Chapter 12
Logan
The cabin was exactly the way I’d left it. Boots by the door. Coffee mug rinsed and upside down on the drain board. Bed made with the corners tucked. All the evidence of a man who kept his environment locked tight because it was the only thing he could control.
I held the door for Tova, and she trotted past me, her collar tags jingling in the quiet.
She went straight to the kitchen, checked her water bowl, drank for a solid fifteen seconds, then walked to her spot beside the bedroom door and lowered herself to the floor with a huff that said she considered the evening’s adventures finished.
“Make yourself at home,” I said. “Oh wait. You already did that days ago.”
Her tail swept the floor once.
I stood by the front door and peeled off my jacket.
The mud had dried stiff during evening rounds, and it cracked along the creases when I pulled it over my shoulders.
My shirt underneath wasn’t much better. I left a trail of dirty clothes from the front door to the bathroom, which was the most disordered my living space had been since I moved in, but I’d deal with it later.
The shower was the only thing on my mind. An hour of barn chores in clothes that had been soaked through and half dried had left me feeling like I’d been rolled in grit and left out to cure.
I turned the handle and stepped under the spray, and the heat hit my shoulders and ran down my back, and for about ten seconds, that was all it was. Warmth sinking into cold muscles, steam filling the small bathroom, my body starting to unclench.
Then the memory of what happened in that overhang decided to join me.
It didn’t build or ease in. It landed on me whole, a full sensory replay my body launched without my permission. Lark’s mouth against my neck. The broken, ragged sound she’d made when I shifted my thigh higher and angled it and the pressure changed.
I was hard before I could form a conscious thought about it. I wrapped my hand around my cock as the memories crashed over me.
I hadn’t gotten into this shower for this, but my body didn’t care about my intentions.
Her hips rolling against me with a rhythm that had nothing to do with grace and everything to do with a woman who needed to get out of her own body.
Her fingers twisting in my shirt hard enough to pop a seam.
The heat of her through wet denim, concentrated and insistent and so close to the center of her that I could feel exactly where she was chasing it.
I braced one hand against the tile, closed my eyes, and let it have me.
My grip tightened and the rhythm built and the water ran down my back, and I wasn’t in the shower anymore.
I was in the overhang with her weight against me, her forehead dropping hard against my collarbone as she worked herself against me.
My hand sliding to the curve of her ass and pressing her closer and the way she’d stopped breathing entirely for three full seconds before the next sound tore out of her.
My shoulders locked. The muscles in my thighs were shaking and the pressure was building at the base of my spine, and behind it was every sound she’d made, layered on top of each other, her breath and her voice and the raw, broken noise when she came apart against me.
Her body going rigid, every muscle locked, and the release that had broken through her so hard it now broke through me too.
My knees buckled, and I caught myself against the tile, breathing wrecked, the water running over me while the aftershock rolled through my legs and my hand and my chest.
I stood there. Let the water run. Let my heartbeat come down.
The water hitting my shoulders was 105 degrees. Endless. I’d been using it every night for three weeks, while about forty yards across the property, a woman walked to a barn in the dark before dawn because her hot water heater was dead and she couldn’t afford to fix it.
I turned off the water. Stood in the silence of the bathroom with steam curling around me and my jaw set so hard my teeth ached.
Six o’clock. I’d told her I’d be there at six o’clock tomorrow morning, and I’d meant it. The only reason I hadn’t insisted on working on it tonight was because I knew she needed space after what had happened today.
If that water heater could be fixed, I’d fix it. If it was dead, we were trading. She could have this cabin with its working shower and its functioning heat and I’d take her cold house until the problem was solved, and she could fight me on that from now until the goddamn mountains fell down.
I toweled off, got dressed, and picked up the wet clothes I’d trailed down the hall. Hung them over the shower rod to dry. Wiped the muddy water off the tile floor with a rag and put the rag in the hamper, and everything was back in order.
Tova watched me from the bedroom doorway through all of it. I stepped over her on the way to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Stepped over her again on the way back.
“This is becoming a pattern, you know,” I said.
She put her chin on her paws and closed her eyes.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The cabin was quiet. The kind of quiet that usually crawled under my skin and left too much room for the noise in my head to fill. But tonight, the noise wasn’t the usual reel.
It was Lark.
I knew she was embarrassed about what had happened in the overhang. Known it before she made the joke about the job description—an attempt to bury it or apologize for it or turn it into something she needed to manage so that I was comfortable.
She didn’t need to do any of that. What happened was the most honest thing anyone had given me in longer than I could measure.
A woman who spent every waking hour holding the world together with jokes and brightness and sheer force of will had trusted me enough to let all of it go, and I would rather lose my right hand than let her feel ashamed of a single second of it.
I lay back and pulled the blanket up. The bedroom was dark. Tova was breathing on the floor beside me, and I let the rhythm of it pull me down.
Reid was sitting on the hood of a truck, drinking a beer. A parking lot behind a bar in Fort Benning, a Thursday night, his boots crossed at the ankles on the bumper. He was telling me a story about his sister’s wedding, and I was laughing.
And then we were in the convoy and the vehicle ahead of us was burning.
Reid was still talking. His mouth was moving, but the words were gone, replaced by the sound of metal tearing. I was pulling at a door that wasn’t a door anymore while the heat blistered my hands. Someone was screaming inside the vehicle, and I couldn’t get to them.
Reid was standing in the road behind me saying something I needed to hear, but the fire was eating the sound.
Then everything spun, and I was in front of a window. Reid on the other side of it, sitting on the edge of a bed with his back to me, his shoulders curved forward. I knew what he was about to do.
I was pounding on the glass and shouting his name, and he couldn’t hear me or wouldn’t turn around. My fists hit the window hard enough to split my knuckles, and it didn’t crack, didn’t even vibrate.
He was right there, close enough to touch if the glass weren’t between us…
Then he was gone, and I was at the convoy again. The fire closer. Reid farther away. Back to the room. His shoulders hadn’t moved. I still couldn’t get to him.
The loop tightened every time it cycled, the fire hotter, the room smaller, and my body was locked inside it with no exit.
No way out. I knew what would happen, but there was no way out. No way—
Weight.
Warm and solid and real, settling across my chest and pressing me into the mattress. Something damp pushed against my neck, and the hallway with Reid dissolved around the edges like wet paper.
Tova’s nose was at my throat. Her chin rested against my collarbone, and her full fifty-five pounds lay distributed across my ribs and sternum, pinning me to the bed, to the cabin, to the here rather than the nightmare.
Her body rose and fell with a breathing rhythm so slow and deliberate it was impossible to ignore, which was exactly the point.
The convoy was gone. Reid was gone.
The rest came back in pieces. The ceiling of the cabin. The dark. My own hands fisted in the sheets hard enough that my knuckles burned. My jaw was locked so tight I could feel my pulse in my temples. My heart was hammering against my ribs.
And Tova was lying right on top of it, absorbing every wild beat with her weight.
She didn’t move. She didn’t lift her head or lick my face or make a sound. She just lay there, breathing. The pressure of her body against mine was the only thing in the room that was real, and my lungs found her rhythm before I made a conscious decision to try.
In, slow. Out, slower. The hammering in my chest eased by degrees. My jaw loosened. My fingers released the sheets, one at a time, until my hands were open and flat against the mattress.
I didn’t know how long we stayed like that. Long enough that the sweat cooled on my skin and the dream let go of the last thing it was holding, which was Reid’s face with the light going out behind his eyes.
Tova lifted her head and looked at me. Held my gaze for two full seconds. Then she climbed off the bed, circled once on the floor beside me, and lay back down. She was asleep in thirty seconds, as if what she’d just done was the most ordinary thing in the world.
But what she’d done wasn’t ordinary. She hadn’t panicked.
She hadn’t barked or reacted the way a dog reacted when something startled it in the night.
She’d climbed onto my chest and positioned herself with specific, deliberate precision: weight across my sternum, nose at my pulse point.
She’d held that position until my breathing regulated and my heart rate dropped, and then she’d disengaged.
As if it was what she’d been trained to do.
I scrubbed a hand down my face. Of course it was what she was meant to do. Lark’s voice surfaced from the back of my memory. The open house, two weeks ago, standing beside me at the paddock.
Someone who can’t sleep because the nightmares won’t stop, we train a dog to wake them before the dream peaks. Pressure on the chest, licking the face, whatever breaks through. The dog learns to read the physical signs before the person even knows what’s happening.
I reached for my phone on the nightstand. The screen was too bright in the dark, and I squinted against it while I typed with one thumb: PTSD service dog nightmare response.
The results loaded, and I read until the picture was complete.
Deep pressure therapy. The dog was trained to recognize elevated heart rate, rapid breathing, and physical agitation during sleep.
Upon detection, the dog would apply firm, even pressure across the handler’s chest and position itself at the neck or face.
Once the handler’s vitals stabilized, the dog disengaged.
I set down the phone.
Tova gets anxious during storms.
That’s what Lark had said, that little liar. Standing in the barn with thunder rolling in the distance, her face arranged in the expression of a woman asking a practical favor. Would you mind letting her stay in your cabin tonight? She just needs a warm spot and some company.
The thunderstorm had lasted less than an hour. Tova hadn’t so much as twitched during the entire thing. And she’d been here ever since.
I thought about what Beckett had said at the hardware store: she’ll say she needs help and then do it all herself before you get your boots on.
But that wasn’t quite right. Lark didn’t just do things for people.
She set things in motion and then stepped back so the person never realized they’d been guided.
She never made anyone feel like a project because the whole point was that they didn’t know it was happening until they were already different.
She’d looked at me three weeks ago and seen a man who was too stubborn to accept help and too far gone to survive without it, and instead of telling me what I needed or pressing me to admit what was wrong, she’d put a fifty-five-pound yellow lab in my path and waited.
“Hey,” I said into the dark.
Tova’s tail thumped once against the floor.
“I know what you did. What she trained you to do.”
Another thump.
“I didn’t ask for it.” I stared at the ceiling. “But I’m not giving you back.”
She exhaled through her nose, long and patient, and her tail went still.
I lay in the dark and listened to her breathe.
The quiet in the cabin was different now. It wasn’t the crawling kind I usually had from a nightmare that sent me outside to walk the fence line and scan the perimeter and catalog everything that might be wrong.
It was the kind that had something in it. A dog breathing on the floor beside my bed who would be on my chest before my conscious mind registered the next dream, who would hold me down with her weight and her warmth until my body remembered where it was and my hands and brain unclenched.
I closed my eyes. I thought about a woman who’d been quietly saving me since the day she handed me a flyer in a coffee shop and hadn’t asked for a single thing in return except that I fix her fences.
I was going to do more than that. I didn’t know exactly what or how. I just knew I was going to help Eleanor “Lark” Monroe the way she’d helped so many people.
The little bird wasn’t alone anymore.
Tova breathed. I breathed.
And I slept.