Chapter 6 #2
He lowers himself into the chair across from the desk with the careful deliberation of a man whose joints have opinions about the weather. His eyes move across my face as they've been doing since I was barely old enough to hold a funeral together and run this place at the same time.
"You look like your father when he wasn't sleeping," Walt says.
"That's not a compliment, is it?"
"No."
The silence stretches between us. Walt is comfortable with it the way most people are comfortable with breathing. He lets it fill the room. The room gets smaller around it, and eventually the silence does the work that questions would do less efficiently.
"The woman," he says.
"What about her?"
"Saw an extra coat on the hooks when I came through. Truck out front that doesn't belong to anyone I know. And Dash has never been able to keep a secret from his family, which includes me." He sets the hat on the desk. "I'm not asking who she is. I'm asking if you know what you're doing."
The question lands closer than I'd like. "I'm figuring it out."
"Your father said that. Once. About a situation that was already past figuring."
The reference to my mother is surgical. Walt doesn't miss.
He was there, watching my father's certainty build the walls that my mother died trying to escape.
Walt saw my mother's bruises. He knew what was happening in this lodge.
He didn't intervene. He carries that, and it shows in the careful way he looks at women who flinch.
"This isn't the same situation," I say.
"No." He picks up the hat. Turns it in his hands. "She's not Catherine and you're not Jack. But the look on your face this morning is the same look he got when he decided he was the only thing standing between someone and the dark."
He stands and leaves. The door closes. I sit with it… I sit with it for a long time.
The lodge is quiet. She finds me in the main room after lunch. Cameron is in the workshop. Dash went to check the road conditions. Bryan came back from wherever Bryan goes and left again. The fire is rebuilt, the flames new and loud after the morning's embers.
Kendall stands near the bar with a glass of water, watching the fire. The containment protocol has loosened into something more natural, as if she spent the morning deciding how to carry last night and found a grip that works.
The flannel has slipped off one shoulder. The strap of whatever she's wearing underneath is thin and dark against her skin, and I force my eyes to the fire because the alternative is staring at her collarbone. The collarbone leads to the throat. The throat leads to the mark I left below her ear.
My restraint has a limited fuel supply.
I should let her speak first. I should wait for her to set the terms.
I don't.
"Last night," I say.
Her eyes come to mine, steady and guarded.
"I know something happened to you before you got here. I want every detail, and I want a name. But those belong to you. You decide when I get them. Until then, my hands stay tied."
The sentence is more words than I've volunteered in sequence since she arrived. My jaw aches from holding it steady. Every part of me wants to close the distance between us instead of standing here offering her control I've never given anyone.
I've never given someone else the authority over where my hands go. I mean it, and that's new territory.
She looks at me for a long time. The guardedness shifts, but it doesn't drop. The calculation behind it adjusts.
"That's a speech," she says with the barest glimmer of a smile. "From you, that's practically a TED Talk."
The relief hits my bloodstream like whiskey. She's giving me banter. She's choosing verbal sparring ground over vulnerability, and the choice is so smart and so Kendall that my mouth almost does the thing it did last night in the kitchen.
"I have range," I say. "I just don't waste it."
"You've been averaging six words a sentence since I got here. I've been counting."
"You count my sentences?"
"There isn't a lot of entertainment up here. I take what I can get."
She's closer than she was a minute ago. A half step, maybe, angled toward the fire but oriented toward me.
The approach is so gradual it could be accidental.
It isn't. The flannel has shifted again, and the line of her throat catches firelight.
I track the beard burn from her ear down to where it disappears beneath the collar.
"For the record," she says, "last night wasn't a mistake."
I close my fist before the rest of me can move.
"The flinch wasn't about you," she says.
"It was about something that happened before you.
It interrupted what was happening with you, and that makes me angry in a way I'm still sorting through.
So if you were out there walking your perimeter at dawn because you think you did something wrong, you can stop. "
She takes a casual sip of her water, as if she hasn't just handed me a piece of herself she could have kept. Her throat moves when she swallows, and watching her throat while she tells me about her pain is a conflict I'm going to have to live with.
"I walk the perimeter every morning," I say.
"At dawn. In the cold. For over an hour." She tilts her head. "Normal routine?"
"Yes."
"Liar."
The word is warm. The delivery is precise. She knows I walked the perimeter because of her, and she's calling it without cruelty. The sharpness and the kindness exist in the same syllable, and the damage it does is worse than the kiss.
"What gave me away?" I say.
"Your boots were by the back door when I came down. Already soaked through, not still dripping. You'd been back long enough for them to start drying, which means you went out and came back before anyone else was up."
"You're observant."
"I'm a woman who's spent years reading a room. Reading a man's boot situation is entry-level."
The line hits and I let it. She's funny.
She's been funny since the spice rack, but this is different.
This is her humor pointed directly at me, calibrated to land, and the intention behind it is unmistakable.
She's flirting, and she's choosing to do it the morning after her body flinched away from my hands, and the courage that takes is staggering.
I lean against the mantel. She moves to the other end of it, closer than the breakfast distance. Close enough that when she sets her water glass down, her arm crosses within inches of mine. The near-miss is deliberate. We both know it.
"You should know," I say, "that I'm going to kiss you again."
The words land. Her breath catches, a hitch in the rhythm that runs through my body like a lit fuse. Her fingers tighten on the edge of the mantel. Her chin lifts, and the pulse at the base of her throat picks up, visible in the firelight.
"That's presumptuous," she says. Her voice is steady. Her pulse isn't.
"That's a warning."
"Most men buy dinner first."
"I made you coffee at two in the morning—”
“Actually I made it.”
“Fine. You made it in my kitchen in Alaska, that counts."
"So by Alaskan standards, we're practically engaged." She says it dry and perfectly timed, and the image of this woman with her fake name and her worn flannel talking about engagement to a man she met in a blizzard reaches somewhere I keep locked.
I laugh.
The sound surprises me. The surprise crosses her face before she can catch it. The laugh is short and real, from somewhere I don't give people access to. The unfamiliarity of it in my own ears is disorienting. I haven't laughed like that in long enough that the muscles feel rusty.
Kendall looks at me. The flirting drops away. The guardedness drops away. She's looking at me as if she's seeing someone she didn't know was there, and the surprise of it is written across her face before she can manage it away.
For a second, maybe two, Kendall Jackson looks at me as if I'm a person she hadn't planned on.
I'm in trouble. The thought arrives clean and certain.
She's smarter than me and funnier than me and she reads my boots. A woman who flinches at hands on her ribs came downstairs this morning, sat at my table, and chose to flirt with me in broad daylight. The damage and the bravery in her exist side by side, and neither one is going to let me go.
I told her my hands would stay tied. I meant it, but the rope is already fraying.