Chapter 11
Lark
The cold found me fast once I’d put space between us. My wet clothes pressed against my skin, and the fire had burned down to embers that barely held the dark back. I wrapped my arms around myself and turned toward the open side of the overhang.
The rain had eased. I looked past his shoulder and saw the valley below us, the brown water lower than it had been, pulling back from the ground and leaving mud and broken branches behind.
“Water’s dropping,” I said. “It’s probably safe to go down.”
Logan stood first and held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up, and for a second, we were standing close enough that I could feel heat radiating off him through his wet shirt. My fingers stayed in his a beat longer than the mechanics of standing required.
What the hell was I doing? As if this weren’t already awkward enough.
I let go and stepped back and turned toward the slope, blinking after the darkness of the overhang, trying to ignore the slight throbbing still going on between my legs.
“Stay left of the shale shelf. The grass line has better footing.”
“You know this ridge?”
“I’ve been up here exactly once before.” I tested a rock with my boot before putting my weight on it. “It was a hundred degrees, and I was hiding from Duchess because she was in a mood.”
“You hid from a horse on a ridgeline on the other side of the property?”
“You haven’t met Duchess in a mood.” I grabbed a scrub branch to steady myself on a loose patch. “She holds grudges. She once refused to let the farrier near her for three weeks because he sneezed during a trim.”
“That seems excessive.”
“That seems like Duchess.”
The walk down was slow and miserable. Everything the flood had touched was slick and unstable.
Mud over rock, loose shale, debris deposited in piles that hadn’t existed two hours ago.
My boots slid on every third step, the cold had settled deep into my wet clothes, and my thighs burned in a much less pleasant way from the angle of our descent.
Logan helped me twice. Once when mud gave way under my boot and I started sliding, his hand closing around my arm and pulling me back to solid ground. Once when I misjudged a wet rock and my ankle turned, and he caught my elbow with a grip that was firm without being tight.
Both times, he let go as soon as I found my footing. He offered a hand the way you’d offer one to anyone on bad ground, and he took it back when it wasn’t needed anymore.
Carter would have kept his grip. Would have steered me down the hill with his hand locked on my arm, deciding where I stepped, calling it protective.
It took me three years of marriage to learn the difference between protection and control, and another three once the marriage was done to stop flinching from a man’s hand near my arm.
I stopped ten feet away and my stomach dropped.
The truck sat at the bottom, coated in brown silt, the waterline halfway up the doors.
I could see exactly where the water had reached, and I couldn’t tell if it had been enough to kill the engine or not.
It looked like something that had been dredged from a riverbed.
The windows were intact. The cab looked dry. Maybe.
I got in. The cab was damp. Mud covered the floor mats, and the seat was wet under my legs. I gripped the key and put it in the ignition.
“Please,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. God. The universe. The truck itself. “Please start.”
I turned the key.
The engine cranked. Coughed once, hard enough that my hand tightened on the key.
Then it caught. Turned over. Ran.
I closed my eyes and gripped the steering wheel with both hands and pressed my forehead against my knuckles and just breathed. The engine hummed under me, alive, running, the most beautiful sound I’d heard in months.
At least one thing hadn’t broken today. Which was good since I definitely would not be part of the “hadn’t broken” list.
A laugh came out of me, shaky and thin and too loud in the small cab. I lifted my head and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand.
Logan was in the passenger seat. He’d gotten in while my eyes were closed, and the cab that had always felt like plenty of space suddenly didn’t.
I could feel the warmth coming off him from eighteen inches away.
My body was still humming with the ghost of what had happened in the overhang, and being this close to him in an enclosed space with his thigh right there made my skin prickle with something I wasn’t ready to name.
“The truck lives,” he said.
“Yes, thank God.” I sniffed once and put it in gear, grateful to have something to do with my hands that wasn’t thinking about his. “Don’t look at me. I’m having a deeply emotional reunion with my vehicle, and it’s private.”
He chuckled. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I pulled out of the low ground and onto the dirt road back to Pawsitive. The road was a mess, rutted and half washed in places, but passable. I drove slowly and carefully, and I was grateful for the task of it. Hands on the wheel. Eyes on the ruts.
I shifted gears and my knuckle brushed the edge of his knee, and heat shot up my arm and into my face so fast I nearly swerved. I pulled my hand back to the wheel and stared at the road.
Logan sat quiet beside me, watching the road through the windshield, giving me space even in a truck cab. He didn’t push me to talk. He didn’t fill the silence. He was just there.
The road curved through the trees, and the light was going gray and gold before evening.
My mind wouldn’t stop, but it wasn’t doing what I expected.
I thought it would replay the breakdown, the secrets, the things I’d said that I couldn’t take back.
And it did, distantly, the way you’re aware of a bruise without pressing on it.
What my mind kept circling back to was the way he’d shifted his thigh higher without being asked.
I gripped the wheel harder.
I could almost explain what happened in the overhang. Adrenaline. Panic. A body flooded with chemicals that needed somewhere to go. That was biology, not choice. I could file it under extraordinary circumstances and move on with my life.
But I was in a truck now. The adrenaline was gone. My hands were on the wheel and my breathing was normal and nobody was having a breakdown. But I still wanted Logan. I could feel it in the low pull behind my navel and the way my body leaned toward his side of the cab without my permission.
That was the terrifying part. The overhang had been reaction. This was something else.
“Road washes out up ahead sometimes,” I said, because if I didn’t say something, I was going to crawl out of my own skin. “After the bridge. If it’s flooded, we’ll have to go the long way around.”
“Okay.”
The bridge wasn’t flooded. I drove across it, and the silence settled back in.
He wasn’t asking. About any of it. Not the mortgage, not the grants, not the six weeks without heat. I’d split myself open in that overhang and poured every humiliating detail into his lap—then proceeded to use that for other purposes—and he hadn’t said a word about any of it.
I didn’t know what to do with that. Part of me was grateful.
Part of me wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him.
Say something. Ask me something. Tell me I’m an idiot for letting it get this bad.
Tell me you didn’t sign up for this and it’s time for you to go.
Just stop sitting there being patient while I fall apart.
He wasn’t going to, though. I was starting to understand that about him. He’d wait. He’d let me come to him on my own terms, in my own time. And the patience of it, the absolute unshakable quiet of this man, was either the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me or the most terrifying.
I was tired. Not the kind that sleep fixed. This was the tiredness that lived behind my ribs where I kept everything I didn’t show.
Tired of being cold in my own house. Tired of eating standing up over the sink because sitting down felt like admitting the problems were still there. Tired of holding everything else up with no one to hold me.
I’d been carrying everything alone because alone was safe. Alone meant nobody could get close enough to take anything else from me. I’d built Pawsitive and filled it with people and animals who needed me, and I’d made myself so necessary that no one ever turned around and asked what I needed.
That was the design. That was the whole architecture of my life since I’d walked out of my marriage.
And this afternoon, a man had held me while I fell apart and hadn’t asked for anything in return, and now the architecture had a crack I didn’t know how to patch.
The barn appeared through the trees, its peeling paint familiar and welcome. I turned into the gravel lot and parked, and the engine ticked in the silence.
“Animals need feeding,” I said. “I’ll take the barn if you want outdoor rounds.”
My hand was on the door handle. Already moving. Already reaching for the next task, the clipboard, the feeding cards.
“Let’s talk about the hot water heater.”
I stopped. Looked at him. That was a mistake, because looking at him meant seeing his face, and his face was the one that had been inches from mine in the firelight while I kissed him.
“You said you haven’t had hot water in six weeks. I’m going to look at it tomorrow.”
“Logan, it’s fine. I’ve been managing.”
“I know you have. I’m still going to look at it.”
“It’s not a priority right now. The animals need—”
“The animals are fine. You’re the one showering in a barn. The hot water heater is a broken thing on your property, and I fix broken things on your property. That’s literally what you hired me for.”
“I hired you to fix fences and haul feed, not to—”
“Lark.”
“What?”
“Let me look at it. There’s no harm in that.”
I sat there with my mouth open and nothing coming out of it. I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him the hot water heater wasn’t his problem, that I was handling it the way I handled everything, by myself, because asking for help meant admitting I needed it.
And I had been not enough for my entire family my entire life. I was not going to be not enough here.
But I was sitting in a truck that shouldn’t have started, arguing about plumbing with a man whose shirt I’d torn in a fit of passion, and the absurdity of it landed on me so hard I almost laughed. What came instead was something closer to surrender.
“I think it’s dead,” I said quietly. “Not fixable.”
“Then I’ll figure out the next step. Even if it means you move in to my cabin and I live in your house until we get it worked out.”
“That’s not your—”
“We’ll figure it out tomorrow. First thing. We get the animals situated tonight so you know they’re okay, then tomorrow I’ll look at what needs fixing in your house.”
I stared at him. He stared back. Calm, unhurried, immovable.
“Fine,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
We handled the evening rounds. Fed the animals, checked the medication log, topped off water bowls. Logan walked to Tova’s kennel and opened it. Tova trotted out and pressed against his leg, and he dropped his hand to her head the way he probably didn’t realize he was doing.
When we were done, he looked at me. “I’m going to go so you can shower. I’ll be at your house by six tomorrow morning. We’ll start with the hot water heater before the morning rounds.”
Already planning. Already making tomorrow concrete so I didn’t have to wonder whether any of this would hold in the daylight.
“You don’t have to—”
“Six o’clock, Lark.”
I watched them go, the tall man and the calm yellow dog, and something behind my ribs ached in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
I went to the barn shower. Peeled off the mud-caked clothes and stood under the hot water and let it run over me until my skin stopped feeling like it belonged to someone else.
The barn was quiet around me. Just the sound of the water and the soft rustling of animals settling in for the night and the distant hum of the heater that worked perfectly fine out here while the one in my house sat dead.
Six weeks of this. Walking out here before dawn, showering in a building that smelled like hay and horse and dog kibble, getting dressed in the cold and walking back to a house that wasn’t much warmer.
I’d told myself it was temporary. I’d told myself it was fine. I’d told myself a lot of things.
Tomorrow at six, a man was going to look at my hot water heater and try to give me back something as simple as a warm shower in my own home. And I didn’t know why that thought made my throat tighten.
I toweled off, got dressed, and walked over to my house.
I stood in my kitchen without turning on the lights. Cold air pressed against my skin and settled into the tile under my boots. Outside the window, the porch light on Logan’s cabin glowed through the cottonwoods.
I could still feel him. His thigh between my legs. His hand at the small of my back. The way he’d shifted to give me more without once trying to take. My body held the memory like a handprint, specific and warm and impossible to ignore.
I stood in my dark kitchen, and I was terrified.
Not of him. Of wanting. Because the last time I’d wanted someone, I’d ended up with stitches and no family and a name I had to shed to survive. Wanting was the door I’d locked the night I walked out of my marriage, and this afternoon, it had swung wide open and I didn’t know how to close it again.
But I felt something I hadn’t let myself feel in a very long time. Something small and stubborn, lodged behind the fear, refusing to be stamped out.
The possibility that someone could see all of me. Every ugly, broke, desperate, stubborn piece. And not walk away.
I didn’t trust it.
But I felt it.