11. Emilia #2
Justice sits on the floor beside the stove with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up.
A block of pale wood rests in his left hand.
His right works a short-bladed knife in careful, deliberate strokes.
Curls of shaving peel away from the blade and drop between his boots, accumulating in a small golden pile that catches the firelight.
I'm on the bunk with the wildflower guide open on my lap, but I haven't turned a page in twenty minutes. I'm watching his hands.
Those hands. Scarred across every knuckle.
A thick white line across the back of his left where something sharp caught him years ago.
The permanent charcoal in the creases. The engine grease he can never fully scrub from beneath his nails.
Those hands carried me up a mountain. Those hands held my wrists with impossible gentleness when I was thrashing and screaming on his couch.
Those hands drew my face on a piece of paper and tucked it into a book for me to find like a secret he couldn't say out loud.
He turns the wood. Studies it. His brow furrows with the same concentration he gives to a seized engine or a jammed rifle bolt.
The shape emerging under his knife is small.
Rounded. Wings, I realize. He's carving a bird.
Something with a curved breast and a fanned tail, the details too fine for a knife that size, but he coaxes them out anyway.
Patient. Unhurried. His thumb tests the wing. He blows the dust free and keeps going.
The stove door glows orange through its seams. Wind presses against the cabin walls with a sound like deep breathing. The world outside is white and violent and absolute. The world inside is eight feet by ten feet of rough pine and one man carving a bird from nothing.
And I know.
Not a gradual dawning. Not a slow unfurling.
It arrives whole and complete, the way a wave arrives at shore.
One moment I'm observing as he whittles.
The next moment I understand, with total and terrifying clarity, that I am in love with him.
That I have been in love with him since he stood in front of me on the highway pass and blocked me from view with nothing but his body.
That every moment since has been my heart catching up to what my bones already recognized.
He isn't safe. Not in any conventional sense. He lives on a mountain surrounded by weapons and tripwires and motion sensors. He communicates in grunts and single syllables. He has the heat of a granite cliff face and the social instincts of a feral dog.
But he drew me while I slept. He carved the bigger portion onto my plate. He carried me through snow when my legs gave out and didn't mention it again. He placed his body between me and every threat without hesitation, without negotiation, without asking what he'd get in return.
The men in my father's world performed love as currency. Gifts with invoices. Compliments with conditions. Affection dispensed and withdrawn based on compliance. Justice has never asked me to comply with anything except eating a full meal and staying alive.
I shut the book. The sound of it is loud in the small space. He glances up. Those cold blue eyes, not cold at all in the stove light. Deep water blue. Warm current underneath.
I swing my legs off the bunk and my feet find the floor. Three steps and I'm standing over him. He looks up at me, the knife pausing mid-stroke. A wood shaving clings to the front of his flannel shirt. I brush it away. My fingers rest on him. His heart beats hard beneath the fabric.
"I love you."
No preamble. No qualification. No careful buildup or hedging or softening. Three words dropped like stones into still water.
His knife hand goes still.
His eyes fix on mine. The blue deepens. His lips part. No sound comes out. His throat moves. A hard swallow that shifts the tendons in his neck. He looks like a man who has just been struck. Not hurt. Stunned. Like he walked through a door and found an entirely different room on the other side.
"I love you, Justice. Not because you're protecting me.
Not because I'm scared and you're safe. I love you because you toast the rice before you cook it because it tastes better.
Because you drew me like I was something worth remembering.
Because you tried to hide those sketchbooks like they were something shameful and they're the most beautiful thing I've ever held in my hands. "
"I don't need you to say it back. I don't need anything from you. I just needed you to hear it, because I think you've gone a very long time without someone telling you that you matter. And you matter. You matter to me."
His mouth opens. His jaw works. He fights for words the way he fights for everything, with brute strength and stubborn will, dragging them up from some deep, locked vault he welded shut years ago.
The emergency radio on the shelf above the bunk screams to life.
Static. A pop. Then a voice. Cold. Measured. Professional.
"We know she's up there, Spanks. Send her down, or we burn you out."
The knife clatters to the floor. Justice is on his feet before the last syllable fades, his body between me and the door, one hand already reaching for the rifle mounted on the wall.