Chapter 7
TREYTON
I'd been awake for two hours by the time she moved.
The fire had burned down to nothing, and I'd rebuilt it twice, once around five and once around six-thirty, working slow because I didn't want to wake her.
The rain had stopped sometime in the night.
The sun was up but the cabin still sat in shadow at this hour, and the only light came through the one good window.
Biscuit had moved at some point from his spot in front of the fireplace to sitting at my feet, where he had spent the morning watching me think.
The damn dog knew. I'd been watched all morning by an animal who had witnessed the whole thing and who had opinions, and the opinions were not in my favor.
Soleil was tucked against my chest under the blanket with her hair a mess across my collarbone and her hand curled loose on my ribs, and at some point, I’d stopped trying to plan how I was going to walk this back and started counting the hours she had left on the ridge.
Not even six full weeks. We had forty-one days. I'd done the math twice because I hadn't believed it the first time.
She stirred. Her hand on my ribs moved, found my skin under the blanket, and settled. She made a small sound against my chest, and her other hand came up and slid along my jaw. She pulled my face down toward her without even opening her eyes.
Her lips found mine before I could stop it. I should have stopped it. I'd been deciding for two hours that I was going to stop it. I kissed her back.
She was warm and sleepy and her mouth was soft, and I had her hip in my hand and her breath in my mouth before I'd registered that my body had decided my head had spent two hours arguing against. I took her against the tarp again.
Her fingers tangled my hair, my lips pressed kisses against her throat.
Her leg hooked over mine, and the cabin seemed brighter in a way it hadn't been when she was asleep. Her eyes opened and she looked at me like she hadn’t realized that at some point we were going to have to rejoin the real world.
I pulled back, my breath coming harder than I wanted, and braced on one elbow above her. As I looked at her underneath me, so beautiful and warm and ready to be mine, I tried to find the sentence I'd been working on for the past two hours.
She saw it on my face before I said it. “What?”
“Soleil.”
“What, Treyton?”
I sat up. Pulled the blanket up to cover her even though it was too late for that to mean anything. I scrubbed a hand across my jaw and made myself look at her.
“Your residency is only for three months,” I said. “You've got six weeks left.”
It landed on her face the way I'd known it would. She didn't argue. She didn't flinch. She did the thing she had done at the workshop when I'd shut down on her, which was rearrange her expression into something easier and turn it back toward me like nothing was wrong.
“Right,” she said. “Of course. Six weeks.” She sat up too. Pulled the blanket around her shoulders. Looked at the fire instead of at me. “I appreciate you being practical about it. That's smart.”
She was using her professional voice. The voice she used on the phone with her editor. I'd heard her a couple of times through the open window and I'd hated it because it wasn't a voice that should have been on the ridge. But it was on the ridge now and I was the one who’d brought it.
“Soleil.”
“I'm fine.”
“I didn't —”
“You didn't what?” She wasn't using the voice anymore. She was using a different voice that was worse. It was the voice she used when she was telling herself something she was going to have to live with, and I knew that voice because I had been using a version of it on myself for nine years.
“I didn't want to do that to you,” I said. “Not the — not last night. The other thing.”
“The leaving-soon thing.”
I nodded.
“You didn't do it to me. I came up the mountain. I knew I was going home. I didn't forget any of that.” She finally looked at me. Her face was clear, but her eyes were guarded. “I'm not asking you for anything. So we don't have to do this part.”
I had never wanted to argue with someone less in my life, and I had never wanted to argue with someone more, and they were the same person, and she was sitting two feet from me wrapped in a blanket I had brought to a cabin she didn't know existed, and she was telling me I didn't have to do this part.
So I kept my mouth shut and I let her have the version of the morning she had decided to take.
We got dressed in the kind of silence that took effort to maintain.
She put her braid back together with her hands while I rolled up the tarp.
I folded the blanket. Put the coffee can and the matches back where they'd been on the hearth. Stacked the firewood and added a few of the splits I’d broken down during the night.
We left the cabin the way we’d found it. That was the rule.
Biscuit walked between us the whole way down. I thought he would default to her the way he had defaulted to her every other time, but he didn't. He walked between us like a scruffy chaperone who didn’t want there to be any more trouble.
She didn't talk to me on the way down, but she wasn’t silent. Every once in a while, she’d bend down to talk to a flower or ask a plant how it was doing today. But her voice sounded different, less bright with more gravity. I was the one who’d done that to her. It was my fault.
I got us back to the ridge by noon. She thanked me for the hike but didn’t look at me when she did. Then she walked across the clearing, entered her cabin, and shut the door behind her. I stood next to my truck with Biscuit at my side, but the door didn't open again.
The porch step on Cabin Three had been loose for weeks. I'd seen it on Tuesday, and I'd been planning to fix it on Monday, because small repairs got done on Mondays and that was the rhythm I had with the cabins.
But my routine had been rocked. Last night had thrown me, and I felt like I’d lost my way. After she came out of the cabin and drove away, I got the toolbox out of my truck and fixed the damn porch step.
I planed the step level, replaced the bracket, sank two new screws into the joist, and was off the porch and gone by twenty after two. I didn’t leave a note or let myself wonder whether she would notice or what she would think about it when she did.
Soleil might overlook things like that, but I couldn’t.
The faucet in her kitchen had been leaking since the day she moved in.
I’d been planning on fixing it, but she’d shown up early and I hadn’t had the chance.
On Friday morning, she left for a meeting at the bookstore.
I drove up at ten with the toolbox, pulled the faucet handle, replaced the cartridge, tested the seal, and was gone by ten-forty. I didn’t leave a note this time either.
On Saturday morning, I built her a shelf.
Eighteen inches by six, one shelf on two iron brackets, mounted on the wall by her kitchen table at the height where she could reach it from her chair.
I'd noticed the table was too crowded for her sketchbooks the second time I'd been inside the cabin.
I cut it from a piece of black walnut left over from the Aspen table.
I sanded it, oiled it, and resisted the urge to carve anything into the underside.
I drove up to her cabin at eleven on Saturday. Her SUV was gone. The cabin door was unlocked because nobody in Hollow Peak locked anything. I let myself in, hung the shelf in fifteen minutes, and left.
I refused to look around the cabin while I was inside.
That was a rule I’d created before I went in, and I held to it.
When I was done, I headed back to my place and stood at my kitchen window for the better part of an hour, thinking about nothing in particular except the way she’d looked at me before I’d ruined everything.
By Sunday morning I’d been pretending not to look for Soleil for four days, even though I’d been looking for her constantly. Finally, when I couldn’t stand my own company any longer, I drove down to the Switchback for coffee and a cinnamon roll. She was supposed to be giving a talk at the lodge.
I saw her as soon as I walked in, sitting at the two-top by the window. Her sketchbook sat open in front of her next to a half-eaten cinnamon roll. She had a Magic Latte in one hand and was wearing the same Boulder Marathon t-shirt she’d had on the day she found the goat.
My heart pounded because I hadn’t seen her in days. And also because she wasn’t by herself.
A man sat across from her. Probably somewhere in his thirties.
Even from across the room, I picked up on his attitude.
He was leaning forward across the table with his forearms on the surface in a way that suggested he had been there a while and was planning to be there longer.
Soleil tilted her head and offered him a polite smile.
He sat there like an asshole who was way too sure of himself and hadn’t noticed that she’d been staring at the door for the last sixty seconds.
When she looked up and saw me, the polite smile faded. I walked across the café and sat down on the chair next to her without asking. Mae was already on her way to the table with another mug.
“What can I get you, Berg?” she asked, like she’d been waiting for me to arrive.
“Coffee. And another roll. Bring the bill.”
Mae arched a brow. “For both of them?”
“For both of us.”
The man in the fleece looked at me. He hadn’t caught up to the situation yet. His mouth opened like he thought he was still taking part in a conversation.
Then Mae set the mug down in front of me and looked up at him. “She's spoken for, Brendan.”
Brendan closed his mouth. He looked at Soleil. He looked at me. He looked at the table. He stood up, smoothed his fleece, and said, “Right. Have a great morning, you guys. Nice to meet you, Soleil,” and walked out of the café in defeat.
Mae went back to the counter and refilled one of her regular’s coffee without being asked. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t have to.
But Soleil did. “You didn't have to do that.”
“I didn't have to,” I said. “But I did.”
She picked up her Magic Latte. She took a sip and set it back down. Then she looked at her sketchbook. “Treyton.”
“Yeah?”
“You can't have this both ways.”
I sat with that for a beat. She wasn't wrong.
She wasn't wrong and we both knew she wasn't wrong and Mae knew it from across the room and Brendan was probably figuring it out in the parking lot, and I sat there with my hand around a mug I hadn't touched and I tried to decide what version of the truth I was capable of saying out loud in the Switchback Café on a Sunday morning.
I finally settled on, “I'm working on it.”
She looked at me for a long beat the way she had looked at the side table in the workshop, with the focus she gave to things she was trying to understand all the way through. Then she nodded, picked up her pencil, and went back to her sketchbook.
I drank my coffee and sat at her two-top for another twenty minutes without either of us saying anything else. She drew. I sat there. Mae refilled my mug without being asked.
When Soleil went to the bathroom, she paid the bill, and when I tried to argue she said, “I didn't have to, but I did.”
Then she walked out of the café with her sketchbook under her arm, her braid down her back, and her SUV keys in her hand.
I sat there for another five minutes after the bell on the door stopped ringing.
Mae came over and sat down across from me in Brendan's vacated chair. “You look like you've been hit by a truck.”
“Thanks, Mae.”
“What are you doing, Berg?”
“I don't know.”
“Hmm.” She squinted out the window at her own parking lot. “Well, whatever it is, do better.”
I drove out to Gibson's because I didn't want to drive back to my own cabin and I didn't have anywhere else to go.
Gibson was in the pasture with two of the goats and a fence post and a roll of wire when I pulled in.
He waved me over with one elbow. I walked across the pasture with the length of cedar I’d brought in case I needed an excuse.
I’d told him weeks ago I'd bring him some for a stall partition but hadn’t delivered yet.
While he finished the wire, I leaned against the post.
He stood and looked at my face. “You slept with her, didn't you?”
“Gibson —”
“Yeah. You slept with her.” He picked up his wire-cutters. “Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to lean on the fence and not talk about it.”
“The second one.”
“Okay.”
I leaned on the fence. Penny wandered over and put her head against my hip and stood there for a while. She’d never done that before.
While Gibson worked, the sun came up over the east face of his pasture and warmed the side of my face and Penny breathed against my hip, and I stood there and didn’t talk about it.
After a long stretch of quiet, Gibson said, “Don't tell anyone I said this. But the girl's pretty. And smart. And probably in love with your ugly ass, I would guess.”
“Gibson.”
“Yeah, alright. Fence is done. You want lunch?”
“No.”
I left the cedar leaning on the post and took the long way home, not sure what I planned on doing when I got there.
I parked the truck at the head of the south trail and got out and started up on foot with Biscuit running ahead of me. Every once in a while, he’d look back with the patience of a dog who had been waiting for me to catch up to where he’d been for weeks.
Stretching my legs gave me time to think. I walked the rest of the way up the ridge, and Soleil was on my porch when I came around the last bend. She sat on the top step with her sketchbook open, and the afternoon light coming down over her shoulder.
Biscuit had already accelerated past me and was halfway across the gravel before I'd registered her.
She looked up but didn't smile. “I drew Biscuit. Do you want to see?”
I sat down on the step next to her, not trusting myself to speak.