Chapter Five
Nell
THERE WAS NO PROTOCOL for this. I had protocols for client onboarding, quarterly reviews, travel delays, and the optimal sequence for packing a carry-on.
I did not have a protocol for waking up next to a man who had spent the better part of a week putting his mouth between my legs and making me forget my own name.
I lay still. His arm was heavy across my waist. My body carried a tenderness I was learning to live with, a low ache that had settled in and stopped asking permission, and my brain was doing the thing it did when a spreadsheet returned an error it couldn't trace: cycling, cycling, not landing.
These nights kept happening. Not just the sex, though the sex had redrawn my assumptions about what my body could do so thoroughly that the new version was starting to feel like the original.
But the after. How he'd held me with his face pressed into my hair, his heartbeat slowing against my back.
The silence between us had felt less empty than full, and I hadn't wanted to leave it.
That was the part my spreadsheets couldn't process. I'd wanted to stay.
I turned my head on the pillow. He was on his stomach, face half-buried, one arm flung across me.
His shoulders rose and fell with deep sleep.
He looked younger with the careful stillness gone, and I watched him for reasons I wasn't ready to examine, which was new enough to notice and too fragile to pick apart.
The manual was on the kitchen counter, untouched. The exit strategy sat in an email I hadn't answered. I was lying in bed next to a man I was supposed to use and leave, and my chest ached.
Cliff stirred. His arm tightened, pulling me closer, and he pressed his mouth to my shoulder without opening his eyes. The warmth of it traveled straight through me and settled somewhere behind my ribs.
"Morning," I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected.
"Mm." He nuzzled into my neck. "What time."
"Early."
"Go back to sleep."
"I've been awake for twenty minutes."
"Overachiever." His hand found my hip and squeezed, lazy and possessive. My breath caught. His hand on my hip carried a certainty now that would have undone me two weeks ago, and my body knew it before my brain could intervene.
I got up because I needed to move. Needed my hands busy. Needed a task with steps I could follow while the rest of me caught up to what had happened.
In the kitchen I pulled out eggs, milk, cinnamon, the thick bread Cliff kept on the counter.
French toast. My grandmother's recipe — vanilla in the egg wash, a dusting of cinnamon so heavy it made the kitchen smell like her kitchen on a Sunday morning.
I hadn't made it in years. I'd stopped somewhere around the second promotion, when weekday mornings became coffee over a laptop and weekends became meal-prepped containers labeled by macronutrient.
I didn't know why I was making it now. Maybe because it was the only recipe I knew by heart, and my heart was the organ currently running the show while my brain stood in the corner trying to reboot.
I'd found wild berries on a walk two days ago, small and dark, growing along the trail behind the outpost. Cliff had shown me which ones were safe. I'd picked enough to fill a bowl and kept them in the fridge, not sure what they were for until right now.
I poured his coffee black and mine with sugar.
The sugar bowl lived next to my mug on the counter, both of them migrated to the same spot without anyone deciding it.
I'd picked wildflowers yesterday and put them in a mason jar on the dining table, purple lupine and a few yellow blooms I still couldn't identify.
The jar sat between my laptop and a stack of topo maps he'd left there.
Our things mixed together on every surface.
My jacket on the hook next to his. My trail shoes by the door.
The cabin had absorbed me so gradually I hadn't noticed until I looked around and couldn't find a room without evidence that I lived here.
I plated the French toast, spooned berries on top, and set the table. He came out of the bedroom in jeans and nothing else, scratching his jaw, and stopped in the doorway.
"You cooked."
"Don't sound so surprised. I've been cooking since Tuesday."
"You heated soup on Tuesday." He looked at the plate. "This is French toast."
"My grandmother's recipe. Sit down." He sat. "I haven't made it since — I don't know. Before business school, maybe."
He took a bite and closed his eyes and didn't say anything for a few seconds, which was better than any compliment he could have offered.
I sat across from him and ate my own and thought about my grandmother's kitchen, the yellow curtains, how she'd made breakfast feel like an event rather than a task.
I'd dismissed that as sentimental, moved on to protein ratios and calendar blocks.
Sitting here now, watching a man savor a recipe I'd almost forgotten, the calendar blocks felt like the thing I should have let go of instead.
"Drew's coming today," he said, refilling his coffee. "Texted last night."
"Another check-in?"
"He calls them pulse checks. Like we're a startup he's monitoring."
I cleared the plates while he washed up. Side by side at the sink, same as every night since the first week, our elbows bumping in the small space.
DREW PULLED UP AT ELEVEN in an SUV, overdressed for Cedar Bluff the same way he'd been overdressed for the hike, as if his wardrobe hadn't gotten the memo about altitude. He bounded out of the car with the energy of someone who believed his own press releases.
"You two." He stood in the cabin doorway, grinning. "Look at you. Domestic bliss."
I was at the dining table with my laptop, a client deck half-finished. Cliff was wiping down the counter. We were wearing matching expressions of people who had been caught being comfortable and weren't sure what to do about a witness.
"Drew." Cliff didn’t look up. "You’re early."
"Keeps you honest." He pointed at the wildflowers on the table. "Fresh-picked flora in a mason jar. That’s a data point. Nesting behavior within the first month is one of our highest-correlation indicators."
"They're wildflowers," I said. "They were free."
"Leading indicator."
He stayed for an hour. He asked about the trails I'd hiked and what I thought of Cedar Bluff, questions that came with actual eye contact and follow-up.
He told a story about his wife, who'd started hiding his laptop at dinner because he couldn't stop checking satisfaction metrics.
The kind of person who was hard to dismiss, slightly insufferable, and easy to enjoy.
Cliff was patient with him, tolerating a friend who didn't know when to leave.
But underneath the patience I could see the tension, a tightness in his jaw I'd learned to read since I'd been here.
When Drew said "You know, I really think this one's going to stick," Cliff's hand stilled on the counter for half a second. My stomach tightened.
After Drew left, Cliff washed his mug, shoulders tight.
"You okay?" I asked.
"Fine." He dried the mug and put it away. Turned and leaned against the counter and the tightness eased. "Want to take a walk? There's a spot I haven't shown you."
HE TOOK ME UP THE SOUTH ridge trail through old-growth cedars that filtered the sunlight into columns.
My trail shoes from Moose’s found the packed dirt without slipping.
I’d stopped thinking about my feet entirely, which the woman who’d driven into Cedar Bluff in designer flats could not have imagined.
The trail opened onto a ledge above a swimming hole.
I stopped walking.
The pool was fed by a small waterfall, the water clear enough to see the rocky bottom.
Wildflowers grew thick along the banks. The ledge overlooked the valley, the Cascades stacked behind it in layers of blue and white.
The afternoon sun was warm on my shoulders.
I stood there and felt a space open behind my ribs, wide and still.
I had not planned for the version of myself who stood on a mountain ledge and let beauty hit her full force.
The woman who'd driven into Cedar Bluff with a binder would have noted this scenery, appreciated it briskly, and moved on.
That woman was not here. The woman who was here wanted to sit on this warm rock and watch the water fall and not be anywhere else.
"This is where you bring clients?" I asked.
"No." He sat on the ledge, feet dangling. "This one's mine."
I sat beside him. The rock was warm from the sun, our legs dangling over the valley.
I thought about the exit timeline, the attorney I hadn't called, the plan that had seemed so airtight from San Francisco.
I felt it crack, not with fear this time but with the understanding that leaving Cliff Masterson would not be leaving a situation.
It would be leaving him. The man who kept sugar by my mug and told me about prison because I'd laughed without filtering it, who was sitting beside me now, quiet and solid.
I did not want to be anywhere he wasn't.
I let that thought land.
"Swim?" he said.
I looked at the water. It was late May. The snowmelt was finished but the water wouldn't be warm.
"It's freezing, isn't it."
"Bracing."
"That's what cold people say when they don't want to admit it's cold."
He pulled his pullover over his head and stood up in his undershirt, and I lost my train of thought, which was happening with an inconvenient frequency these days. He caught my expression and the corner of his mouth pulled.
"Coming?"
I pulled off my jacket and my tank top. Stood there in my sports bra and hiking pants, and his gaze tracked down my body with a directness that made my skin warm in places the sun wasn't reaching.
"Pants too," he said. "Unless you want to hike back in wet clothes."
"How convenient for you."
"Pure logistics."