Chapter 10
EVACUATION
Melinda
H e moves fast.
I move faster.
I move down the hallway into the bedroom.
I pack in eight minutes.
Everything that matters, nothing that doesn't. Clean clothes. Medical notes. Charger.
The bird guide. I put it back down. Then pick it up again.
I take the bird guide.
I'm back in the main room in fourteen minutes total.
He looks at me. At the bag. At his watch.
"Fourteen minutes."
"I know."
"I gave you twenty."
"I know."
The corner of his mouth.
Even now.
I grab my jacket. "Let's go."
It rains before we hit the main road.
The kind that arrives all at once.
He kills the headlights twenty minutes out and drives on memory and whatever internal navigation system exists in a man trained to operate in actual darkness.
I watch the trees blur past the window.
To me it’s all black shapes against blacker sky.
I think about the person who stood in the soft soil on the north side and watched our windows.
The person who saw us moving around inside.
I should be more frightened than I am.
I run a quick internal check.
The kind I run on patients when I need to know what I'm working with.
My fear is present and accounted for.
It's also sitting quietly in the corner, deferring to the fact that the man driving this truck has walked the perimeter twice tonight and drove the last mile without headlights and has not once looked like someone who doubts himself.
I look at his hands on the wheel.
They are steady and relaxed. Not performing calm, just calm.
After a while he reaches across without looking and turns the heat up.
I look at him as he watches the road.
"You were cold."
"How did you?—"
"You tucked your hands under your legs."
I look down and realize I had. But I hadn't noticed.
He noticed.
He noticed and fixed it without comment, like it was the obvious thing to do.
I tuck that observation into the collection of things about him I'm not ready to examine directly.
That collection is dangerously full of things I admire.
"You're staring."
"I'm observing. I'm a doctor."
"What's your diagnosis?"
I consider him. The profile of his face in the dark. The set of his jaw. The way his eyes move: road, mirror, road, even when we're the only car for miles.
"Dangerously competent. Excellent bedside manner."
"Why."
"You turned the heat up without being asked. That's worth a full grade."
He says nothing.
But the almost-smile stays for the next fifteen miles.
I turn back to the window and let him drive and let myself not examine why being in this truck in the rain in the dark feels safer than anywhere I've been in a week.
The second cabin is smaller. I didn't think that was possible.
The road turns to dirt a mile out, trees pressing in close on both sides. No neighbors. No ambient light from anywhere. The real dark.
He pulls around back, cuts the engine, sits. Listens.
I wait. I know this part. Thirty seconds of him reading the sounds of the place before he decides it's safe. Wind in the pines. Something small in the undergrowth. The tick of the engine cooling.
We go inside.
I do my circuit. Smaller kitchen. Smaller living area. I stop at the hallway.
"One bed."
"Yes."
"And the couch is?—"
"Smaller than the last one."
I look at the couch. It is essentially a loveseat. I look at him. He is six feet three inches of solid person.
We have the full conversation without words.
"I'm not sleeping on that."
"I wasn't going to suggest it."
"The bed?—"
"Is big enough. We're adults. We've established that comprehensively."
Warmth moves through his expression. "We have."
"Good." I pick up my bag. "I'm checking the kitchen."
He follows me. Which he doesn't usually do.
I open the first cabinet. "Oh."
"What?"
"This place is even better stocked than the first one." I open the next cabinet. "Kaden. There's pasta. The good kind. And canned tomatoes and—" I open the refrigerator. "Fresh vegetables."
"Eagle doesn't?—"
"Cut corners on provisions, yes, I know, I love Eagle." I'm already mentally planning three days of meals.
"You're making a grocery list in your head."
"I'm assessing resources. There's enough for proper pasta tonight, eggs tomorrow, and the day after depends on the freezer."
He looks at me. "I'll check the freezer."
"Thank you."
We stand in the small kitchen of the smaller second cabin and take inventory together, and it is, I think, the most domestic thing I've done in years.
I don't say that out loud. He would file it.
I make pasta. Proper pasta. Salted water. The right amount of sauce. Timing everything so it comes together at once.
He sits at the table with his tablet.
He is not reading his tablet.
"I can feel you watching."
"I'm reviewing?—"
"The threat assessment. I know." I stir the sauce. "You always watch when I cook and then either ask a question or set the table."
"You've catalogued my behavior."
"You catalogue everything. It seemed only fair."
"What else have you catalogued?"
I consider the sauce. "You look up when I laugh. Every time. Like you keep forgetting I'm going to do it."
"I don't?—"
"You do. It's one of my favorites."
"You have favorites."
"I have an extensive collection. The almost-smile. The not-quite sound when something amuses you. The way you measured my sugar this morning without thinking about it."
"I was making coffee."
"You measured it before you started the coffee. That's the point."
He doesn't answer.
"Set the table."
He sets the table.
The pasta comes out perfectly. We eat.
Somewhere between the pasta and the end of a bottle of wine I found in the back cabinet, I say the thing I've been thinking about since roughly mile forty of the drive here.
"Can I ask you something," he says.
I blink. He asked first. That still surprises me.
"Sure."
"What do you want? From this. When it's over."
I set down my fork. Think about it. The genuine answer and the answer I've decided to give. They're related, but not identical.
"Honestly? I want my apartment. My patients. My Tuesday dinners with Dana. My life back."
He nods.
"And in the meantime, I am in a cabin with very limited entertainment options." I look at him. Matter of fact. "And you are, objectively, an extremely attractive man who turns the heat up when I'm cold and fixes window latches and has a very interesting scar."
He goes very still.
"So, this is entertainment?
"No, it’s more than that. It’s two adults, in an unusual situation, being sensible."
"Sensible."
"Practical."
"You think this is practical?"
"It’s complicated but I think I am a grown woman who knows what she wants and isn't going to pretend otherwise. I’m enjoying our time together."
I pick up my fork ad continue eating. Like I've said something perfectly reasonable about the weather.
"Does my answer bother you?"
"No."
Too fast.
I notice. I don't let on that I notice.
"What do you want when this is over?”
"I mean." I consider my pasta. "You're not exactly forthcoming. I don't know enough about you to build anything more complicated."
"You know about the scar."
"Medically."
"You know I take my coffee black."
"Observationally."
"You know I look up when you laugh."
I look at him. He's looking back with an expression that is paying attention to every word.
"I know all of those things," I say carefully. "And I think you're extraordinary. And when I go back to my life I'll think about this—" I gesture between us, "and think it was the best possible way to spend a very difficult eleven days."
I smile at him. Warm. Genuine. Unbothered.
"Sure."
“I’d like to point out that you are not specifying if there is anything you want, after this is over.”
“Yeah,” he says, flat and even. Like a man who has discovered that wanting something can be complicated.
I take a bite of pasta.
We're in the dark.
His weight on the other side of the bed.
We are not touching.
The rain on the roof fills the silence.
"You're not scared?"
"Of what?"
"Any of this. The move tonight. The boot prints I didn't tell you about."
"I knew about the boot prints. Or at least I knew you found something."
"You didn't say anything."
"Neither did you. I've learned you tell me what I need to know when I need to know it. And sometimes you don’t tell me things that maybe you should.
The rain on the roof.
"But, no, I wasn't scared. Maybe for about four minutes after I figured it out. Then I looked at you and I wasn't anymore."
"That's a lot of trust."
"Yes. It is. You’ve earned it, you’ve kept me safe."
The rain eases.
"Kaden."
"Yeah."
"It's not nothing for me either. In case the pasta speech suggested otherwise."
"I know."
"You knew."
"I know how to read people."
I look at the ceiling. "You let me keep talking anyway."
"You were enjoying it."
"I was—" I stop. "Yes. I was."
The third almost-sound.
The rare one. The one I've only heard twice before. The one I haven't examined yet.
His hand finds mine in the dark. His touch is slow and deliberate.
I hold on.
The rain continues its assault on the roof.
This cabin is smaller than the first, the bed is smaller too.
It’s small enough that even lying apart I can feel the warmth of him along my entire left side.
Not touching but close enough that not touching is its own kind of contact.
His thumb moves against the back of my hand, slowly. Absently.
Like he's thinking about something else and doesn't know his hand is stroking mine.
Like when I find myself moving my foot in a repetitive beat and don’t realize I’m moving at all.
It’s a self-soothing thing, I think.
I turn onto my side, facing him.
He doesn't move, but his thumb stops.
Which means he's aware again.
"Kaden."
"Yeah."
"I'm not asking for anything. I just want to be closer."
His arm comes around me and he pulls me in.
My back against his chest with his arm across my waist.
We are spooning and I can feel the full length of him behind me.
I snuggle into his warm and solid presence
I exhale a full breath that I didn't realize I was holding.
His mouth near my ear.
His breath is warm against my neck.
We’re not kissing, we are just there together.
I feel his heartbeat against my back.
He is not as unaffected as the stillness of his body suggests.
I press back against him slightly and feel his response.
He inhales a sharp but controlled breathe.
His fingers tighten once against my stomach.
Then his mouth finds the place below my ear that he learned the first time.
The place I didn't know about until him.
I make a sound I don't recognize.
"Melinda."
"Don't stop."
He doesn't.
He turns me toward him slowly.
Like he's giving me every chance to say no.
I don't say no.
We don't speak again for a long time.
It's different this time. The first was discovery.
It was frantic and full of everything held back too long.
This is slower. We have time.
We know what works now.
What undoes the other.
What to do with the small sounds that escape when neither of us is being careful.
His hands move over my body, very slowly over my hips and my waist.
My fingers find the tattoo over his heart again and trace it in the dark this time, and his breath catches against my throat.
"What is it?" I whisper. "The name."
"Later."
It isn't a refusal. It's a deferral a promise to talk later.
We move together.
Slowly at first, then less slow.
His forehead against mine. My hands on his shoulders. His hands on my back, holding me there, holding me to him.
There’s no urgency or clock.
Just the two of us and the dark and the rain on the roof and the way time stops doing what it normally does.
When I come apart this time it isn't sudden.
It builds for a long time and breaks for longer.
He follows me soon after, my name against my throat, his whole body shaking once and then still.
We stay like that.
Eventually he eases us onto our sides. Pulls the blanket up. His arm back across my waist.
"I'm not letting go yet."
"Good."
I close my eyes and enjoy the dark. The rain. The slow steady weight of his arm.
I wake once in the night.
He's asleep. Deeply asleep.
Not the vigil-stillness, but real sleep. One arm behind his head, the other still around my waist.
His face relaxed in a way it never is when he's conscious.
Even asleep, he doesn’t let go.
I lie there in the dark and think about what I said at dinner.
Practical. Sensible. Two adults. The best possible way to spend a difficult eleven days.
I think about the third almost-sound.
I think about too fast.
I told him it wasn't anything complicated.
I am the most spectacular liar I have ever met.
His arm still around me.
I don't mind the trouble at all.
Then his phone lights up on the nightstand. Once. Twice. He doesn't stir. The screen reads: Marcus. Urgent.