Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
OWEN
Thursday passes. Friday passes. Boone stops eating his dinner on Friday night.
He lies by the front door with his chin on his paws, staring at the wood like he can will it open and find her standing on the other side with flour on her collarbone and scraps in her hand.
Every few hours he gets up, walks to the kitchen, looks at the spot where his second water bowl used to be, then goes back to the door.
I poured the bowl out and put it in the cabinet after I got back from her porch. Seemed like the right move at the time. Clean break. Remove the evidence. Go back to canned soup and silence.
The cabin is quiet. The way it was before she showed up with that pie. Before the humming in the kitchen and the sound of her laugh and the smell of ghee at six in the morning because she was testing a recipe before the sun cleared the ridge.
Saturday morning. Market day. She's down there right now, setting up her table, rolling chimney cake dough for a crowd. Sage from the coffee shop is probably helping her carry supplies. People are going to taste her food and tell her she's incredible, because she is.
And I'm up here. Eating cold soup from a can because the stove works fine but cooking for one feels pointless after a week of cooking for two.
Boone won't look at me.
"I know," I tell him.
He exhales through his nose. Loud. Pointed.
Danny's photo sits on the mantel. Has since I moved in.
Him on a trail, grinning, daypack over one shoulder, Boone trotting beside him.
Before the scars. Before the surgeries. His daughter Lily would be four now.
Danny's wife Sarah moved to Vernon with her parents after the second surgery.
She sends me a photo of Lily every Christmas.
Last year, Lily was wearing a park ranger costume.
Sarah wrote on the back: She wants to protect the animals. Just like her daddy did.
Three years of staring at that photo, telling myself that Danny got mauled because I was responsible and I failed, so the answer is to never be responsible for anyone again.
But Priya didn't ask me to be responsible for her. She asked me to stand next to her at a market and eat chimney cake.
And I told her showing up is how people get hurt.
Boone gets up from the door. Walks to me. Puts his chin on my knee. Those brown eyes, Danny's dog's eyes, looking up at me with something I've been avoiding for three years.
Danny walked onto that trail because the data didn't meet the closure threshold.
Every ranger in the province would have made the same call.
The review board said so. The investigation said so.
Danny's own doctor said the grizzly was a juvenile protecting a food cache, unpredictable behavior that no activity report would have flagged.
Three years of rereading those reports looking for the pattern I missed. And the answer, the one I've been refusing to accept, is that there was no pattern. Danny got hurt in a tragedy. Blaming myself didn't undo the scars on his face. It just gave me permission to stop living.
Priya didn't ask me to save her. She asked me to be there. And I compared that to a man who kept her invisible for four years.
Boone's tail moves. Once. Testing.
"Yeah," I say. "I know."
The truck starts on the second try. Boone jumps in before I've fully opened the passenger door.
His ears are up, tail going, that focused expression he gets when he's locked onto a direction.
Forty minutes down the mountain on switchback gravel, past the turnoff for Priya's cabin, onto the paved road that leads to Crimson Hollow.
The market fills the town square and spills into the side streets.
Vendor tents line both sides. There's a bluegrass trio playing near the gazebo, a face painting booth, someone selling honey from a truck bed.
People everywhere. Families with strollers.
Kids with caramel apples. Old men sitting on benches arguing about the Canucks.
Every molecule in my body wants to turn the truck around.
Boone barks. One sharp sound. Move.
The parking lot behind the general store has one spot left. My boots hit the pavement and the crowd noise rolls over me. Three years of silence, and now there's fiddle music and children screaming and someone calling out prices for organic garlic.
I walk into the market. People notice. Of course they do.
The mountain hermit just came down from his rock.
Betty from the general store stops restocking her booth and stares.
The woman at the post office nudges the man next to her.
Someone whispers mountain man and someone else says Tate and I keep walking because the only person in this crowd who matters is somewhere near a demo table with flour on her hands.
The cooking demo is at the far end of the market, near Sage's coffee booth. A small crowd has gathered around a double table where a woman is rolling dough with the precision of a surgeon, narrating as she works. Her voice carries clear over the crowd. Warm. Confident. Teaching without performing.
"The trick with chimney cake is patience. The dough has to be thin enough to wrap without tearing but thick enough to hold the sugar crust. My grandmother would say patience, beta, patience, and then she'd smack my hand if I rushed the rolling."
Laughter from the crowd. She's glowing. Dark hair pulled back, apron dusted with sugar, dimple visible from twenty feet away. In her element. Doing what she was born to do, sharing food and stories and warmth with people who can feel how much she means every word.
She hasn't seen me yet.
Sage has. She's standing behind her coffee booth with a cup frozen halfway to her mouth, watching me walk toward the demo table with an expression that suggests she might start clapping. I give her a look that says please don't. She grins and mimes zipping her lips.
The crowd shifts. A gap opens. Priya looks up from the dough.
Her hands stop. The rolling pin goes still. Those dark eyes find mine across ten feet of market crowd, and everything on her face moves at once. Surprise. Anger. Hope. Fear. All of it cycling fast enough that I can see her deciding how to feel about me standing here in the last place she expected.
"Owen."
"Hey."
"What are you doing here?"
The crowd has gone quiet. Small towns run on moments like this, and every person at this market can sense one happening. I can feel eyes on me from every direction. Betty. The post office woman. Sage with her hand over her mouth. A guy selling elk jerky has stopped mid transaction to watch.
My voice works. Barely. "You asked me to show up."
Her jaw tightens. "That was four days ago."
"I'm slow. You've met me."
A ripple of laughter from the crowd. Priya's mouth twitches but she holds it.
"You said showing up is how people get hurt."
"I was wrong." Stepping closer. The demo table between us. Flour dust and sugar crystals and a half rolled chimney cake. "Showing up is how people heal. I just forgot because I've been hiding for three years and the person who reminded me makes the best pie I've ever tasted."
Her eyes are shining. She blinks fast.
"I don't want to be your secret, Owen." Quiet. Just for me, even though twenty people can hear us.
"Good. Because I'm standing in the middle of a town market with a hundred people watching, and I'm about to tell you something I haven't told anyone in three years."
"What?"
"I love you." The words come out hoarse.
Rusted from disuse. "I love your grandmother's pie plate and your chimney cake and the way you hum in your kitchen at six in the morning.
I love that you brought a pie to a stranger who didn't deserve it.
And I love that you told me I was allergic to sweetness because you were right, and you are the cure, and I'm sorry it took me this long to get down this mountain. "
A tear rolls down her cheek into the flour on her jaw. She wipes it with the back of her hand, which makes it worse, and now she's laughing and crying with sugar on her face.
"I love you too, you impossible man."
The crowd erupts. Actual cheering. Sage drops her coffee cup.
Betty is dabbing her eyes with a dish towel.
The elk jerky guy pumps his fist. Boone, who apparently followed me from the parking lot, barrels through the crowd and puts his front paws on Priya's legs, tail destroying a display of sample cups.
She comes around the table. My arms close around her. She's warm and solid and she smells like sugar and butter and the cabin that became home the day she walked into it. Her face tips up. I kiss her in front of every person in Crimson Hollow.
Deep. Slow. Her hands fist in my jacket. My palm spreads across her lower back, pressing her against me. The kiss says everything my three word vocabulary couldn't cover. I'm here. I'm staying. I choose you out loud.
When we pull apart, Sage is openly sobbing into a coffee filter.
"Your chimney cake," I say. Priya's demo crowd is still watching. The dough is still on the table.
She looks at it. Looks at me. "It can wait."
"Finish the demo. I'll be right here."
Something crosses her face. The test. Can he stay? Can he stand here in a crowd with people looking at him and survive it?
I pull a stool from behind Sage's booth, sit down three feet from the demo table, and stretch my legs out. Boone settles at my feet. "Go. Show them what you can do."
She shakes her head. Wipes her eyes. Picks up the rolling pin.
And for the next forty minutes, I sit in the middle of a town market surrounded by strangers and watch the woman I love teach a crowd how to make chimney cake.
Her voice is steady again. Confident. She tells the story of her Nani's recipe card, the Gujarati note about patience, the altitude problem she solved because a grumpy neighbor fixed her oven.
"He said it was an eleven dollar part." She glances at me. "Charged me nothing for the labor. I've been paying for it ever since."
The crowd laughs. Someone offers me a sample. I eat it. It's perfect.
We drive back up the mountain in my truck. Boone rides between us with his head on Priya's lap, tail thumping against my thigh. She holds my hand on the gearshift. Neither of us speaks because the silence between us has changed. It's full now. Warm.
At my cabin, I barely get the door closed before her hands are on my belt.
"Upstairs," she says against my mouth.
"Don't have an upstairs."
"Bedroom. Now."
My jacket lands on the kitchen floor. Her apron follows. She pulls my shirt over my head while I walk her backward down the hall, my hands pushing her sweater up over her ribs. We crash into the bedroom doorframe. She laughs against my mouth, that full sound, and I swallow it.
The bed catches us both. She straddles me, pulling her sweater off. No bra underneath. Brown skin and dark nipples and the line of her waist curving into hips that fill my hands perfectly.
"Four days." She rolls her hips down. The friction through our remaining clothes drags a groan out of me. "Four days without you. I burned a chimney cake Thursday because I was crying into the batter."
"I'm sorry."
"Prove it."
My hands grip her hips. One roll and she's under me, hair spread dark on white sheets, eyes blazing. My mouth finds her throat. Her collarbone. The curve of her breast. Her nipple between my teeth, gentle, then harder when her back arches off the bed.
"Owen. Please."
Jeans come off in a tangle of urgency. Hers. Mine. Her underwear is cotton and simple and I drag it down her legs with my teeth because I want to feel every inch of skin I almost lost.
She's wet when my fingers find her. Two pressing inside while my thumb circles her clit. Her hips rise to meet me. Head thrown back, throat exposed, hands gripping the sheets.
"More. I need more."
Condom from the nightstand. She watches me roll it on, eyes dark, bottom lip caught between her teeth. Then I'm between her thighs and she wraps her legs around me, heels pressing into the small of my back.
Sliding inside her is coming home. Slow. Deep. Her walls gripping me as I sink in all the way. Forehead to forehead. Eye contact. Her breath against my mouth.
"I love you," she whispers.
"I love you." Pulling back. Driving in. "I'm going to keep saying it until you're sick of hearing it."
"I'll never be sick of it."
Faster. She matches me, hips rising to meet each thrust. My hand slides under her ass, lifting her, changing the angle until I'm hitting the spot that makes her voice break.
The bed rocks. Her nails drag down my back.
Every stroke grinds against her clit, and the sounds she's making are wrecking me.
"Come with me." Her hand on my jaw, making me look at her. "Together."
My thumb finds her clit. Tight circles while I drive deep, again, again, watching her face.
She shatters first. Clenching around me, crying out, pulling me so deep there's no space between us.
The pressure breaks me open. I come buried inside her with her name on my lips and her hands in my hair and the absolute certainty that I'm never spending another night in this cabin without her.
After. Her back against my chest. Boone's nails clicking into the bedroom, settling at the foot of the bed with a satisfied grumble. The window frames a sky going orange over the Selkirks.
"You really showed up," she murmurs. Half asleep. Her fingers tracing patterns on my forearm.
"Told you. I'm slow."
"You made Sage cry."
"Sage was already crying. I just gave her a reason."
She laughs. Soft. Rolling onto her back to look up at me. Flour still in her eyebrow from the demo. Sugar on her neck.
"Stay here tonight?" My mouth against her temple.
"I'm staying here every night." She pulls my arm tighter around her. "And tomorrow you're helping me test three chimney cake variations because my oven works now and I have a cookbook chapter to finish."
"That sounds like a lot of baking."
"It's going to be a lot of everything." She tips her face up. Kisses me slow. "Get used to it."
Boone sighs from the foot of the bed.
Yeah, buddy. Me too.