11. Nora
Nora
I wake up disoriented, sunlight pouring through the window instead of the gray storm light I have grown so used to over the last three days that its absence feels almost wrong.
For a second I think I am still dreaming.
Then I feel the warmth at my back, Colt's arm heavy across my waist, his breath slow and even against the nape of my neck, and I do not move.
I just lie there for a long minute, cataloguing the strange, improbable, entirely wonderful reality of being tangled up with this man in his bed, in his cabin, on the same mountain that nearly killed me three days ago and gave me this instead.
The storm broke sometime in the night. I can tell by the quiet before I even open my eyes properly.
No more wind howling at the corners of the cabin.
No more snow hammering the window glass like something trying to get in.
Just soft, ordinary morning light and the low crackle of a fire somebody must have fed before dawn without waking me.
Colt stirs behind me, his arm tightening instinctively around my waist before he is even fully awake, some deep animal part of him checking that I am still there before the rest of him catches up.
“Morning,” he murmurs against my hair, his voice thick and rough with sleep in a way that does something warm and low in my chest.
“Morning yourself.” I turn carefully in his arms, mindful of my healing ribs, until I am facing him properly.
His eyes are still soft from sleep, none of the usual sharp alertness there yet, none of the watchfulness he seems to carry every waking hour like it is simply part of his anatomy.
I like him like this. Unguarded. It feels like being handed something most people never get to see.
He studies my face for a long moment, quiet, like he is memorizing it, and then he leans in and kisses me, slow and unhurried, nothing like the desperate, argument shaped hunger of last night.
This kiss is a question and an answer both, patient in a way that makes my chest ache pleasantly.
I melt into it, my hand coming up to rest against his jaw, feeling the scrape of morning stubble rough under my palm.
When we finally break apart, he pulls back just enough to look at me properly, his gaze moving over my face like he is checking for damage the way he does every morning. “Storm's over.”
“I noticed.” My stomach does an uncomfortable flip, the good feeling from a second ago curdling fast into something colder.
The storm was our excuse, our reason to exist in this bubble outside of time and consequence, and without it, reality comes crashing back in all at once.
Levon. WITSEC. Everything Mason told us yesterday, all of it waiting patiently on the other side of that door for the weather to finally get out of its way.
Colt reads it on my face, because of course he does.
He always seems to know exactly what I am thinking a beat before I manage to say it out loud, which should probably unsettle me more than it does.
“Hey. We have got time still. Storm clearing does not mean the roads are passable yet. Could be another day, maybe two, before anybody makes it up here.”
“And then what?”
He does not answer right away, his jaw working like he is chewing on something he does not particularly want to say out loud yet. “Then Mason and the team probably show up. We figure out next steps together.”
I nod, even though the thought of strangers, of Marshals I have never met, sitting in some office somewhere deciding my fate on my behalf, makes my chest go tight with a very specific kind of anxiety I have never had to practice managing before this week.
I push it down for now, the way I have gotten surprisingly good at pushing things down since the crash.
We have time. A day, maybe two. I refuse to waste it drowning in fear about what comes after, not when what is happening right here, right now, in this bed, is the first genuinely good thing to happen to me since I heard that gunshot on the trail.
“I need coffee,” I announce, mostly to change the subject before my own thoughts can drag me somewhere darker.
“And maybe actual food. Something that is not eggs. I love eggs in theory, Colt, but we have had a very intense relationship with eggs the last two days and I think we both need some distance.”
Colt laughs, the sound rough and real and entirely too rare, which makes me want to earn it again immediately. “I have got venison stew I can heat up. Made it myself last month.”
“You made stew? From an actual deer you actually hunted?”
“That is generally how venison works, yeah.”
I swat his chest lightly, more for the excuse to touch him than out of any real annoyance.
“I know that, smartass. I just, you are very good at all this. Surviving. Cooking. Being a whole capable human being who does not need modern conveniences to function. Meanwhile my most impressive survival skill is knowing exactly which coffee shop has the best outlet access for my laptop charger.”
Something flickers in his eyes, pride maybe, or amusement, or both tangled up together. “You get good at things when you spend enough time alone in the woods.”
“Is that lonely? Living out here by yourself?”
He is quiet for a moment, considering the question seriously instead of brushing it off the way I half expect him to. “Used to be. Before.”
“Before what?”
His eyes meet mine, steady in a way that makes my breath catch somewhere behind my ribs. “Before you.”
My heart does something complicated and warm and slightly terrifying. “That is a lot of pressure to put on someone you met two days ago while trapped in a car.”
“Was not trying to put pressure on anything. Just telling you the truth.” He shrugs like it costs him nothing to say, though I suspect it costs him quite a lot, this man who strikes me as somebody who has spent years keeping his real thoughts locked up tighter than that iron bar on his door.
“This cabin has been quiet a long time. I stopped minding the quiet a long time ago too. Did not realize how much I had stopped minding it until you filled it up with pencil scratching and bad jokes, and it started sounding like something I actually wanted to keep.”
I do not know what to say to that, so I do the only thing that makes sense to me in the moment. I kiss him again, softer this time, trying to communicate everything I do not have the right words for yet.
He pulls back eventually, resting his forehead against mine, both of us breathing slow in the quiet morning light. “We should get up. Eat something. You need to keep healing, and I cannot in good conscience let my future stew go cold on principle.”
“Bossy,” I mutter, but I am smiling when I say it, and we both know it.
“You love it.”
I do, actually, though I am nowhere near ready to say that part out loud yet either.
We untangle ourselves from the blankets, and I immediately miss his warmth the second the cold cabin air hits my skin.
He pulls on a shirt while I wrap myself in one of his flannels again, the fabric soft and familiar now, smelling like him and woodsmoke and something that has started to mean safety instead of just borrowed clothing.
We move around the small kitchen together, him tending the stew on the stove while I set out the mismatched bowls, the ordinary domesticity of it sitting strange and wonderful in my chest at the same time, two feelings that should probably cancel each other out and somehow do not.
I try to help chop the small amount of onion he has left, and manage to nearly take off the tip of my own finger within about ninety seconds, which earns me a look from Colt that is somewhere between alarm and barely contained laughter.
“Give me the knife,” he says, already crossing the kitchen. “Sit. Draw something. Let the professional handle sharp objects.”
“I resent that. I have used a knife before.”
“On paper, maybe. Not on an onion that is actively trying to make you cry while you also handle a blade.” He takes the knife gently but firmly out of my hand, and I let him, mostly because watching him work is its own kind of entertainment. “You draw. I will cook. Division of labor.”
I settle at the table with the notebook instead, sketching him at the stove without really meaning to, the line of his shoulders, the concentration on his face over something as simple as browning meat, and I think this might be my favorite drawing yet, even though it is barely more than a few quick strokes.
“Can I ask you something?” I say while he stirs the pot, not looking up from the page.
“Always.”
“What happens to us? After. When they take me into witness protection or whatever comes next.”
He stops stirring, his shoulders going tense in a way I am already learning to read.
When he turns to face me, his expression has gone fierce, almost angry, though I do not think any of that anger is actually aimed at me.
“I do not know yet. But I am not just letting you disappear, Nora. I do not care what Mason or the Marshals or anybody else says about protocol. We will figure something out.”
“That is not really an answer.”
“It is the only one I have got right now.” He crosses the kitchen and cups my face in both hands, calloused palms rough and warm against my cheeks.
“I know this is fast. I know none of this makes sense outside of this cabin, this mountain, this storm we just weathered together. But I am not letting you walk out of my life just because some men in suits decide I have to. We will find a way. I have got resources most people do not. A badge that opens doors. A boss who owes me a favor or twelve. It is not nothing.”
I want to believe him with my whole chest. I want to trust that whatever this fast, strange, entirely inconvenient thing between us is, it can survive contact with the outside world, with reality, with all the complications waiting for us the second we walk out from under this roof.
But fear whispers otherwise underneath all that hope, reminding me how impossible this sounds when I actually say the words out loud instead of just feeling them.
Still, I nod, because right now, in this kitchen, with stew simmering and his hands warm against my face, I choose to believe him anyway. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. We will figure it out. Together, apparently, whether the Marshals like it or not.”
“Whether they like it or not,” he agrees, and something in the set of his jaw tells me he means it as a promise, not just a comfort.
He kisses my forehead, and we go back to making breakfast, the small domestic normalcy of stirring stew and setting bowls sitting in stark, strange contrast to the very real danger still lurking somewhere out there on the other side of the mountain, waiting patiently for the roads to finally clear.