Chapter 5
KENDALL
The lodge sounds different after midnight. I've been in the kitchen long enough for the coffee to go cold in my hands, long enough for the wind to shift from a howl to a constant moan. The fire in the main room glows in the grate.
The timber walls expand and contract around me with a rhythm that sounds almost biological, and the absence of voices, of Dash's constant motion, of Bryan's loaded silences, of Cameron's quiet industry, leaves a space I haven't occupied alone since I got here.
I pour the cold coffee down the sink and refill the kettle. The water runs cold enough to ache against my fingers.
The stove clicks three times before the burner catches, and the small blue flame throws shadows across the counter that shift when the draft moves.
My hands aren't shaking.
My palms are flat against the counter and they're still. They're not gripping, not bracing, not curled into the half-fists I've been carrying since Sitka.
The steadiness feels foreign, like wearing someone else's skin.
The kettle ticks against the burner as the water heats.
My eyes move through the kitchen. The window has no curtains and the pale light from the starry sky casts just enough light to make moving through the kitchen feasible.
Iron skillets hang from a rack above the stove, seasoned black and heavy.
The cutting board by the sink has a groove worn into one corner from years of the same knife landing in the same place.
The spice rack on the wall is half-empty, the jars mismatched.
The labels have faded to illegibility. A mug tree by the coffee pot holds mugs that don't match either.
Nobody has organized them by size or color, and nobody ever will.
Gary's kitchen had marble counters and a six-burner Viking range and copper pots that hung from a ceiling rack like sculpture.
Everything matched. Everything was placed.
I wasn't allowed to rearrange the spice rack because the alphabetical order was the order, and deviating from the order was a conversation I learned not to start.
This kitchen has no order. It has use. The surfaces are worn where hands have rested, the wood scarred where knives have slipped, the drawers soft on their tracks from years of opening.
Nobody cares where I put my mug. Nobody is tracking which drawer I open or how long I stand with the refrigerator door ajar.
The freedom of it is so small and so enormous that I have to close my eyes for a moment and breathe through it.
The kettle whistles. I pour coffee into the mug and wrap both hands around it. The heat moves through my fingers into my wrists and down into the tension I've been carrying in my forearms for days.
A floorboard creaks overhead.
My body goes still. The mug pauses halfway to my mouth.
I track the creak the way I track every noise in an unfamiliar building: location, weight, direction. It came from the hallway upstairs, near the end where the bedrooms are, and the weight behind it is too heavy to be the lodge settling.
Then the stairs begin, one by one, unhurried. The third step gets sidestepped, which means it's someone who lives here.
Alex appears in the kitchen doorway.
He's in a T-shirt and flannel pants, barefoot, and the domesticity of the image is so far from the man who splits wood and fills doorframes that my brain stutters on it.
His hair is disordered, pushed back from his face, and the stubble along his jaw has gone past shadow into the early stages of a beard.
He looks at me. He looks at the coffee. He doesn't look surprised.
"Couldn't sleep," I say.
"Heard the kettle." His voice is rougher than usual, lower, the edges of it blurred by sleep or the absence of it. He leans against the doorframe the way he leans against every doorframe, as if the building offered itself up as a backrest and he accepted.
"I can go back upstairs."
"You can stay."
I stay.
He makes coffee. Even at this hour, even barefoot in flannel pants, the movements are efficient and practiced.
He doesn't turn on the overhead light. The blue flame of the stove and the glow from the dying fire in the main room are the only sources, and the dimness makes the kitchen feel smaller, the edges of the room softened into shadow.
"You always make coffee at two in the morning?" I ask.
"You always wander through other people's kitchens at two in the morning?"
"Only when the kitchens are this disorganized. It's a public service. Someone should intervene."
The almost-smile I've been tracking since the porch makes another appearance. "That spice rack has survived without intervention this long."
"It shows."
He pours his coffee without responding, but the almost-smile lingers longer than it has before.
We end up in the main room. I take the chair by the fire.
He takes the end of the couch, legs spread, one arm stretched along the back, taking up space the way he always takes up space, as if furniture were built to accommodate him rather than the other way around. His coffee rests in his other hand, held loose against his thigh.
The remaining firelight paints his forearms in shades of bronze and burnished gold. I've spent an unreasonable portion of the last few days failing to ignore his forearms, and they're worse by firelight, which is information I didn't need.
The silence stretches between us. We haven't been here long enough for silence to feel like this, warm and loaded, filling itself with every glance that lands and holds.
"The kitchen," I say after a while, because looking at his forearms is becoming a tactical liability. "It hasn't been remodeled."
"That a complaint?"
"An observation. Most people would have updated it by now. New counters. Better lighting."
"Most people didn't grow up eating breakfast on that counter." He takes a sip of his coffee, and his eyes stay on me over the rim. The steadiness of that gaze at this hour, unhurried and warm, makes my breath go shallow.
"My mother made pancakes on the griddle hanging above the stove. Cast iron. Weighs more than a cinder block. She'd flip them one-handed while holding a baby on the other hip."
The sentence starts easy. By the end, his jaw has tightened around the last few words, a visible flinch of muscle that tells me this came out without his permission.
He looks away. His thumb traces the rim of the mug. The gesture is the first thing he's done that looks like fidgeting.
He doesn't elaborate. He doesn't explain what happened to her or when or how. He gives me the image, the griddle, the pancakes, the baby on the hip.
The past tense hangs in the air the way it does when someone has surrendered a piece of themselves they weren't planning to give.
"Careful," I say. "That almost sounded personal."
"Must be the hour." He takes another sip. The jaw relaxes, but something behind his eyes hasn't recovered.
"My mother had a cast iron skillet she'd had since college." The words come before I've decided to offer them. I had a deflection ready, something dry about his decorating philosophy, and instead the truth walks out of my mouth.
"She seasoned it for years. My father threw it out when she left because it took up too much space."
His gaze comes back to me. The look isn't the careful observation I've grown used to. It's open in a way that changes the shape of his face.
His mouth is slightly parted, and I'm staring at his lower lip in the firelight. The inappropriate specificity of where my attention has landed is fully apparent to me. I don't redirect it.
"You don't talk about your family much," he says.
"Neither do you. That might be the most personal thing you've said since I got here."
"You keeping score?"
"Hard not to when the list is this short."
"Yours is shorter."
The accuracy of it lands, and the laugh that escapes is quiet and genuine.
His eyes follow it to my mouth, and the air between us changes temperature.
"We should probably stop talking about our mothers," I say. My voice is steadier than the rest of me.
"Probably." His gaze hasn't left my mouth.
His mug is empty. So is mine. He stands, collects both without asking, and walks toward the kitchen.
The T-shirt pulls across his shoulders as he moves, and the shift of muscle underneath is visible and distracting.
I'm following him into the kitchen before the decision fully forms, which is a problem I'm going to deal with later.
The kitchen is cooler than the main room. The stove flame has burned out, and the only warmth is what drifts through the doorway from the dying fire.
He sets the mugs by the sink and turns, and the turn puts him close. Close enough that for the first time I catch his scent without cold air and distance diluting it. His scent is wood and soap and something warm underneath both that belongs only to his skin.
The response is immediate and involuntary, heat and recognition hitting before thought catches up.
"Kendall."
He says my name low and unhurried, tasting the shape of it, and the sound does something to the base of my spine that runs all the way up.
"Alex."
The motion is slow, giving me every chance to pull away. His fingers close around my wrist, the one I cover when I flinch, and the touch is warm and careful and exactly where another man's hold would be a threat.
On him, it's a question.
I don't flinch.
The absence of it registers on his face before I've finished processing it myself. His expression shifts, something raw breaking through the composure, the moment he understands that his hand is on the place I protect and I haven't pulled away.
His thumb moves against the inside of my wrist, finding the pulse, and the pad of his thumb is rough and warm against the beat of me.
I turn my wrist into his hold, opening toward him. The motion is small and it says everything my mouth won't.
He steps closer. His hand comes up to my jaw. The touch is firm. His fingers spread along the side of my neck, thumb at my chin, and he tilts my face up toward his.
His breathing has changed. Mine stopped a while ago.