Chapter Five
Christa
I stand there for a long moment with the engine idling behind me, warm exhaust curling up into the cold morning air, and make myself actually think about the decision instead of just reacting to it the way I’ve been reacting to everything for three days.
Leaving means getting back on a road I don’t know, toward a destination I don’t have, with four hundred dollars and no plan beyond away.
Leaving means more nights like the one I almost had, stranded alone, at the mercy of whatever comes along, except this time without the strange, improbable luck of a man who’s turned out to be careful with me instead of dangerous.
Staying means trusting that luck a little further. Means admitting that some small, traitorous part of me doesn’t actually want to get back in that car yet, and I don’t fully understand why, and not understanding why frightens me almost as much as the idea of staying does.
“I don’t want to be a burden.” I finally say, because it’s easier to say than any of the truer things sitting underneath it.
“You won’t be,” Tobias says simply, like there isn’t any question worth debating there.
“I’ve got more space than I know what to do with, and a life that doesn’t exactly run on a schedule that’d be disrupted by a guest. If you want to stay a few days, rest, figure out where you’re actually headed instead of just where you’re running from, that’s yours to decide.
Not mine to talk you into.”
I look at him for a long moment, trying to find the catch in it, the angle, the thing he’ll eventually want in exchange. I learned to expect an angle. Kindness that comes without one has always, in my experience, turns out to be kindness with a very long fuse.
“A few days,” I say finally, testing the shape of the words in my mouth. “Just until I figure out a plan. I can pay you something, for the room, for…”
“You’re not paying me anything,” he says it without heat, but there’s a firmness underneath it I haven’t heard from him yet, something that tells me this particular point isn’t up for negotiation.
“You need groceries, you tell me, I’ll get the next time I go into town. Otherwise this doesn’t cost you a thing.”
I want to argue. Arguing feels safer somehow than simply accepting something for nothing, three years of a relationship built on carefully tallied debts, every kindness eventually collected on with interest, has taught me that nothing ever comes free, that the bill always arrives eventually,
usually at the worst possible moment.
But something in his face tells me arguing won’t move him, and something else tells me I’m tired enough to let this one go without a fight.
“Okay,” I say. “A few days.”
I haven’t told him yet that I’ve got nowhere in particular those few days were leading toward.
Haven’t told him that the plan I’ve been running from the start has never gone further than away, that I pictured myself finding some town, some job, some studio apartment with a deadbolt and my name on the lease and nobody else’s, and I’ve never once let myself imagine anything past that bare,
threadbare outline.
I wonder if he can tell. He doesn’t ask, which I’m grateful for, because I wasn’t sure yet what I’d say if he did.
The days turned into a rhythm faster than I expected.
I wake early, always have, some old habit from foster homes where sleeping in got you the worst chores of the day, and find more mornings than not, that Tobias is already up too,
moving around his own land with the kind of unhurried competence that comes from doing the same tasks the same way for years.
I started helping without really deciding to.
Carrying water. Learning to feed his chickens, badly at first, then less badly.
I'm watching him split wood one afternoon and when he offers to teach me, I find myself saying yes before I fully thought it through.
I suck at it. The axe feels enormous in my hands, and my first several swings glances off the wood at useless angles, sending it skittering across the yard while he stands a respectful distance back, offering quiet corrections without ever once making me feel foolish for needing them.
“You’re gripping it like it’s going to run away from you,” he says after my fourth miss. “Let your hands be looser. Let the weight of the axe do the work, you’re not trying to muscle through it.”
I adjust my grip and swing again. This time the blade bites clean into the wood and splits it in one motion, and something in my chest lights up unexpectedly at the small, stupid victory of it.
“There you go.” He says and there’s something in his voice, not quite pride, but not quite anything I have a name for, just warm and genuine, no mocking edge I would have braced for from anyone else. I find myself splitting three more rounds before I notice I’m smiling.
It occurs to me, standing there with my palms starting to ache in a way that feels earned instead of inflicted, that I can’t remember the last time I learned something new just for the pleasure of learning it.
Every skill I picked up in the last three years had been in service of something else, how to read a mood before it turned, how to make a meal stretch, how to apologise convincingly for things that weren’t my fault.
This is different. Nobody is going to grade me on it.
Nobody is keeping score of how many rounds I miss before I get it right, filing the failures away as evidence for some later argument about how I can’t do anything properly.
I split another round, badly this time, and laugh, an actual laugh, short and surprised at the wood skidding off sideways into the grass. He laughs too, low and easy and doesn’t say anything about it, just hands me another round and lets me try again.
I catch myself at it later that evening, replaying the moment while I sit on the small cabin’s single step watching the sun go down behind the treeline, and feel a flicker of something close to guilt.
It feels disloyal somehow, to feel lighter than I have in years while sitting on land that belongs to a man I’ve known less than a week.
It feels like a betrayal to the caution that has kept me alive this long, like laughing at a stupid joke about firewood is somehow proof that I’m not taking my own safety seriously enough.
But the feeling keeps coming back anyway, small and stubborn, every time he does something that doesn’t match the shape of every man I’ve ever learned to be careful around.
He started inviting me to dinner on the second night, and by the third it turned into its own quiet ritual, me helping to chop vegetables at his kitchen counter while he handles whatever is on the stove,
the two of us working in a silence that has stopped feeling uncomfortable somewhere around the first shared meal.
He cooks simply, but well. The kind of food built for practicality more than flair, and I find I don’t mind that at all.
There’s something steadying about a meal that doesn’t come with performance attached, no candles, no wine, no charged atmosphere designed to soften me up for something afterward.
Just food and a man who eats like a person who genuinely enjoys the process instead of using it as a stage for something else.
I ask him questions during those dinners, small ones at first, testing how much of himself he’ll offer without me having to pry.
He told me about his parents, who visits most months and would, he said with something like fondness, absolutely adore me, a comment that made me flush and look down at my plate, unprepared for the casual assumption of a future that includes me meeting anyone at all.
He told me about learning to hunt as a boy, about the long winters out here, about a childhood surrounded by more family than he apparently knows what to do with.
He doesn’t tell me everything. I can feel the edges of what he isn’t saying, careful and deliberate, the same way I imagine he can probably feel the edges of everything I’m not saying.
Strangely enough, it doesn’t bother me. There’s something almost comforting in two people mutually agreeing, without ever discussing it, to let some things stay unsaid until they’re ready.
He’s never touched me, I notice that. Cataloguing it the way I catalogue everything, turning it over at night in the quiet of the small cabin before I fall asleep.
Not once, not even accidentally, not even in moments where it would have been easy and unremarkable, passing me a tool, steadying me when I nearly turned an ankle on uneven ground.
He keeps a careful, consistent distance, close enough to help if I need it, far enough that I never once have to think about how to extract myself from unwanted contact.
I tested it once, without fully meaning to, reached for a log at the same moment he did, our hands nearly brushing, and watched him pull back a half-second before contact, quick and automatic, like he’s trained himself to catch it every time before it happens.
I didn’t said anything. Just filed it away, another data point in the slow, careful case I’m building about what kind of man he actually is, separate from what kind of man I’m still bracing for him to turn out to be.
At night I wonder whether he even wants to touch me.
I catch him watching me sometimes, not in the way my ex used to watch me, cataloguing flaws, looking for the next thing to criticise, but something warmer, something that makes my stomach do a strange, unfamiliar flip when I notice it.
He always looks away first when I catch him.
Always finds something to occupy his hands, some task to return to, like he’s giving me space with his body.
I don’t know what to do with being wanted like that. Quietly. Patiently. Without demand.
I’ve thought more than once, about the calm that settles over me whenever he’s near, a strange, low hum of ease that makes no logical sense given everything I know, given a lifetime of learning that men who seem safe rarely stay that way.
I feel it most strongly in unguarded moments like, watching him work, listening to him talk about something as mundane as the weather turning, sitting near enough to feel the warmth radiating off him on a cold evening without either of us acknowledging the distance closing.
Once, walking back from the woodpile, I caught myself leaning toward him without deciding to, some magnetic pull I haven’t given permission from and had to consciously correct my own path back to a safer distance, unsettled by how natural the drift had felt.
It scared me more than anything else about this whole strange, impossible week. Not him. The calm itself. Because calm, in my experience, is usually the part right before something breaks.
On the fourth night we sat out on his porch after dinner, a habit that has formed without either of us naming it, some quiet routine of coffee and low conversation as the sky goes purple and then black over the treeline.
I started talking more, in small pieces, testing the water before committing to anything deeper.
He never pushes. Just listens, the way he seems to do most things, with a patience I still don’t fully trust but have started to, despite myself, to lean into.
I told him, two nights before, in careful, guarded fragments, some of what had brought me out here, not everything, not the kitchen, not the specific shape of the last three years, but enough.
Enough that he knows, in broad strokes, what he’s dealing with.
He didn’t push for more than I offered. Hadn’t reacted with the kind of performative outrage some people do, the kind that makes a story about me into a story about their own feelings.
He just went quiet for a moment, jaw tight, something controlled and careful in the way he holds himself afterward and said simply that he’s glad I got out and that whoever had done that to me doesn’t deserve another thought of my time.
It was the first time in longer than I can remember that someone’s anger on my behalf felt like a gift instead of a burden I have to manage.
Tonight feels different somehow, the air between us carrying a question I haven’t asked yet, one that’s been building since the car repair, since that half-assed answer he gave me about headlights and feelings and things he promised to explain when there was time.
“Can I ask you something?” I say watching the last light fade behind the trees.
“Course.”
“That first night. You said you saw my headlight from your place, and then out there fixing my car you said that wasn’t really true,” I turn to look at him. “You said you’d explain, when there was time. I think there’s time now.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and I watch something shift across his face, not reluctance exactly, more like a man weighing how to say something true in a way that won’t sound insane.
“There’s not an easy way into this,” he says finally.
“So I’m just going to say it plain, and you can ask whatever you need after. I didn’t see your headlight, Christa. I felt something was wrong, out on my land before I had any way of knowing what or why. Followed that feeling straight to your car,” he pauses. “I know how that sounds.”
I sit very still, some old instinct telling me to be wary of a story this strange, and yet underneath the wariness something that doesn’t feel surprising at all. Something that’s been waiting, I realise for him to say exactly this.
“Try me.” I tell him.
And so he does.