9. Chapter 9 #2
“I have a cabin. Outside Cedar Junction. Not in my dad's name. My mom's family owned it. Nobody ever connected it to him.”
He nodded once.
“He told me, before he died, if I was ever in real trouble I should go there. He said there was a place he'd leave me something. Only I'd know where. He said to look.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
She swallowed.
“I wasn't sure I could get in and out without leading them to it. And I didn't want to find what he meant. For years I didn't. For three years I just wanted him back.”
Jace nodded again. He didn't say anything yet. He had the face of a man who had learned, a long while ago, that some sentences needed their own room to finish landing.
“I think I'm ready to look now,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I don't know what's there.”
“Then we'll know that.”
“It might be nothing.”
“Then it's nothing, and we drove out in the cold for nothing, and we come back.”
She nodded.
He didn't push for the where. He didn't ask what the place was. He filed it on his side the way she'd seen him file a hundred things all week, without comment, without pulling on it.
That filing went into her bones.
“He had quiet hands,” she said, after a minute. She hadn't meant to say it either. “My dad. His hands did the thing where they went still when he was thinking. Most people's hands move when they think. His went still.”
“Yeah.”
“He wasn't a loud man.”
“No.”
She hadn't told anybody that in three years.
Hadn't told anybody her father had quiet hands.
She stood on her porch in the cold with a man she'd known a week and said one true small thing about her father out loud.
Nothing in the world fell over. The thing in the base of her ribs moved up one inch, stopped at her sternum, and stayed there. She could breathe around it.
She turned to the door.
Got her fingers on the knob.
The wood of the door was cold through her glove.
She hesitated.
The question that had been under every other question all week came up her throat before she could get it back down, and she let it come because she didn't want to carry it alone into the cabin and close the door on it.
“What if I say no?”
He was quiet.
A long beat passed before he answered.
“Then I will still want you every day for the rest of my life.”
She kept her grip on the knob. Didn't turn it yet. Her eyes were on the door and not on him because she wasn't sure what her face was doing.
“Good night, Jace.”
“Good night, Maren.”
She opened the door. Stepped inside. Started to close it behind her.
“Maren?”
She stopped.
Looked back.
He hadn't moved from where he'd put his boot on the bottom step.
One foot up, forearm across his thigh, face turned up toward her in the porch light.
The exhaustion from the training yard was still under the bones of it.
He was looking at her the way he'd looked at her across the corner booth on the night he'd walked into Jenny's and never walked out of her life.
“The bond is why my wolf wants you,” he said. “He knew the first second you walked up to the booth. A compass and a temperature, once it sets. Not words. The shape of you.”
She held onto the door handle.
“I knew when you knelt to hear what that kid at booth four was trying to tell you. You didn't rush him. Not even when that stupid bell kept going.”
Her grip tightened on the handle.
“I knew then.”
She didn't say anything. She didn't trust her voice.
He didn't need her to.
“Go to bed, Maren.”
She nodded once. Closed the door.
Maren stood with her back to it for some time.
Her coat was still on. Her boots were still on. Across the room, the tire iron was on the table where she'd left it when she'd walked to the lodge.
The cabin was quiet, the after-someone-leaves quiet. The woodstove made its small sound. On top of it the kettle ticked as the metal cooled.
She took off her coat.
Hung it on the hook.
Took off her boots and set them by the door.
She didn't go to the bed yet. She stood at the middle of the room, arms empty, coat off, boots off, feet on the rug. Listened to her own breathing slow.
Booth four.
She knelt in front of a six-year-old at booth four on a Thursday because his crayon had broken and he'd wanted to show her the page.
She'd been on her feet for eight hours. Her back had hurt.
Jenny had been ringing the bell at the pass.
She'd kept telling Jenny one minute. The kid had been trying to tell her about a dragon he'd drawn.
The dragon had stripes instead of scales.
She'd said dragons could have whatever they wanted, because dragons were in charge of themselves, and the kid had nodded like she'd given him something he'd been waiting for somebody to give him.
She hadn't known anybody was watching.
Hadn't known a man across the diner in the corner booth had a wolf in his chest that sat up and came forward and put its weight against the back of his ribs the second he’d scented her.
Hadn't known for a full week after that somebody had been looking at her and not at the thing around her.
Maybe the cabin felt quiet. Still, as if no one were inside it at all.
The hot that went up her face wasn't embarrassment.
She didn't have a word for what it was.
She went to the bed. Turned the lamp on. Sat on the edge of it in her clothes and looked at the lamp.
He saw me before the bond did.
The sentence put itself together without her making it.
She let it sit.
She let it sit minutes.
Somewhere across the compound, a porch board creaked once under a large weight that moved and went still.
She turned the lamp off and lay down.
Lashes lowered.
Booth four.
The word echoed through the dark in her chest and her chest didn't tighten around it.
Her chest opened.
She slept.