CHAPTER FOUR
LAWSON
She fell asleep mid-sentence.
One minute she was ranking every documentary that had ever lied to her about nature — which was a surprinting amount — and the next, her words simply stopped.
Her head tipped against the back of the couch.
The mug sat cradled loose in her hands, and I crossed the room and took it before it could end up in her lap, and she didn’t so much as stir.
I stood there holding a mug. Watching her.
I shouldn’t have. I should’ve killed the lamp, taken the chair, done the job Jared had volunteered me for. Watch and observe. Instead, I stood there like a man who’d forgotten what he was doing, and I looked.
Asleep, all that motion went out of her, but there was a crease between her brows even in sleep, like some part of her was still arguing with that river.
The hands that never stopped moving when she talked lay open. She’d rolled the sleeves of the flannel shirt into thick cuffs at her wrists but one had come loose, swallowing her hand to the fingertips.
My flannel. She was wrapped in something I’d worn against my own skin a hundred times, and that fact ran a slow lap through my blood waking something inside. The voice started whispering.
Keep her.
I listened, knowing I could keep her. On my couch. In my cabin. In my life. Her in nothing but that flannel. Unbuttoned. Under me.
I drove the thought down. It didn’t stay down.
Mine. It whispered again.
There it was again. Third time today. I was starting to lose confidence I could wait this out.
I moved her, stretching her out on the couch so she wouldn’t wake up with a sore neck.
She’d be sore enough as it was. I got the light blanket off the end of my bed and put it over her.
Summer nights ran cool this high up, and she’d been in cold water.
She turned into the quilt without waking, pulled it up under her chin, made a small sound of contentment.
I stood there one more beat than I had any business standing there.
Then I took the chair.
I killed the lamp and let the dark settle.
Moonlight came in gray through the front windows.
The night was doing its usual summer business — crickets working the tall grass, a moth ticking against the screen, the creek running behind the cabin, low this time of year, just a murmur over stone.
Years of nights up here and I knew every sound this place made, and every one of them, and none of them explained why I couldn’t settle.
She slept like she talked. Fully committed. Curled into a small ball but with one socked foot escaping the blanket, face mashed sideways into the cushion.
I’d done more night watches than I could count.
Wire, ridgLawsonnes, radios, other men’s breathing in the dark.
I knew how to sit a watch without getting attached.
The men who attached made mistakes. I’d known them and refused to become them.
I’d made my life sparse on purpose. Nothing waiting on you, nothing pulling your focus, nothing the world can use against you.
That didn’t stop me from watching her, taking her in.
The scrape on her cheekbone that she hadn’t talked about once, and she talked about everything — the shoe, the raft, the rocks, the general conduct of nature — everything except the things that actually hurt her.
She’d handed me the little pains like party favors and buried the big ones.
Somebody had taught her that. I found I wanted a word with whoever it was.
I liked my life. That was the truth. Quiet suited me. Solitude wasn’t a wound.
I’d built this life the year the military decided a solider with a busted knee couldn’t cut it. I didn’t need a woman who only stopped talking when she slept to inch her way inside it.
The timer on my watch peeped.
“Amy.”
Nothing.
“Amy.”
“Mmph. No.”
“Wake up. What’s your name?”
One eye opened. Regarded me with the profound betrayal of the freshly woken. “You know my name. You just used it. That’s how you got me to open my eyes.”
“Concussion protocol. Name.”
“Amy Marsh. Age thirty-two. Blood type, sweet iced tea.” The eye closed. “Your turn. What’s your name?”
“You know my name.”
“Right. Bigfoot.”
“Where are you?”
“A very judgmental man’s couch.” Both eyes opened now, squinting up at me in the dark. “I fell into the river. Was rescued from said river. I lost a shoe but gained a pair of very warm socks.”
“Headache?”
She did an internal audit that I read as it crossed her face. “Small. Behind the eyes. Three out of ten.”
“Nausea?”
“Only when you ask me math questions.”
“Nobody asked you a math question.”
“I could feel one coming.”
I stood. “Go back to sleep.”
“That’s it? No bedtime story?” But she was turning back into the blanket. Right before she was pulled back under, she muttered, “Not the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed at, but room service could be improved. That’s what I’ll write in the review.”
I walked back to the chair and sat down, a small smile tugging at my lips. I knew she’d be disappointed at missing that.
I sat there, waiting for the timer to go off again. I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping. I wasn’t planning on it. That part of the protocol suited me fine — I hadn’t slept through a night in years, and at least tonight the not-sleeping had a job attached.
Somewhere in the second watch, a pair of coyotes started up on the far ridge.
I listened to the crickets fill back in behind them.
I don’t know why, but the memories started to escape.
Or the lack of them. I’d never had a woman in the cabin before.
If I needed to scratch an itch, I want a couple of towns over and found someone who knew the score.
No attachments, just a night. I did the same thing in my civilian life as I had in the military.
Kept the perimeter clean and let nothing inside..
But yet, here she was. And I knew more things about her than I’d wanted. The way she narrated fear instead of swallowing it. The exact pitch of her laugh. The soft weight of her thigh in my hand while I’d treated her wound — which my body kept replaying on a loop, adding things I shouldn’t.
Like her under me in that flannel with the buttons undone. Her over me, all that softness spilling out of my hands. Her cries of satisfaction loud enough to scare the coyotes off the ridge. Me waking her up slow with my mouth on her, shutting up her smart mouth.
I dragged my eyes back to the window and urged my cursed body to obey me.
She didn’t help my control at all. She snored. Once. A small, cartoonish sound, and I caught myself with the corner of my mouth already moving, and stopped it out of pure principle.
The buzz of my watch again.
“Amy.”
She didn’t even open her eyes when she spoke. “I answered these already.”
“New round. Name.”
“Bigfoot’s Assistant.” A yawn cracked her jaw. “Amy. Marsh. Still thirty-two, unless I slept longer than expected.”
“Where are you?”
“You can’t keep asking that. Eventually I get it right through repetition and the data’s contaminated.
” She dragged herself half-upright against the arm of the couch, her cheek printed with the seam of the cushion, and looked around the moonlit room like she was confirming it was still real. “Your cabin.”
“Headache.”
“Still there. I’d give it a two star review.”
“Good.” I put the water glass I’d gotten before I woke her up in her hand. She drank it without arguing, which told me she was tired down to the bones, and handed it back. Her fingers brushed mine on the glass and I felt that in all the places I shouldn’t have.
“Lawson.”
“Go to sleep.”
“You should sleep too.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sitting in a chair in the dark watching a stranger breathe.” She was sliding back down as she said it, words slowing as she tucked the blanket under her chin. “Wake me up in two hours, I’ll watch you breathe, we’ll take shifts…”
Gone again.
I sat back down. Watching her sleep, I could not stop thinking about the sound she’d made when the current took her under.
Three seconds. I’d been in the water before the thought finished forming, and standing on the bank afterward with her coughing in my grip, what I’d felt hadn’t been relief.
Relief is clean. This had claws in it. This was knowing if the river wanted her back it would have to come through me.
Where had these feelings come from? Over a woman I’d known ninety seconds, who called me Bigfoot?
I got up and stood at the window for a while.
Moon high over the tree line, the small around my cabin meadow silver with it.
There was a version of tomorrow where I drove her down to the lodge and Jared gave me that grin and I came back up the mountain to my one mug and my one chair and my clean quiet perimeter, and everything went back to the way I’d built it.
There was another version. I made myself look at that one too, the way you check a wound you already know is bad. Her staying. Her chatter filling up rooms. Her learning where I kept things, which was the same as her learning me.
I’d known men who took a hit and kept walking, didn’t feel it till they sat down. I had the feeling I was one of them right now.
Third alarm.
This one I did slower. She’d earned a real sleep cycle if she could string one together. I crouched, said her name twice, and she came up out of it easier this time — faster to the surface, eyes clearer when they found me.
“Amy Marsh,” she said before I asked. “Cabin. Montana. Bigfoot residence. My headache is a one.” She pushed her hair out of her face. “How am I doing, doc?”
“Better.”
“Better,” she repeated, and smiled — sleepy, unguarded, aimed straight at me from a foot away, and I took it like a man takes a punch he watched coming. “Ask me the bonus questions.”
“There are no bonus questions.”
“Who’s the president? What year is it? How many fingers?” She held up three of her own, then frowned at them. “This is your part.”
I handed her another glass of water. “Drink.”
She drank. Handed the glass back but didn’t lie down.
That was the first sign she was healing.
Getting better. Getting ready to leave. She stayed sitting up, blanket around her shoulders like a cape, and looked out the window at the moonlit meadow, and for a whole ten seconds she didn’t say anything at all.
I’d known her less than a day and already knew ten seconds of quiet meant something was coming.
“I keep waking up right before you get to me,” she said finally. “I feel the floor move. Big man, old boards.” She looked at me. Moonlight on one side of her face. The scrape on her cheekbone gone dark. “And then I spend that second being glad it’s you.”
“Amy.”
“It’s the concussion talking,” she said and then frowned.
“Except my head’s a one out of ten, so it’s mostly not.
” She clenched the edge of the quilt around her hand, then smoothed it back out.
This was the most coherent she’d been since the river, no slur in it, no fog — only her, awake in the middle of the night in my shirt, saying things straight.
“The couch is fine. I want it noted the couch is fine. But every time I fall asleep I’m back in the water.
” She let go of the quilt completely. “So. Can I sleep with you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re going to wake me up in two hours anyway. I’m proposing we cut out the commute.”
Every reason to say no lined up for inspection.
And underneath the reasons was everything I’d spent the night not thinking about.
Her in my bed. In my shirt. My sheets learning the shape of her.
If she’d asked for the bed and taken it alone, that would have been one thing.
She was asking to sleep next to me — trusting me to lie down beside all that warm, soft, sleep-heavy woman and behave.
I could behave. I’d have the worst night of my recent life doing it, but I could behave.
“You snore.” That was all I said. The only reason I could give her without revealing the other things. The real reasons way.
Her mouth fell open. “I do not.”
“Yes, you do. Like a small chainsaw hitting a knot.”
“That is slander, and I was concussed — “ She was still building her case when I stood up and pulled the blanket off her and got one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and picked her up, and the case collapsed mid-sentence into a small startled sound and her arms went around my neck like they’d been doing it for years.
I carried her into the bedroom and put her down on the side of the bed nobody had ever slept on. She pulled back another thin quilt and burrowed beneath it as I stretched out on top of it beside her, boots off, watch set, staring at the ceiling.
She was a foot away and I felt her there like a campfire.
Hands under my head as if to keep myself from reaching out for her.
I gave myself the talk. She was hurt, she was a guest, and I was the man on watch.
The talk mostly worked. My body registered a minority opinion and was overruled.
Her breathing went long and slow inside of a minute, and I lay there, listening.
“Lawson?” Barely a word.
“Sleep, Amy.”
“I’m glad you pulled me out of the river, Bigfoot.”
I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.
“Yeah,” I said, to the dark, to nobody, to the woman already asleep beside me. “Me too.”