Chapter 2 #2
Dash straightens from the counter and gives her the full weight of the smile that's been getting him out of trouble since he was old enough to cause it. "You picked a hell of a night to visit."
"I picked a hell of a state to drive through." Dry and quick, with the timing of someone whose wit is a reflex rather than a performance.
Dash's eyebrows go up, and the look he cuts toward me holds an entire conversation I'm going to pretend I didn't receive.
My hand finds the back of the chair nearest to me, and I shift my weight without thinking about it, settling into the space between Dash and the door.
The positioning is instinct rather than decision, and the fact that it also happens to put me between Dash and Kendall is something I'm going to call coincidence and leave there.
She moves to the coffee, walking the long way around the island rather than passing between me and the counter. The route adds several steps. It also keeps a solid piece of furniture between us, and whether that was deliberate or incidental, I notice it.
She selects a mug from the middle of the rack rather than the end, pours from the pot on the counter, and wraps both hands around it. Drinks without adding anything, and the first swallow changes her posture by a degree.
Some of the tension in her shoulders releases. For a half second she closes her eyes, and the expression on her face is the closest thing to unguarded I've seen from her.
Then the eyes open and the composure locks back into place. I'm the one looking away first, which isn't a habit I have.
Cameron sets plates on the table. Eggs, biscuits, a jar of preserves from one of the women in town who keeps bringing them up to the lodge in mason jars like the kitchen would collapse without her.
Kendall takes the chair closest to the door. She eats fast, efficiently, a pattern that speaks to meals being unreliable or needing to leave a table quickly, or both.
Her bag sits on the floor beside her chair, and her left hand drifts to it between bites, fingers brushing the strap the way another person might touch a talisman.
When I move to refill my coffee, her eyes drop to my hands and track them from the mug to the pot and back. The tracking is automatic, a reflex built by spending time in rooms where hands were the thing to watch.
Her gaze cuts away. Too fast.
Cameron reaches behind her for the salt and a pan slides off the stack on the counter.
The sound is sharp and metallic and not loud, and Kendall's whole body goes rigid.
The flinch is total. Shoulders up, chin down, left hand off the table and against her right wrist in a gesture so fast and so practiced that her fingers are wrapped around the wrist before the pan finishes clattering.
Her breath catches, a single truncated inhale that she cuts off and converts into a controlled exhale in under two seconds.
Cameron freezes. He looks at the pan on the floor, then at her. The expression on his face is pure confusion, a man who has never in his adult life made a woman flinch and doesn't understand the mechanics of it.
"Sorry about that," he says, bending to pick it up. The gentleness in his voice is Cameron's default setting and therefore exactly the right thing and exactly the wrong thing simultaneously.
"My fault," Kendall says. The recovery is fast and smooth and would fool most people.
The hand comes off the wrist. The shoulders drop. The smile she produces is small and appropriate and doesn't reach her eyes. "Jumpy morning."
Dash watches from the counter. His mug is halfway to his mouth and his eyes move from Kendall to me and stay.
The flinch is one I know. That combination of sound and physical response, that hand going to that wrist, that smile. I've seen it before. Different face, different kitchen, same bones.
My mother used to flinch at the sound of my father's boots on the porch. The recovery, the smile that followed, was a performance so polished that by the end she could execute it while setting the table and carrying on a conversation about what the boys needed for school.
The thought surfaces and I let it sit this time, because drowning it would be a lie. The gesture, the hand to the wrist, looked like covering. Protecting something. The motion was too fast to be conscious, the kind of thing a body learns to do before the mind gives permission.
I eat. The food tastes like nothing.
Most guests leave their plate on the table and say thank you. She washes hers, dries it, puts it back in the rack, and wipes down the counter like she’s trying to erase ever having been here.
After breakfast, the lodge settles into the rhythm of a building under siege by weather. Cameron disappears to check the generator housing.
Dash finds a book and a spot by the fire that he'll occupy until restlessness drives him somewhere else, which won't take long.
Kendall claims a chair by the fire and stays in it. She doesn't read. She doesn't ask for anything.
She sits with her hands around a mug that has gone cold and watches the flames, and the stillness in her isn't peaceful. She's conserving energy because she doesn't know when she'll need to spend it.
I find the excuse of restocking the bar to remain in the same space without appearing to have chosen it.
The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable than that.
She's in my lodge and I don't yet understand what she's running from, and until I do, the distance between us will remain whatever I decide it is.
At some point she moves to the frosted window, arms crossed, looking at the white nothing beyond it. Her jaw is set, the tension in it belonging to a woman recalculating a plan that weather just dismantled.
"How long have you been out here?" she asks without turning around.
"In the lodge, or in Sawyer's Ridge?"
"Either. Both."
"Whole life, more or less. Took over the lodge when I was eighteen."
She turns from the window, and the question in her face is genuine rather than conversational. "That's young to run a place like this."
"My father died. Someone had to."
The words come out flat and factual, because they are flat and factual, and also because the longer version of that story involves a man who drank his liver into failure after his wife died on an icy road and his daughter went to live with her aunt, and the longer version isn't information Kendall Jackson has earned.
The short version will do. She's good at short versions. She'll understand.
She studies me for a beat that runs longer than comfortable. "I'm sorry about your father."
"Don't be. He earned what he got."
The sentence lands between us like a blade set down on a table, and I watch her register it. No recoil. No polite redirect. Recognition rather than shock, because she understands exactly what it means when a son says his father earned his death and doesn't need the statement dressed up in context.
Most people would fill the silence with something soft. She lets it breathe.
The fact that my darkness doesn't make her flinch the way a dropped pan does is something I feel in my chest, warm and dangerous.
"You don't say much, do you," she says, and a thread of humor surfaces in her voice despite what I suspect is her better judgment.
"I say what needs saying."
"That must make for riveting dinner conversation."
"Cameron does most of the talking. Dash fills in the gaps. Bryan, the one you haven't met yet, fills in the silences with judgment. I pour the drinks."
The corner of her mouth moves. The expression is small and involuntary and so different from the manufactured smile she produced after the flinch that the contrast hits me somewhere I wasn't expecting to be hit.
This is the real face. Quick, dry, alive in a way the performed version isn't.
"So you're the strong, silent type," she says. The dry edge on it pulls her mouth into a shape I track without deciding to.
"I'm the type that owns this building and keeps the generator running. The rest is negotiable."
The sound she makes is close enough to a laugh that my whole body pays attention. The humor rearranges her face, softens the structure of it, and for a half second I see the woman who exists underneath the performance. That woman is trouble in a way I'm not prepared for.
She turns back to the window, and the line of her neck catches the gray morning light. I'm staring at the place where her jaw meets her ear and I need to stop doing that immediately.
"You know," she says to the glass, "most people ask their stranded guests where they're headed. Make small talk. Pretend they're not taking notes."
"Would you rather I pretend?"
She glances back at me. The look is sharp, with the faintest current of heat running underneath it, like she's deciding whether my honesty is attractive or alarming and hasn't landed on an answer.
"No," she says. "I've had enough pretending to last me a while. I'd rather just know what the rules are."
"You're under my roof. That means you're fed, you're warm, and nobody bothers you while you're here."
The last three words land between us with more weight than I intended. 'While you're here' should feel neutral. It doesn't. It feels like a line drawn around something.
She hears it. I watch her hear it, watch the way her chin lifts a fraction and her eyes narrow, and the look she gives me is the look of a woman deciding whether the man in front of her is offering shelter or staking a claim and isn't entirely sure he knows the difference either.
She reaches up to push her hair behind her ear, and the motion lifts the collar of her sweater away from her throat, and the smell reaches me before I can prepare for it.
Cheap soap, the kind from a gas station dispenser.
Cold air still trapped in the wool. Underneath both, something warm that belongs only to her skin, and my body responds to it before my brain gets a vote.