Chapter 7
SAWYER
The blade was dull.
I could feel it in the way the saw dragged, the slight resistance that meant the teeth were losing their edge.
A sharp blade sings through wood. A dull one argues with it.
I made a mental note to swap it out before the afternoon run and turned my attention back to the lumber order spread across my desk, columns of numbers that should have held my focus the way they usually did.
They didn’t.
Three days since I’d slept in her apartment.
Three days since she’d held me through a nightmare I couldn’t remember and spoken about her parents with a gentleness that had undone something in my chest I hadn’t known was knotted.
Three days since she’d lain beside me in a bed too small for one person, let alone two, and told me to sleep like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Three days since I’d called her beautiful.
The thought made me grip the pen harder. I’d said it to her back as she walked out of the room, a confession that had slipped past every guard I had, and she’d gone to the kitchen and made pancakes like the world hadn’t just shifted on its axis.
I hadn’t seen her since. Three days without her showing up at the mill, three days without the sound of her voice cutting through the noise of the saws, and the silence was louder than it had any right to be.
Before her, I’d gone years without minding silence.
Now three days of it felt like a drought.
The thing that bothered me most was that I had no way to reach her.
In over a month of her visits, we’d never exchanged numbers.
That was by design, or at least by habit.
Our entire arrangement had been built on her showing up.
She came to me. That was how it worked. I didn’t call, didn’t text, didn’t reach out.
I just existed in my space and she appeared in it, like sunlight through a window, and I pretended not to notice how much brighter everything got when she did.
But now she hadn’t appeared for three days, and I didn’t know if she was tired or sick or busy or if the morning after the nightmare had been too much, if holding a man through his worst moment and hearing him cry for his dead brother had finally shown her what she was getting into and she’d decided to get out.
I shoved the thought down and checked the clock. Half past four. The crew would knock off at five, the yard would empty, and I’d have the silence I needed to get my head straight. Silence and work. The only two things that had ever made sense to me.
“Sawyer?”
Josh’s voice came from the doorway of the office, carrying the particular tone he used when he was about to deliver information I didn’t want.
“What.”
“Chloe’s here.”
Something kicked in my chest. I crushed it.
“Tell her I’m busy.”
“I did. She said, and I’m quoting here, ‘Tell him I don’t care.’”
I looked up from the desk. Through the office window, I could see her crossing the yard, and even from a distance, I could tell something was off.
She moved slower than usual, her steps heavier, her shoulders rounded in a way that was wrong on a woman who normally walked like the world owed her a red carpet.
Her face, when she got close enough for me to see it clearly, was pale.
Not her usual warm-honey tone but washed out, drained, with shadows under her eyes that told me she hadn’t slept properly.
She looked exhausted. And she was alone. No Dollie, no cookie tin, no pretense of a social visit. She’d come just for me.
She walked through the office door, past Josh, who stepped aside with the practiced ease of a man who had learned not to stand between Chloe Matthews and her destination, and came straight to me.
And hugged me.
Her arms went around my waist, her face pressed into my chest, and her body leaned into mine with the boneless trust of someone who had reached the end of their energy and was borrowing someone else’s.
She was warm against me, small and solid, and the sawdust on my shirt transferred to her hair in tiny golden flecks.
“Don’t complain,” she mumbled into my flannel. “I am way too tired.”
My arms hung at my sides. This was the part where I was supposed to push her back, remind her that this was a workplace, tell her that physical contact in the middle of the sawmill yard was not something I did. My brain knew the script.
My arms didn’t get the memo. They came up, slowly, and settled around her. One across her back. One at the base of her skull, my fingers curving into her hair without permission.
“Then why did you come here?” I asked. My voice came out rougher than I intended, but quieter too, like the volume had been turned down without my consent. “You should have rested.”
She tilted her head up. Her chin pressed into my sternum and those blue eyes, dimmer than usual, ringed with fatigue, looked up at me with an honesty that hit me like a two-by-four.
“Because you’re here,” she said.
The words were simple. Five syllables, basic vocabulary, nothing that should have made the ground shift under my boots.
But they did. Because she wasn’t saying it to be clever or to tease or to push my buttons.
She was saying it because she meant it. She had dragged herself across town, exhausted and half-asleep, because the place she wanted to be was wherever I was.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I had spent over a month watching this woman walk through every barrier I’d put up like they were made of tissue paper, and she’d done it with a smile and a bag of cookies and the absolute refusal to leave me alone.
And I’d let her. I’d let her closer than anyone since Jimmy, and the terrifying thing wasn’t that she was here.
The terrifying thing was how wrong the three days without her had felt.
“I could come to your place instead,” I said. The words were out before I could catch them, bypassing every filter I had. “Just call me.”
Her face changed. The tiredness was still there, but underneath it, something lit up. A spark, bright and warm, breaking through the exhaustion like sunlight through clouds.
“You’d really do that?” she asked, and the wonder in her voice, the genuine surprise that someone would offer to come to her, made something behind my ribs crack.
The realization of what I’d said hit me half a second late. I had offered to come to her house. Voluntarily. On request. Like a man who did that kind of thing. Like a man who had someone to go home to.
“I’ll go back to work,” I said, pulling my arms away from her.
“Wait.” She caught my hand. Her fingers were cool against my palm, small and certain, and she pressed her phone into my grip.
“Put your number in. So I can actually call you. Because I just realized that after everything, after the sidewalk, the soup, the cookies, the nightmare, all of it, we don’t even have each other’s phone numbers. How ridiculous is that?”
She was right. It was ridiculous. Over a month of her showing up at my mill, two nights at her apartment, one of them spent in each other’s arms, and we’d been operating on nothing but the assumption that she’d keep appearing and I’d keep letting her.
No safety net. No way to reach each other outside of the sawmill and the sidewalk and whatever accident of proximity brought us together next.
I looked at the phone. Then at her. Then back at the phone.
I typed in my number. Saved it. Handed it back.
She glanced at the screen and grinned, the kind of grin that made her whole face rearrange itself into something dangerously close to joy. “You saved yourself as ‘Sawyer.’ Just Sawyer. No emoji, no last name, nothing.”
“That’s my name.”
“Most people add something. A last name. A little descriptor.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” she said, and the grin softened into something warmer. “You’re really not.”
She released my hand, and the absence of her fingers felt like the absence of something I hadn’t known I’d been missing.
“Okay. I’m going home. I’m really, genuinely, about-to-fall-over tired.” She took a step back and swayed slightly, catching herself with a hand on the desk.
“Sit down,” I said.
It wasn’t a suggestion. I pulled the chair from behind the desk, the one with the cracked leather seat that had been here since before I’d bought the place, and pointed at it.
“Sawyer, I just said I’m going home.”
“You can barely stand. Sit.”
She looked at the chair. Looked at me. Then she sat, because even Chloe Matthews had a limit, and she had apparently just found it.
I walked out of the office and found Danny, one of the younger crew members, loading the last of the afternoon cut onto the flatbed.
“Go to Mabel’s,” I said. “Get soup. The chicken one with the thick noodles. And bread. The sourdough, not the rye.”
Danny blinked at me. In three years of working the mill, I had never once asked anyone to make a food run. “You want me to… get soup?”
“Did I stutter?”
“No, sir.” Danny grabbed his keys and practically sprinted to his truck.
When I got back to the office, Chloe was curled in the chair with her legs tucked under her, her head resting against the leather back. Her eyes were half-closed, her breathing slow, and she was watching me through the office window as I crossed the yard.
“Did you just send someone to buy me food?” she asked when I came through the door.
“The crew eats. There’s always a run.”
“There is absolutely not always a run. Josh told me you once made a guy eat lunch in his truck because he took two minutes too long at the microwave.”
I made a mental note to have a conversation with Josh about information security.
“Nice muscles, by the way,” she said, her eyes drifting to my arms where I’d rolled my sleeves up.
I picked up a small offcut of pine from the desk, a scrap no bigger than my thumb, and tossed it at her. It bounced off her knee and she laughed, the sound tired but real, filling the small office like music.
“Hey! Workplace violence.”
“You’re not an employee.”
“I’m a guest.”
“You’re a trespasser who won’t leave.”
She grinned at me from the chair, and I felt something crack in the wall I kept around myself. Not a big crack. Just enough to let light through.
Danny came back with the soup in a paper bag, looking confused about his life choices, and I set it on the desk in front of her. She opened the container and the smell of Mabel’s chicken noodle filled the office, warm and hearty.
“Eat,” I said, and went back to the yard to check on the blade replacement.
I could see her through the office window while I worked.
She ate slowly, savoring it, pausing between bites to watch me through the glass.
At one point, I was hauling a beam across the yard, the weight of it balanced on my shoulder, and I caught her watching with an expression that was somewhere between admiration and amusement.
When I came back in to log the afternoon numbers, she was standing by the desk with the soup container empty and a paper napkin in her hand.
“Taste this,” she said, holding out a piece of sourdough bread with a sliver of something on it. “Mabel puts this herb butter on the bread now. It’s so good.”
I took the bite from her fingers. The bread was warm and the butter had rosemary in it and her fingers brushed my lips and I absolutely did not think about that.
“Good?” she asked.
“It’s bread.”
“It’s amazing bread and you know it.”
While I turned to the desk to log the numbers, I felt something on the back of my neck. A towel, soft and damp, pressing against my skin. I went still.
“You’re covered in sweat,” she said from behind me, her voice matter-of-fact. “Hold still.”
She wiped the back of my neck, the sides, across my forehead where she had to go up on her toes to reach.
The towel was cool against my heated skin, and her free hand rested on my shoulder for balance.
I stood there, pen frozen over the logbook, while this woman gently wiped the sweat from my face like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“There,” she said, stepping back. “Now you look like a person instead of a man who just ran a marathon in a sawmill.”
I looked at her. She was smiling, the tiredness still there but pushed to the edges, held at bay by whatever energy she pulled from these moments. From being here. From being with me.
“Go home,” I said. “Get some sleep.”
“Are you going to call me later? You have my number now. No excuses.”
“You have my number too. You call me.”
“That’s not how it works, grumpy. The man calls.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. It’s a rule.”
“I don’t follow rules.”
“You literally just lectured Josh about break time rules three hours ago.”
I set down the pen. “Go home, Chloe.”
She laughed, gathered her jacket, and walked to the door. She paused in the frame, one hand on the wood, and looked back at me with those blue eyes that had somehow become the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing before sleep.
“Call me,” she said. “Or I’ll come back tomorrow and bring a loudspeaker.”
She left.
I stared at the doorway for a long time after she was gone. Then I picked up my phone, looked at the screen, and saved her number under a name I’d never admit to choosing.
Sunshine.
I put the phone in my pocket and went back to work.
I called her at nine that night. She answered on the first ring.
“Took you long enough, grumpy,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.
We talked for two hours. I didn’t know I had two hours of words in me. Turns out, for her, I did.