Chapter 3
brOOKLYN
He could cook.
Not the way I’d expected—not an elaborate performance or something cobbled together from scraps.
He just moved through his kitchen with that same quiet competence, and twenty minutes later, there were two plates of pan-seared trout with roasted potatoes and greens on the table, and I was staring at a man who lived alone and somehow cooked like this.
“The trout’s from the creek behind the cabin,” he said, like that was a perfectly ordinary sentence. “I keep a garden in the summer. Potatoes are stored in the cellar.”
“You grow your own food.”
“Some of it.”
“And catch your own fish.”
“The creek’s right there.”
I looked at him across the table, and something about the lamplight and the food and the quiet of the cabin made his face less guarded than it had been.
The hard angles were still there—the jaw, the brow, the set of his mouth—but his eyes were different.
Warmer. Like the act of cooking for someone had loosened something in him that conversation hadn’t.
We ate in a comfortable silence that surprised me. I wasn’t usually a silence person. I was a fill-every-gap person. A keep-the-conversation-going person. The friend in the group who’d talk about literally anything to avoid a quiet moment.
But Ridge’s silence wasn’t empty. It was full of the sounds the cabin made. The woodstove ticking as it heated. The faint creak of timber walls settling. The distant hush of the creek through the window he’d cracked open.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, pushing my empty plate forward.
“You’ve been asking me things all evening. Why start being polite now?”
I almost laughed. “The scavenger hunt. The orchid I was looking for up on the ridge. Do you know where it actually grows?”
He leaned back in his chair. “The yellow fringed orchid.”
“It’s worth a lot of points. One of the highest on the checklist. I need it if I’m going to have any shot at winning.”
“You fell off a mountain today, and you’re still thinking about the contest.”
“I fell off a mountain today because I was thinking about the contest. Might as well commit.”
He studied me, and I had the uncomfortable sense that he was seeing more than I wanted him to.
Not the surface-level Brooklyn—the one who cracked jokes and slept in and treated everything like it was funny until it wasn’t.
The one underneath. The one who wanted the prize money and wasn’t going to say why, because saying it out loud would make it real.
“It grows in a clearing about a mile from here,” he said. “South-facing slope, above the tree line. I’ve been monitoring it for two years. There’s a safe route to reach it, but it’s not on any map.”
“Will you show me?”
“Tomorrow. After we see how your ankle’s doing.
” He stood and collected the plates, carrying them to the sink in a way that made it clear he’d been cleaning up after himself for a long time.
“There are other species up there too. High-point ones that most people can’t reach because the terrain’s too technical.
But if you’re with me, I can get you to all of them. ”
I watched him wash the dishes—two plates, two forks, two glasses. The quiet math of shared space, multiplied by two for the first time in what was clearly a very long while.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked.
He turned off the water and dried his hands on a towel, his back to me. “Because you were on a ridge you shouldn’t have been on, looking for a flower that shouldn’t have been on the checklist, and nobody warned you because nobody’s paying attention to the terrain conditions up there.”
He turned around.
“That was my job. Or it was. And I’ve been up here pretending the mountain isn’t my problem anymore. Then I find you on the ground with a busted ankle, and it turns out it still is. You’re still my—”
He stopped. Reset.
“The mountain is still my responsibility.”
There was a word he’d almost said. A word he’d caught and swallowed and replaced with something safer.
I stood from the table, testing my weight on the ankle. It held. Barely. A deep throb flared, warning me I was pushing it. I hobbled to the counter where he was standing, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to see his face.
“What happened to the person who got hurt?” I asked softly. “On the trail.”
His jaw tightened. For a moment, I thought he’d shut down—retreat behind the wall I’d been watching him maintain all evening. But he didn’t. He looked at me, and the rawness in his eyes made my chest ache.
“She fell forty feet off a ridgeline I’d said was safe. Shattered her pelvis. Three ribs. Her wrist.” His voice was steady, controlled, but the effort behind that control was visible. “I got to her in under a minute. I stabilized her. Rescue came. She lived. She recovered.”
“But you didn’t.”
The words came out before I could filter them, and I watched them land on him like something tangible. His whole body stilled.
“No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t.”
I reached up and put my hand on his chest, over his heart.
I don’t know why. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t strategic.
It was just the only thing that felt right in that moment—touching the place where I could feel him hurting and letting him know someone had put her hand there and wasn’t pulling it back.
His hand came up and covered mine. His palm was warm and rough and easily twice the size of mine, and he held my hand against his heartbeat like he was anchoring himself to it.
“I should tell you something,” I said.
“Okay.”
“I’ve never been with anyone. Not like— not in any way. I’m a virgin.” I kept my eyes on his. “I’m telling you because I think something is happening here, and I don’t want you to find out later and think I was hiding it.”
His expression didn’t shift. No surprise. No retreat. No recalibration. His hand stayed on mine, warm and steady.
“Thank you for telling me,” he said.
“Does it change anything?”
“It doesn’t change how I feel.”
“And how do you feel?”
He took a breath. The kind that comes before a confession or a surrender.
“Like I’ve been sitting in the dark for seven months, and you walked in and turned on a light I didn’t know was there.” His thumb traced the back of my hand. “Like I was supposed to find you on that ridge. Like the mountain put you there because it was tired of watching me hide.”
My heart was hammering. Not from fear. Not from the fall. Not from the pain in my ankle. From the way this man—this quiet, broken, impossibly solid man—was looking at me like I was the answer to a question he’d stopped asking.
“I want this,” I said. “I want you. But I need you to know I don’t have a frame of reference. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t need a frame of reference.” He lifted my hand from his chest and pressed his lips to my knuckles, soft and slow. “You just need to tell me what feels good and what doesn’t. That’s all.”
He kissed me then, and it was nothing like what I’d imagined a first kiss would be. I’d thought it would be tentative. Exploratory. Two people testing the edges of something new.
This was a man who’d made a decision. And the decision was me.
His mouth was warm and firm, and when his hands slid to my waist, the gentleness in his grip contradicted everything about the size of him. He kissed me like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it. Slow. Deep. Thorough.
I made a sound against his mouth—a soft, involuntary thing I’d never heard myself make—and felt his hands tighten at my waist in response. Not harder. Just more certain.
He pulled back just far enough to speak. “Your ankle.”
“My ankle is fine.”
“Your ankle is sprained.”
“My ankle is not invited to this conversation.”
The ghost smile became a real one. I watched it transform his face—the hard angles softening, the tension around his eyes easing—and I realized I was seeing something he hadn’t shown anyone in a long time.
He lifted me the same way he had on the ridge, effortlessly, and carried me through the cabin to the bedroom.
It was spare, like the rest of the house.
A bed with a quilt his mother probably made.
A nightstand with a book and a reading lamp.
A window that looked out on nothing but dark trees and stars.
He set me on the bed and stood over me, and in the lamplight his eyes were the color of the creek outside, gray-green and clear and deep.
“Tell me if you want to stop,” he said. “Anytime. For any reason.”
“I don’t want to stop.”
He knelt in front of me, unlaced Paisley’s borrowed boot from my good foot, then carefully—so carefully—eased my wrapped ankle onto a pillow.
Then his hands moved to my waist, his fingers hooking into the waistband of my hiking pants, and he looked up at me with a question in his eyes that made my breath catch.
“Yes,” I said.
And that was all he needed to hear.