Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
ALANA
I spent the morning pretending to work on a logo redesign that’s already three weeks late.
The client wanted something geometric, modern, fresh.
Instead I opened a blank Procreate canvas and drew the interior of this cabin fourteen ways — the stone fireplace, the furniture he built (the table is hand-constructed, the legs are too intentional), the way light falls through the north-facing window in what I’m sure is exactly the golden hour despite the fact that we’re surrounded by pine trees that block half the sky.
Zac left the kitchen before I finished my coffee. He’s avoided the same room since I woke up — moving with the kind of careful deliberation that says he’s holding himself together with significant effort. I heard him on the porch, heard the sound of him gathering something, and then the axe.
That sound’s been steady for hours. Chop. Chop. Chop. The rhythm of a man who needs something to do with his hands.
I gave up on the logo around eleven and took my sketchbook to the porch.
The treeline is easier than geometry, and the pencil work gives me something to focus on besides the fact that he’s behind the cabin working through a woodpile like it personally offended him, and I’m trying not to imagine what his arms look like when he’s doing that.
The afternoon slides toward evening. The light’s gone golden and complicated, the kind that makes everything look like it’s caught between day and night.
I’m on my third sketch of the treeline when he comes around the cabin corner, and I catch him staring at me for just a second before his eyes flick away.
He’s shirtless. His chest is broad and tanned and marked with the kind of work-done muscle that doesn’t come from a gym — it comes from years of splitting wood and hauling gear and being a man who doesn’t sit still.
His beard’s got sawdust in it. He looks like something out of a fever dream I definitely should not be having about my oldest brother’s best friend.
He sits down on the porch steps beside me. Not rushed. Not the careful distance of yesterday. Just beside me.
“You draw,” he says.
“Sometimes.” I flip the page so he can’t see the fourteen versions of his cabin interior.
“Mostly in my job. Logos, business cards, web design. But I sketch for myself too. I draw what sticks with me.” Which is to say: I have approximately forty-seven sketches of his hands in my sketchbook, and now I’m going to have to add “shirtless and covered in sawdust,” which means my entire flight home is going to be very awkward if TSA searches my iPad.
He’s quiet long enough that I think maybe I’ve rambled him into regretting sitting down. Then he says, “What do you see?”
I look at the treeline. I’ve drawn it so many times in the last hour that the pencil strokes are automatic — the way the pines crowd together, how the edges blur into the sky instead of having hard lines.
How it looks like you could walk into it and keep walking and never come out the other side. “Something I don’t want to leave.”
He shifts his weight on the steps. His shoulder’s maybe six inches from mine. The heat coming off him is immediate — pine resin, sweat, something that’s just him underneath. “Why’d you sign up? For Montana Matches.”
I should have seen that question coming. “You don’t seem like the type” is what I want to say.
He doesn’t answer right away. His jaw moves like he’s working through how much to tell me. “My mother thinks I’m punishing myself.”
“Are you?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His hand goes to the back of his neck, squeezing — I’ve seen him do that twice now, always when something costs him to say.
“Probably. I’ve been alone a long time. Told myself I liked it.
Told myself the cabin and the business and the quiet were enough. ” He drops his hand. “They’re not.”
I don’t say anything. I’m afraid that if I talk, he’ll stop.
This is the most words he’s given me at once, and each one sounds like it’s being pulled out of him by force.
The wind moves through the pines. “My brothers think they’re protecting me.
Four of them. My whole life, no exaggeration — every boy who showed interest in me got scared off.
Either by Nate specifically, who’s two hundred pounds of overprotective instinct, or just by the general atmosphere of ‘Alana is not available for dating,’ which apparently broadcast loud enough that even the guys with low self-esteem got the message.
By the time I got to college, I’d figured out that no one was going to let me make my own choices, so the only choice I had left was to leave. ”
His head turns toward me. “You left.”
“I left. Didn’t tell them where I was going. Didn’t mention the Montana Matches paperwork until it was already done. And now I’m here.” I gesture at the cabin, the porch, the mountains beyond. “So I guess we’re both punishing ourselves. Just in different ways.”
“Not the same,” he says. His voice is rough. “You’re building something. I’m...” He stops. Starts again. “I’m just running.”
I want to argue with that. I want to tell him that signing up for this program, agreeing to let a woman move into his space, learning to exist in a room with someone else — that’s not running.
That’s the opposite of running. But I don’t know him well enough to say those things yet.
I only know the version of him that cooks steak and avoids my eyes and says things that sound like they’re costing him something.
“Everyone thinks they’re protecting me,” I say instead. “No one asks what I actually want.”
He’s quiet for a long time. The light shifts again, sliding further down the sky. The porch gets darker. The treeline gets less distinct. And then he turns to face me, and his expression’s shifted too. He looks at me like he’s actually considering the question. Like it matters.
“What do you want?” he asks.
The answer’s in my throat. It’s been there since he opened my car door and looked at me like I was something he’d been starving for.
He’s Nate’s best friend. He’s forty-one. If my brother found out I want to crawl across this porch and put my hands on his face, it would kill him.
I don’t answer with words.
I look at his mouth. Let my eyes drop and stay there.
His breath catches. His jaw tightens. He stands — too fast, the chair scraping back against the porch boards — and says goodnight and he’s gone.
Inside. Door closed behind him, and I’m sitting alone with my sketchbook and a pulse I can feel in my teeth and the ghost of a conversation that said everything without either of us finishing a sentence.
The treeline disappears into the dark by degrees.
The temperature drops. I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them and sit there on his porch while the mountain goes quiet, thinking about the way his voice broke on what do you want, like he was afraid of the answer and desperate for it at the same time.
I don’t go inside for a long time.