Chapter Two
Morning comes in thin and gray with the rain still going.
I lie under the quilt a while, cozy and warm, while the last wisps of a dream fade.
Pale eyes, the taste of salt, and something cold I can’t name.
I push it away and make myself sit up before I can turn it over and go back to sleep. Jeans. Flannel. Wool socks.
Downstairs, the automatic coffee maker is bubbling, and I cross to the back door to bring in stove wood off the porch rack. I open it, and he’s there.
He’s at the far rail with his back to me, looking out at the cedars thrashing in the rain.
Same flannel as last night, no coat. Soaked through.
The shirt’s gone dark across his shoulders and down his back, and his hair is plastered to his head.
I open my mouth to ask him what in God’s name he’s doing outside.
He turns before I can. Not startled. He smiles like he’s been standing there waiting for the door to open, which I suppose he has.
“Good morning, Ashley.”
“You’re up early.”
“Always am.”
“You’re soaked through.”
“I was walking.”
The wind is sharp. The man is in a cotton shirt, and he is not shivering. When I huff out a breath, it hangs white in the air between us. I’m cold just looking at him.
“Come in before you freeze,” I say, even though plainly he won’t. “I’ll get the fire up.”
He walks past me, and the porch light catches him from the side for half a second. I get my first good look at his face in better light, and I stop with my hand on the door.
It is not the face from the dock.
I spent a good part of the last day looking at this man’s face, and this is not it.
It’s close, the way a word repeated too many times starts to sound wrong.
The cheekbones are higher, the jaw sharper.
When he smiles his thanks, his gray eyes have a shine in them like there’s more light getting out than is getting in.
I stand there with the cold air pouring past me, and I wait for my own mind to hand me the reason. The angle of the light. A man looks different in the morning. It hands me nothing. The face just sits there being wrong, and I shut the door on the cold and tell myself I’m tired.
“Coffee’s nearly ready. Sit by the stove, dry off.”
He folds into the leather chair and doesn’t take the wet shirt off, just sits with his back straight and his hands on his knees while I build the fire back up out of the coals, and I can feel him watching me do it the whole time.
The coffee finishes, and I bring him a cup.
His fingers brush mine as he takes it. Cold.
I make breakfast. Bacon, eggs, the biscuits from yesterday warmed through. He eats slowly, leaves more than half, and tells me it’s wonderful.
After, I run the morning check with Wyatt while August reads. The storm system hasn’t budged. It’ll be five days minimum. We sign off.
“I’ll bring you fresh towels later,” I say, as I clear the plates.
“You don’t need to.”
“It’s the service.”
“Thank you, Ashley.”
The way he says my name sends a pleasant shiver down my spine, the same heat from last night, and I get on with the morning before it can do anything else to me.
A little before eleven, I pull clean towels from the linen closet, tuck them under my parka against the rain, and go down the boardwalk to Cabin Two. The rain is steady, and the cedars are dripping. I knock out of habit, to an empty room, and let myself in.
The cabin is cold and dead still. The stove is dark, no coals, no ash in the pan, and the wood I laid out is stacked exactly as I left it, not one piece burned. The air’s got no warmth in it at all, like the room’s been empty since I turned it over.
The bed has not been touched.
The quilt’s folded across the foot the way I folded it Tuesday.
The pillows sit the way I set them, the corner of the top one tucked under the lower one the way my grandmother taught me and the way I have done it ten thousand times.
The sheet where it turns down at the head is smooth, no crease, no dent, no hollow where a body lay.
And the smell is back, thicker than yesterday, that sweet thread running under the cedar and the wool, and I have it now.
I have where I know it from. It’s the smokehouse in late fall just after we’ve hung the meat.
It’s the floor of the woodshed the time a marten got ahold of a songbird. It’s the smell of fresh death.
I set the towels down and leave.
I’m up the boardwalk faster than I came down it, head bent into the rain, and when I get inside my parka’s soaked black, and my hands have a fine shake in them I can’t account for with the cold alone.
The kitchen is warm. The fire’s going. August is in the leather chair with his book open, and he looks up at me.
“Towels are on the dresser,” I say.
“Thank you.”
I look at him. He looks back. His face gives me nothing. I hang up my parka, go to the counter, and start lunch because my hands need a job before they shake themselves to pieces.
Lunch is bread and the last of the chowder.
He sits where he sat last night, eats a little, and tells me it’s good.
I eat without tasting any of it. Outside, the rain keeps hitting the windows, the sound only broken by the occasional pop of the stove burning through a length of dry alder.
When the bowls are cleared, he gives me a small smile.
“I’d like to be useful. Anything need doing around the place?”
“I was going to split a few rounds after lunch. Stove’s eating wood faster than I’d like in this weather.”
“Let me.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’d like to.”
“All right. Get your coat.”
He pulls his coat off the hook. I get my parka. He follows me out and around to the woodshed. It’s three walls, a roof, and a packed dirt floor. The seasoned rounds are stacked along the back. The axe is hanging on its nail by the door. I take it down, set a round on the block, and bring it down.
He’s a few feet behind me, watching.
I lift the axe, and bring it down again. The second blow parts the wood with a dry crack, and the two halves fall in the dirt.
He moves. I don’t hear it. He’s just suddenly at my back, his cold hands coming around me, one sliding down the inside of my arm to my hand on the handle and the other settling on my hip. His chest presses against my shoulder blades. His mouth against my ear.
“Let me.”
He works my fingers off the handle, gentle, one at a time, and while he does it, his face comes down into my hair.
I feel him breathe in. A long, slow pull of air.
And right at the end of it, a catch, a hitch in his throat like the breath snagged on something.
Then a sound, so low and so deep in his chest that I feel it in my own back where his front is pressed against me.
I go still.
A moment later, he steps back.
When I turn, he’s two paces away with the axe in one hand, his eyes bright in the gray shed light, the small private smile from last night sitting on his mouth as if nothing happened. The side of my neck where his breath was is cold and tingling. I have to clear my throat before I can speak.
“Suit yourself,” I say. “Have at it.”
I point to the biggest round on the stack, alder with a knot the size of my fist. The kind I’d normally have to struggle with for ten minutes.
He sets it on the block. He looks at it. He brings the axe up and over and down in one easy motion, no wind-up, no grunt, and the round splits with a crack that bounces off the back wall.
He looks at me.
He sets up another and splits it. And another.
Six rounds in about three minutes, and I’m at the wheelbarrow throwing the halves in as fast as my arms will go to keep up with him, and the whole time he is not breathing hard.
His color hasn’t changed. The rainwater still beads on his shirt, and there’s not a drop of sweat on his forehead.
He brings the axe down through the seventh and stops.
“That should be plenty.”
“More than.”
“I’ll stack it.”
He works fast and silent, carrying armloads while I push the wheelbarrow. When I reach the house, he unloads it and goes back for more. He doesn’t use the wheelbarrow. I stand by the growing stack and watch him do half a day’s work in the time it takes the kettle to boil.
When it’s done, he returns the wheelbarrow to the shed and crosses the yard to me. He comes in close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his gaze.
He lifts both hands and cups my face.
His fingers are frigid. They’re also too long, sliding back into my hair and curling to cup the back of my skull, and there’s a thought starting up in me. His hands are wrong, the nails are too
His mouth comes down on mine, and the thought blows out like a match.
It’s not the careful kiss from last night.
His mouth is open from the first second, his tongue past my teeth before I’ve thought to part them.
His mouth is so wet on mine it drips down the corners, and the cold of his tongue is wrong, and I do not care.
I am up on my toes and kissing him back before any part of me votes on it.
His hands hold my head exactly where he wants it.
He kisses me like he’s starving, like being careful all day has been torture.
His teeth catch my lower lip, drag, and let go.
His tongue’s back in my mouth, so wet I feel it running down my chin.
I make a sound I’ve never made before, a helpless whining thing, and he answers it with the rumble I feel in my teeth.
He rips himself off me.
There’s no other word. One second his mouth is on mine and the next he’s flung two paces back across the yard with his chest heaving and his eyes so bright they seem to glow, the back of his hand jammed against his mouth. He looks at me over it.
“I’m going to head down to the cabin,” he says roughly. “I’ve got work to do.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t worry about dinner for me.”
“I won’t.”
He goes across the yard and down the boardwalk, and I stand in the rain with my mouth wet and my lips swollen and my heart still pounding. I watch until his cabin door shuts.
I don’t eat dinner.
I catch myself at the sink scrubbing a pot that was clean before I picked it up, the water gone cold around my wrists, my head still outside in the yard.
I leave the pot. I run the shower as hot as it goes and stand under it with my forehead on the tile and let it cook me, trying to boil out a feeling I haven’t got a name for and don’t much want to name.
He split a knotted round in one stroke, I think, against the tile.
The bed hasn’t been slept in. The cabin smells like the back of the smokehouse.
His fingers were too long. I lay it all out on the white tile in a row, every wrong thing, and the part of me that should be packing a bag and warming up the radio is getting shouted down by the part of me that is still in the yard with his cold mouth on mine, wanting it again.
Get a grip, I tell myself. The tile doesn’t answer.
I dry off and pull on a clean T-shirt and flannel pants, and I stand at my window with my arms crossed and look down at his dark cabin.
I climb into bed and lie there a long time with the want and the wrong wound around each other so tight I can’t pull them apart, until somewhere in there I fall asleep.
Sometime later, I jerk awake. The room is pitch black, and outside the rain is falling. The wind is still howling. I start to roll over when I hear it. A heavy step on the gravel path that rings the lodge. Then another. The slow, unhurried weight of something big.
Bear, I think, mostly asleep. The trash is on this side of the lodge under the eaves, and I should’ve brought the bin in like I usually do. The footsteps continue, heavy and slow, until they are just under my window.
I listen for several minutes, but they don’t move on, and the steady pounding of the rain begins to drag me down again. Strange, I think as I drift off. That’s not where the trash bins are.