Chapter 9
Edward
Morning light drips into the cabin, and for the first time in days, the wind has stopped screaming.
My home has gone back to being isolated on a mountain. Quiet, heavy, watching.
The tarp we duct-taped over the blown window bellies in and out with a tired breath, and the cold that sneaks through it smells like clean snow and pine.
I put another log on the fire and listen to the soft roar as it catches. The kettle ticks on the stovetop and Penny’s perched on the hearth in my flannel jacket she won't stop wearing.
I don't care. It matches the wool socks that could fit three of her all the way up to those gorgeous thighs.
She's got her sketchbook propped on her knees, the end of a pencil tucked into her mouth like she’s trying to taste the scene before she draws it.
She looks like she belongs here. That thought hits me in the chest so hard I have to look away.
Inventory time. I do a slow walk of the room: tarp holding, table still wedged firm, tiny glass shards still appearing everywhere despite sweeping the floors three times a day for the past four days.
We lost some heat, some plywood from the stack, and most of my pride.
But we didn’t lose us.
I’ll take that trade every day.
I shake my head and huff a disbelieving grunt.
A week ago, if that storm came though and threatened to take my life… I probably would have let it. Welcomed it.
But not now. Not with her here with me.
I love you too.
The kettle chirps and those magical words swirl inside my head. I pour two mugs and set one next to her leg, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of her head.
“Coffee, sunshine. Just how you like it… strong enough to stand a spoon in it.”
She smiles without looking up. “Perfect. I like my coffee like my mountain men. Dark, dangerous, and overcompensating.”
“Cute.” I lean a hip against the warm hearth. “How’s the view?”
“Cold. Honest.” She draws a few more lines with the pencil and smudges it with the side of her finger. Then, with a heavy sigh, she glances up at the tarp. “Temporary.”
“Everything is.”
I hate how true that sounds. So I clear my throat and shift gears.
“Weather report says the county’ll run a plow down the main road by afternoon. I can chain the truck and cut a path to the switchback once they pass.”
She stills. I can feel the word leave suck the heat out of the room.
“Right,” she says, pencil hovering over the page. “My parents are probably pacing a groove into their kitchen floor.”
“Probably.” I wrap my hands around my mug so steam fogs my face. “I can drive you down. We’ll radio Jim from the ranger station, let him know we’ll need a tow to get your car in a few days.”
“Sure.” She nods like it’s decided. Then she swallows and adds, too bright, “And then I’ll come back up to finish reorganizing your depressing pantry because I refuse to live in a world where cinnamon expired in 2004.”
My mouth twitches. Hope is a dangerous thing to feel. “Is that right? So tell me, you planning to make a habit of coming back up, Sunshine?”
She tilts her head at me. “Would you hate that?”
“No,” I say, too fast. I stare into the coffee like it holds answers. “I’d—”
I don’t finish.
We eat oatmeal by the fire in the kind of silence that feels like a hand on your shoulder. After, I pull out the toolbox and measure the blown frame, jot down numbers on the back of a grocery list.
Penny trails me, offering tape, holding the end of the measuring line, making faces at my muttered curses when the pencil breaks.
“You know,” she says finally, “I used to think the mountain was something you survived. Like a test. But it’s kind of… a collaborator, isn’t it?” She toes a curl of wood shaving. “It forced us to get creative.”
“It’s an asshole,” I say, deadpan.
She laughs, then sobers. “Edward. When the road opens, and we head down… what happens after that?”
She says it like she’s testing every word for weaknesses. To see if her being here has changed anything.
I set the tape down. “You tell me.”
She chews her lower lip. It’s not fair what that does to me.
“Well, for one… I open the gallery. I find a space, paint the walls white, hang lights that make everything look more important than it feels in my head.” She shrugs. “I pour cheap wine and pretend the people sipping it aren’t there just for the cheese cubes.”
I grunt. “You’ll sell out in a weekend.”
“Only if the glowering grump shows up to add ambience.” She points at me with her pencil again. “Seriously. I want you there. You. Not just your shadow in a corner.”
I hold her stare and feel something inside me try to step backward. “You think I’m leaving this ridge to go stand around in town and play gallery furniture?”
Her eyes spark. “Furniture? No. Enforcer? Maybe. Tender secret weapon who builds frames and hangs shows and pretends not to be brilliant? Definitely.”
“Brilliant,” I echo, like the word is a foreign coin I’m not sure I should spend.
She crosses the room, and bumps my shoulder with hers. “Edward. Look at me.”
I do, but I struggle to hold her gaze because of the way she's looking at me with hope in her eyes.
“I’m serious about this,” she says. “About us. I came up here because I was bored and lost and pretending that counted as ‘finding myself.’ Then I met you, and I wasn’t bored anymore. I was awake. And if I go back down the mountain alone, all the noise down there will try to drown that out.”
Jealousy hits me sideways and stupid.
“You going to get bored again in town and find some other idiot to kiss you in a parking lot?”
She blinks, then her mouth curves in a slow, wicked grin. “Oh. There he is. Mr. Possessive. Good morning, mister." She waves a hand in front of my face. "Took you long enough to crawl your grumpy ass out of bed.”
“Answer the question,” I growl, even though I already hate that I asked it.
“No,” she says softly. “Because I’m not bored anymore. Because you’re not random. You’re the opposite of random.” She taps my sternum with a pointed nail. “You’re the point. Of everything.”
The brittle, rusted bit I’ve carried inside my chest for years snaps. In the space it leaves, there’s only the simple truth.
“Stay,” I say. It comes out like an order, like a plea, like a man trying not to drown. “Don’t just come back up on weekends to stock my pantry. Don’t treat this like a vacation with better scenery for inspiration. Stay here. Live here. With me.”
She stares up at me. The room is so quiet I hear the log collapse in the fire.
“Are you asking me to move in, Edward Rogers?” She arches an eyebrow. “With your crooked bookshelf and your war against spices?”
“Yeah.” I don’t blink. “Move in. I’ll straighten the damn shelf. I’ll throw out the cinnamon. I’ll—hell, I’ll build you a studio on the north side. Good sunlight. Big sink. Storage for all those brushes you leave lying around like land mines.”
Her mouth falls open, then closes around a laugh. “You’d build me a studio?”
“I’ll pour the fucking slab when the ground thaws. I'll have it framed in a week. I can mill trim from the deadfall. I’ll make you a workbench that won’t wobble when you get mad and slam your elbow into it for emphasis.”
She’s laughing and crying at the same time now, which is apparently a thing she does when she’s happy enough to drive me insane.
“And my gallery?”
“I’ll help.” The words are easier than I expect.
Truer. “I’ll sand and stain frames until my hands look like I bathed in walnut.
I’ll hang the shows straight. I’ll haul boxes and say ‘yes, ma’am’ to the fire code guy.
I’ll drive you to town in a goddamn tie if that’s what it takes.
” I scrub a hand over my jaw. “I’ll carve you a sign. ‘Penny Kaye’s—’ what did you call it?”
“Gallery of Wild and Wonderful Things,” she whispers, swiping a tear from her eye and grinning like the glorious sunrise peeking through the window.
“Right. I’ll carve that into a slab of oak that’ll outlive both of us.”
I take her wrists and kiss the pulse in one, then the other, because I can. Because I want to.
I want to live with her. I want to live.
She laughs wetly and wipes at her eyes with the edge of my sleeve. “You’d really do all that, Edward?”
“I'd do anything,” I say, and it scares me how much I mean it. “Anything you need. Anything that keeps you here.”
Her hands slide up my chest, over the worn cotton, to the back of my neck.
“Okay,” she breathes. “But I have conditions.”
“Of course you do.”
“One,” she says, ticking a finger up between us, “we replace those prison curtains with something that isn’t the exact color of despair.”
“Done.”
“Two, you put that soldier sketch in the gallery someday. Not opening night. But someday. People need to see it.” She pins me with a look when I start to shake my head. “That’s not negotiable.”
I let the resistance rise, feel how old and tired it is, and let it go.
“Someday,” I say. It’s the most honest compromise I’ve ever made. “Maybe. And not because it’ll sell. But because you say it should be seen. And you're always right.”
Her smile is small and fierce. “Exactly.”
“And three?” I ask.
She leans in, lips an inch from mine. “Three… when we go down the mountain, you stand next to me when I tell my parents. We tell them together. Because this—” her fingers tighten at my nape, “—is ours.”
“Damn right it is.”
Her breath fans my mouth; I’m seconds from kissing her when she pulls back, mischief sparking. “Also, I’m replacing your chipped mugs with something that doesn’t taste like tin.”
I snort. “Now you’ve gone too far.”
We both laugh, the sound new and good in the quiet. Then I do what I’ve wanted to do since she said you’re the point… I kiss her. Her hands are warm where they slide under my collar to pull me down, and mine are careful on her jaw, then not careful at all.
“I love you,” I say against her mouth, because saying it in the calm after the storm feels different. It feels like choosing it.
“I love you too, Edward Rogers.” She pecks me once, twice. “Now go put chains on that ridiculous truck so my mother doesn’t call the National Guard.”
We suit up and step into a world remade.
The sky is a paper-thin blue. Snow glitter-squeaks under our boots. The cabin roof wears a white cap and the chimney is breathing steady.
My truck sits humped like some sleeping animal, half-buried with snow. I brush off the hood, pop the box with the chains.
Eventually, it's ready and we test the engine.
The old Ford coughs, then rumbles awake. I let it idle, heat chugging through the vents, and we go back inside to wait for the plow.
While the truck warms, we do, too—hands around mugs, bodies around each other, plans spread out on the dining table. I flip over a paper sack and start a list in block letters:
Window glass + glazing
Penny’s studio: 2x6s, insulation, north windows, deep sink
Gallery frames (mill oak)
Carve sign
Curtains (not despair)
Fairy lights (God help me)
She adds: 'Hot cocoa for customers' and, beneath it, 'Edward in a tie?' with three obnoxious hearts. I underline the tie and draw a skull next to it. She cackles.
The radio on the shelf crackles to life at noon with the flat voice of the county driver announcing the ridge road’s open to one lane.
I tighten my boot laces and Penny pulls her hat down over her ears. We’re halfway to the door when she stops, turns, and looks at the cabin the way I used to… like a place I was serving time in.
Only, when she does it, she smiles.
“Home,” she says, simple as that.
The word lands in me and settles right over my heart.
“Home,” I repeat. “Ours.”
We make it to the main road behind a plume of thrown snow and follow the plow down the switchbacks.
At the ranger station we use the landline.
Penny’s mom goes from frantic to crying to suspicious in under thirty seconds until Penny says, “He’s nice, Mom,” and I make a noise that might be a laugh and might be a threat.
We promise we’ll come by after the roads are cleared properly, that we’re fine, that yes, there was a window, and no, we’re not dead.
I get some supplies to fix the window and on the way back up, the truck works like an animal, chain links flashing in the slush. When we roll into the yard, I kill the engine and the silence is big and good.
Penny doesn’t get out right away. She turns in her seat and studies me like one of her sketches.
“What?” I ask.
“You,” she says. “Just… you.” Then she grins. “C’mon, mountain man. We’ve got a window to fix and a sign to design.”
We unload and inside my cabin, I set the glass on sawhorses, warm the glazing putty near the stove. Penny sweeps the last stubborn shards into a dustpan and hums some pop song under her breath that I pretend to hate.
We work elbow to elbow until light thins and the new pane sits snug and true in the frame. I test the latch and it clicks perfectly.
Penny leans on my shoulder. “Good?”
“Good,” I say.
I turn her chin and kiss her slow, tasting coffee and the kind of future I didn’t think existed for men like me. When I pull back, I rest my forehead against hers and say it one more time, because it’s the truest thing I’ve got.
“You're staying,” I murmur. “Staying to build a life with me. I’m gonna build whatever you need to make that easier. A studio. A gallery. A sign. Hell, a damn espresso bar if it keeps you here.”
She laughs into my mouth. “Deal,” she whispers. “On one condition.”
“Of course.”
“You let me love you on purpose. Every day. Not just because a storm forced us into the same room.”
“Every day,” I promise.
Outside, the mountain stands quiet, a sentinel dusted in light. Inside, the cabin is warm and bright, not a tomb but a blueprint. We’ve got lists and lumber and a thousand tiny things to fix.
But we’ve got time and we’ve got each other.
And for the first time in years, that feels like enough to build a life on.