Chapter Four
Tobias
I didn’t sleep much.
I lie on top of the covers for most of the night rather than under them, boots still on, some part of me refuses to fully settle while she’s out there in the dark, not my dark, not anymore, not with her in it, but dark all the same,
and every so often my bear surfaces enough to strain toward the smaller cabin like a dog on a leash, wanting to check, wanting to confirm with its own senses that she’s still breathing steady and sleeping safe.
I hold him back every time. Told him, more times than I can count, that respecting a locked door matters more than easing his own worry. My bear doesn’t fully agree, he’s never been good at that particular kind of patience, and tonight he has a lot less patience than usual to draw on.
Mate. The word keeps surfacing in the quiet, unbidden, every time my mind wanders even slightly off its leash.
I think about the shape of her hands wrapped around that blanket, of the exact pitch of her voice saying my name back to me, Tobias, not Toby, like she was trying the syllables out carefully before deciding whether to trust them, and the word would rise up again, solid,
certain and entirely uninterested in my opinion about the timing.
I also think about all the ways I imagined this moment over the years, back before I stopped letting myself imagine it at all.
I’ve pictured it a hundred different ways as a younger man, a gathering, a chance meeting in clan territory, some ordinary afternoon interrupted by a scent or a look that changed everything in an instant, the two of us recognising each other the way the old stories described it, mutual,
immediate and uncomplicated.
I’ve never once pictured this. A frightened woman alone in a dead car, flinching from my voice, a bruise on her face that tells me more about what she’s survived than any story could have.
None of the old daydreams has prepared me for a mate who needs protecting more than she needs courting, or for the particular, unfamiliar ache of wanting someone so completely while also understanding that wanting isn’t going to be enough, not for a long while yet.
I’ve waited for this for six years. Ached for it some nights, in a way I stopped admitting even to myself, because admitting it only makes the absence louder.
And now that it’s actually happened, now that the bond my bear has been so sure would never come is sitting less than a hundred yards from my own bed, the joy of it comes tangled up with something closer to dread.
Because she’s afraid. Not of the woods, not of the cold.
Of something a hell of a lot more specific than that, something that has left a mark on her face and put a flinch in her hands that I doubt she even notices anymore, it has become so automatic.
My mate has walked into my life already hurt, already braced for more of it, and every instinct I have wants to fix that immediately, wants to wrap myself around the problem and simply remove it from her life by force.
I can’t. I know that, even lying here working it over for the hundredth time.
Whatever this is, whoever has put that fear in her, it isn’t a thing I can solve with my hands, not yet, not without her trust first.
And trust, I understand with a clarity that’s almost physically painful, is not a thing I can rush.
So I lie here and wait for morning. And try not to think too hard about how loud my own heartbeat sounds in a cabin that’s been quiet for six years and suddenly isn’t anymore, even with her here on the other side of the clearing.
I give her until well past sunrise before I let myself walk over.
I tell myself it’s consideration, she needs to sleep, needs time to wake slow after however little rest she’s actually managed, but the truth is closer to fear, if I’m honest with myself, some low current of worry that showing up too early will read as pressure,
will confirm whatever bad math she’s probably run about men who doesn’t respect a boundary once it’s been drawn.
So I busy myself instead. I feed the chickens.
Check the fence line I didn’t get to yesterday, distracted as I’d been by firewood and a restlessness that makes a lot more sense in hindsight.
I make coffee I didn’t taste and eat breakfast I don’t remember eating, as I watch the small cabin across the clearing out of the corner of my eye the entire time, alert to any sign she’s awake.
It’s mid-morning by the time smoke starts curling from the second cabin’s stovepipe, she’s fed the fire at some point, which means she’s awake, which means it’s time.
I knock the way I promised I would and stand back a healthy distance from the door afterward, giving her room to decide whether to answer.
It takes a moment. I hear movement inside, the specific hesitation of someone deciding whether to open a door, and then it cracks open a few inches, not all the way just enough for her to look out at me, wary, blanket still wrapped around her shoulders like armour.
“Morning,” I say. “Sleep alright?”
“Some,” she studies me for a second, like she’s checking the man in daylight matches the one she remembers from the dark. Whatever she finds seems to satisfy something, because the door opens another few inches. “Thank you. For last night.”
“You don’t need to thank me for that.” I say it plainly, without any weight behind it, and watch her expression flicker like she’s not sure what to do with a man who doesn’t want credit for basic decency.
She glances past me, toward the main cabin, then back. “Did you sleep?”
The question catches me slightly off-guard, I didn’t expect her to think to ask, hadn’t expected any concern to be pointed my way this early, and it takes me a second to find an honest answer that doesn’t sound alarming.
“Not much,” I admit. “Wasn’t really trying to, if I’m honest. Wanted to be close enough to hear if you needed anything.”
I watch that land somewhere behind her eyes, not quite suspicion, not quite something softer either, some complicated middle ground I don’t have a name for yet.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know,” I shrug, a small easy motion, trying to keep it light. “Did it anyway.”
“I was going to head down and take a look at your car, if that still works for you. No pressure if you’d rather I didn’t, or if you want to come with me.”
She considers that for a moment I can see her weighing it, the same careful calculation I watched her run last night, some part of her clearly deciding whether letting me near her car alone is a risk worth taking. “I’ll come,” she says finally. “If that’s okay.”
“Course it’s okay,” I step back further, giving her room to come out on her own terms. “Take whatever time you need. I’ll be out here.”
She emerges a few minutes later, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, hair pulled back, the bruise on her cheek more visible in daylight than it had been in the dark of the previous night.
A deep, ugly purple/yellow that makes something low and angry stir in my chest before I push it back down where it belongs.
She catches me looking, I realise, a half-second too late to hide it, and watch her hand come up self-consciously toward her own face before she stops it, jaw setting like she’s decided not to be ashamed of something that isn’t her fault to begin with.
I don’t say anything about it, isn’t my place, not yet, maybe not ever unless she brings it up herself. I just fall into step beside her, matching my pace to hers, keeping enough distance that she doesn’t have to think about it.
“You live out here completely alone?” She asks after a while, when we’re most of the way to the logging road.
“Have for about six years now.”
“Why?”
It’s the most direct question she’s asked me and I take my time answering it, weighing how much of the truth is fair to hand a woman I’ve known less than a day. “Needed some distance from where I grew up,” I say finally. “Long story, not an unhappy one, mostly. Just needed quiet for a while.”
She nods like that makes sense to her, like distance from where you grew up is a language she speaks fluently and doesn’t push for more. I’m grateful for that. I’m not ready to explain fated mates and clan policies to a woman who is still deciding whether I’m safe to walk next to.
We reach her car a few minutes later, sitting exactly where she left it, gravel dew-damp under a morning sun that hasn’t quite burned through the tree cover yet.
In daylight the whole scene looks different than it had the night before, less menacing, more mundane, just an ordinary shoulder, the kind of breakdown that happens to people every day and usually doesn’t come with the weight this one carries.
I watch her look at it too, watch something almost wry cross her face, like even she finds it strange how much has happened in the space of one dead battery.
I pop the hood while she hangs back, watching, arms crossed against the morning chill, and spend a few minutes doing the kind of methodical checking I learned from my father, battery connection, belts, the obvious things first before I go looking for anything complicated.
I’m aware of her eyes on me the whole time, not suspicious exactly, more curious, the way a person watches something they don’t fully understand the mechanics of.
I find himself talking through what I’m checking without really deciding to, some old habit from watching my own father narrate every repair to me as a boy and notice her leaning in slightly to actually follow along, interest flickering through the wariness for the first time since I met her.
“You know a lot about cars.” She says at one point, when I explained what a corroded terminal actually did to a battery’s connection.
“Out here you learn, or you pay someone an hour’s drive away a lot of money,” I say. “My father taught me most of it. Kept me from having to make that drive more than a couple of times.”
Something in her expression shifts at that, brief there and gone, but I catch it. I wonder and not for the first time, what her own family looks like or whether they look like anything at all. I don’t ask. It isn’t my place to ask yet.
It doesn’t take me long to find it. The battery terminal has corroded badly enough to lose contact entirely, likely months in the making, the kind of slow neglect that happens to a car nobody has time to properly maintain.
Not fatal, not even particularly hard to fix, if you have the right tools, which I do, back at the cabin.
An old set my father passed down along with most of what he knows about keeping machines running out here where the nearest mechanic is an hour’s drive.
“Good news,” I say straightening up. “Nothing’s actually broken, corroded connection, is all. I can clean it up, get you running again probably within the hour, once I grab some tools from the cabin.”
Something crosses her face I didn’t expect. Not relief exactly, or not only relief. Something more complicated, harder to read, gone before I can examine it properly. “Oh,” she says. “That’s… good, thank you.”
I hear what isn’t in her voice as clearly as what is.
A fixed car means a decision. Means she has to choose, sometime today, whether to get back in it and keep driving to wherever she’s been driving before the road ran out on her, or to stay a little longer in a clearing that belongs to a stranger who happens to be, though she doesn’t know it yet,
considerably more than that.
I don’t say any of what I’m thinking. Just nod and start back toward the cabin for my tools.
By the time I return with the toolbox, she’s wandered a short distance down the road, arms still crossed, looking out at the treeline like she’s trying to get her bearings on a place that doesn’t have any landmarks she recognises.
I set to work on the terminal without saying much, scraping away corrosion, with the kind of focused, repetitive motion that gives a person’s mind somewhere to go besides the immediate moment, I’m also aware the whole time of her drifting back closer,
drawn in by simple curiosity or maybe just the cold, standing near enough now that I can hear her breathing over the small scrape of my tools against metal.
“Can I ask you something?” She says after a while.
“Course.”
“Last night. You said you saw my headlight from your place.” She’s watching me carefully now, arms still crossed, something guarded back in her voice. “How far away is your place exactly?”
I keep working, keep my voice even, because I knew this question was coming eventually and I decided somewhere in the sleepless hours of the night that the truth, delivered plainly, is better than a story that will only unravel later and cost me more trust than it saved.
“Farther than a headlight should really carry,” I admit.
“Truth is, I don’t fully know how I knew you were out here. Just did. I promise I’ll explain that properly, when there’s more time and you’re not standing in the cold. It’s not a short story, and it’s not anything that should worry you.
But I’m not going to lie to you and pretend it was something simpler than it was.”
She studies me for a long moment, and I make myself hold still under it, hands stopping on the battery terminal, letting her look as long as she needs to.
Whatever she finds, she doesn’t push further, just nods slowly, filing the answer away the way I’m starting to understand she files everything, cautious, careful and unwilling to spend trust faster than the evidence earned it.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll hold you to that. The explaining part.”
“I’d expect nothing less.” I tell her, and something in her face comes close to a smile before she catches it and put it away again.
I finish the repair a few minutes later and the engineturns over clean on the first try, loud in the quiet morning, startling a pair of birds up out of the nearest tree.
She watches the dashboard lights flicker on with an expression I can’t quite place, something caught between relief and reluctance, a woman looking at freedom and not entirely sure, for the first time in a long while, that she wants to use it yet.
“Thank you,” she says again, softer this time. “For all of it.”
“You’re welcome to stay another night, if you want,” I say, careful to keep the offer light, unweighted, nothing she’ll feel cornered by. “No obligation either way. Just… the offer’s there, if you need more time before yo get back on the road.”
She doesn’t answer right away. Just looks at the car, engine idling steady now, and then back towards the clearing where smoke still rises faint from the small cabin’s chimney, and I watch her make a decision I can’t read yet, filed away behind eyes that has learned a long time ago,
not to give anything away for free.