Chapter 15
“Hey, Eden, wake up.” Caleb’s voice is gruff, more texture than sound.
“What?” I grumble. Everything hurts—my hip, neck, leg, back—and I can’t feel my toes. The ground is ice against my body, and the towel has come apart at my waist. I yank it closed.
“You’re shivering so loud it woke me up.”
“Sorry.” I force my jaw closed to stop my teeth from chattering. I contract into a tighter ball, pulling my knees against my chest. Leave it to Caleb to be inconvenienced by my misery.
“Eden.” He sits up so his face is even with mine. “We could huddle closer. It’ll help.”
He’s impossible to read. Is he repulsed by the idea? Is he being a hero? Do I care as long as I’m warmer?
“I don’t think”—I have to stop as my jaw clenches shut—“that’s a good idea.”
“You’re freezing.” He pauses. “You can just use me for body heat. Promise I won’t do anything inappropriate.”
The suggestion is so tempting. The chill in my bones is painful, and my back spasms as my shivering intensifies. I’m just afraid I’ll receive the comfort in a way he’s not offering it.
“C’mon, you’re miserable.” I catch the glint of his irises in the faint light—those whiskey eyes I’d noticed from across the bar—and I cave.
“Okay,” I whisper, scared to say it too loud.
I slide until I’m lying sideways on my other hip, my back to his front.
When he scoots closer and wraps his arm around my waist, his heart hammers against my shoulder blade, and I feel the relief of him in every cell in my body.
He keeps a modest distance so there’s an inch or two between our hips, but my back is cramping from the biting cold, and without thinking, I pull him closer, sinking into him like he’s salvation.
His breath catches, but he doesn’t pull back. Instead, he tucks the top of my head under his chin so we’re connected everywhere. I’m still shaking, but the tremors are slowing, the battery on my chill dying with every inch of him that makes contact.
“My feet are freezing.”
He slides his leg over mine and traps my feet between his calves.
This man aims to serve; it cannot be comfortable for him.
Jeff used to complain about my cold feet and would pull away if I strayed too close to his side of the bed.
But Caleb clutches me tighter, rubbing my toes between his warm skin until I regain sensation.
He is the afternoon sun on white sand. He’s a warm towel fresh from the dryer.
“Better?” His voice sounds strangled, as if he’s holding his breath.
“Getting there. Thank you.”
He squeezes my waist. It’s almost imperceptible, but I feel the subtle affection like an ache.
I haven’t felt another body this close to mine since Jeff left.
I haven’t been held like this in . . . maybe ever.
And Caleb’s body is so unfamiliar and new.
It’s an impenetrable wall and a down blanket all at once.
My body releases one last involuntary shiver, and I exhale with the relief of it.
“So, umm.” Caleb sighs and his breath tickles my cheeks. “My body may react. If it does, I’m sorry. It’s involuntary.”
While my ego takes a hit at his insistence that he doesn’t find me, specifically, attractive, the thought of him hardening makes me flush. I squeeze my legs together and clear my throat.
“I get it. It’s fine. It’s a small price to pay to steal your body heat.”
He chuckles softly. “I’ll try to be your nonreactive heating pad.”
“Just remember you don’t like me. That should help.”
He shifts and brushes my hair until it falls over my shoulder—I assume to get it out of his face—but the indirect touch makes the tiny hairs on my skin stand on end.
He whispers, “I don’t dislike you, Eden.”
I laugh. “Sure.”
“I’m just protective of my people. And sometimes, I let my loyalty get in the way of civility.”
I make a contented sound in acknowledgment. I honestly don’t care why he’s been such an ass, because right now, he feels so divine that I’d forgive him anything.
“I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable earlier. By asking about your leg.”
“It’s okay.”
His body is wrapped around mine, bringing feeling back to my extremities and reminding me how amazing it is to be held.
To feel skin, and breath, and the texture of fine hair and the vibration of voice.
Maybe I’m too easy. But fear of frostbite—and a man’s hard body as salve—will do that to you.
I sink against him a little deeper as my body releases another thread of tension.
“If it makes a difference, I have a bunch of scars, too. The one most people see is the one on my lip.”
“Bar fight?” I tease.
He’s silent for a few minutes before he answers. “My stepdad sliced it open against his wedding band when I was ten.”
I pinch my eyes closed, trying to drown out intruding images of young Caleb terrified, hurt, and betrayed by someone who should have cared for him.
But my body reacts viscerally. It’s like I just plummeted several stories in an elevator; the air leaves my lungs, and my stomach gets stuck near my throat. “Caleb,” I say, a little breathless.
“I have a four-inch gash on my rib cage. That time, he threw me against the garage wall where the garden shears were hanging. And there’s another under my chin when he pushed me down the stairs and I sliced it on the edge of the tile.
I have some hearing loss in my left ear, but I don’t remember which hit caused it. ”
“Caleb.” I have no other words, just his name as a prayer or maybe an elegy. I can sense my tears coming. My nose is burning and throat tightening in sharp warning.
“You asked me when I moved here. And I think you were really asking why.”
“Yes,” I admit, my voice small.
“I moved here when I finally got big enough to fight back. I was sixteen, I think. After our first fair fight, my stepdad gave my mom an ultimatum. Him or me. She chose him.” He clears his throat.
“I couch surfed for a few months, got into some trouble, and overstayed my welcome with friends. Finally, I remembered my mom had a brother in California. I took the bus and then hitchhiked. I didn’t know where Sonny lived but knew he ran this camp up in the woods.
I got here in the winter and came straight here, but it was deserted, so I broke into one of the old cabins. ”
“And there was an earthquake?” I ask, remembering what he told me earlier.
“Happened in the pitch dark that first night. It wasn’t big, but I was alone and . . .” He trails off. “Well, Sonny found me the next morning. He could have called the cops because I’d broken the lock to get in. But instead, he and your mom took me in. And this place healed me.”
I find his arm across my waist and thread my fingers through his. He doesn’t even hesitate before squeezing my palm, his breath catching.
“I guess my point is that scars don’t really mean anything. They just show what happened to you, not who you are.”
I breathe in his words, which land like a truth just out of reach, wishing I could believe them. But for me, my scar is who I am. I was a dancer, and then I wasn’t.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” I whisper, and he nods against my hair.
“I broke my leg when I was a teenager.” I’ve given this same answer a few dozen times to strangers.
To friends. To colleagues. But Caleb’s calves are pressed against that broken leg, and I want to give him more.
His soft hair tickles the incision the doctors used to staple me back together after they set the bone, the same incision that got infected a week later.
His shin bone presses against the other scar where my tibia stabbed through my skin.
His inner thigh clutches the knee that never fully straightened afterward.
His hips warm the muscles that had to fight twice as hard to support me, trying and failing to give me the strength I needed to be who I once was.
“It was a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula. I had a botched emergency surgery. They didn’t align the bones properly.
Then the incision got infected and I had sepsis.
They almost had to amputate. But I was lucky.
” I swallow the words that were bestowed on me so many times in those early months and made me feel ungrateful for still having a leg that would never allow me to do what I loved.
“I had to have several more surgeries, one to fix the first and another for skin grafts since the infection damaged the tissue.”
My stomach turns, the nausea creeping in at the memory. Cassie says it’s my trauma response. I threw up for weeks after that first surgery. There wasn’t enough medicine in the world to quell the queasiness.
“And you were a dancer.” He offers a breadcrumb to my own story. His voice could coax a genie out of a bottle. The hum of it is an elixir.
“Ballet.”
“You were good. So good they had you signing contracts at ten.”
“I was good,” I confirm. There’s no use in equivocating.
“Ballet is elitist and terrible in a lot of ways, but I loved it. You have to have the right feet, the turnout, the body proportions, flexibility, strength, and aesthetics even to have a chance to train at the highest levels. I started at a neighborhood school, and my ballet teacher pulled my mom aside after I’d been there a year.
A few weeks later, I had an audition at the San Francisco Ballet School, and I grew up there.
My time here at camp was the only time I wasn’t training full-time.
” It was holy to me. To us. And I thought Mom came here every summer for me. But I was wrong.
“Did you want to dance professionally?” he asks.
“It’s all I ever wanted to do.”
“And you couldn’t after the injury?”
I shake my head, and my hair catches on his beard.
He brushes it away, and the lingering feeling of his fingertips on my nape sends shivers down my spine.
“Maybe I could have recovered if there weren’t so many complications, but even then, it would have taken a miracle because the injury was so extensive. So my leg made ballet impossible.”
I think of the day, a year after the accident, when I placed my hand atop my kitchen counter like it was a ballet barre and forced my way into first position, which was once as easy as instinct.
But with my palm on the white tile, I couldn’t straighten my leg, couldn’t support my weight.
As a dancer, I knew my body like poets knew their words, but this new body was foreign to me.
My favorite teacher often said that it’s not about perfection; the magic is in the attempt. But I couldn’t even attempt mediocrity anymore.
“So it wasn’t really a broken leg. It was a broken heart,” Caleb says.
My tears burst to the surface, shocking me. They slide over my nose, across my cheek, and into my ear. I don’t move to brush them away, fearing Caleb will pull back from me. I can’t risk ending the spell of his body pressed to my spine, his words pressed to my hair.
But these tears aren’t born of the grief Caleb so succinctly spoke aloud. These tears are born from being understood. These tears are clean like the rain pattering against our cabin in the woods. They are a release.
“Yes,” I say.
“Well,” he says, and I could be wrong, but I think he presses the softest kiss to the top of my head. “I’m sorry about that. Heartbreaks are the toughest breaks to set.”
I sniff the tears away, and Caleb tugs me closer.
“But I know something about healing them,” he whispers.
This makes me chuckle, and my laughter is wet from my tears and filled with gratitude for his kindness. “Really, how’s that?”
“You gotta fill your life with things you love more than you loved what broke you.”