"It doesn't matter what it was," he says. "You've got a life in the city. I've got eleven acres and a radio. Those two things don't?—"
"I didn't ask about our futures," I cut him off, and my voice comes out sharp and clear and I feel the steadiness of it all through me. "I asked you to look me in the eye and tell me you feel nothing. That's all. One sentence. Look at me and say it."
His jaw works. The muscle in his cheek pulses. He looks at me with those ice-blue eyes in the winter light as he assembles the sentence, watch him reach for it, watch the mechanics of his face working around the shape of the words he thinks he needs to say.
He doesn't say them.
Stepping closer, my head tilts back to keep his eyes while I hold his gaze and wait, because I have learned in the last week that this man does not lie with his face and I am not going to look away until he proves me wrong or proves me right.
"Tell me," I say quietly. "Say it out loud."
His hands, hanging at his sides, close slowly into fists.
The boot sits on the floor between us, still unplaced.