3. Morgan
MORGAN
The tea is peppermint. I don’t know why that surprises me, but it does.
I had Elias pegged for black coffee and nothing else—the kind of man whose kitchen holds the bare minimum, and none of it has flavor. But the mug in my hands smells like peppermint and honey, and the cabin smells like wood smoke, and nothing about this evening is going the way I expected.
Not that I expected any of this.
He’s sitting in the chair across from me.
Not the couch. He could have sat on the couch, but he didn’t, and I’m not sure if that’s because he’s giving me space or because keeping distance is just how Elias Riggs is wired.
Either way, he’s close enough that I could reach out and touch him if I wanted to, and far enough that I don’t have to pretend I’m not thinking about it.
The ice on my ankle is doing its job. The sharp edge of the pain has dulled into a deep throb that pulses every time I shift my weight, but it’s manageable now. More manageable than the silence, which isn’t uncomfortable exactly, but it’s full. Heavy with all the things neither of us is saying.
I look around the cabin because it’s easier than looking at him.
It’s small. One main room with the kitchen along the back wall and a woodstove in the corner and a hallway that probably leads to a bedroom and a bathroom.
The furniture is solid, simple, nothing decorative.
No photos on the walls, no books on the shelves, no evidence that anyone lives here except the firewood stacked neatly by the stove and the single pair of boots by the door.
It looks like a place someone sleeps in. Not a place someone lives.
“How long have you been in Wildwood?” I ask, because the silence is starting to make me aware of things I shouldn’t be aware of.
The way his forearms look in the lamplight.
The way he’s watching me with an expression I can’t read.
The way my whole body is wrapped in his flannel and it smells like him and I don’t want to give it back.
“Three years.”
Two words. More than he usually gives me, which is something.
“Where were you before?”
“Northern California for a while. Bend before that.”
He says it the way you list places you’ve passed through, not places you’ve lived. Like they were rest stops on the way to somewhere he hasn’t found yet. Or somewhere he’s trying to get away from.
“And before Bend?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. His jaw works the way it does at the bakery when someone in line tries to make small talk and he’s deciding how little he can say without being rude. But this is different. He’s not shutting me out. He’s deciding how much to let me in.
“Copper Peak, Colorado,” he says. “Small mountain town. Kind of like this one.”
“Is that where you grew up?”
He nods. Looks at the woodstove instead of at me.
I want to ask more. I want to ask why he left and why he keeps moving.
Why a man who grew up in a small mountain town landed in another small mountain town three states away and still looks like he’s not sure he belongs here.
But I don’t, because pushing Elias Riggs would be the fastest way to watch him disappear behind whatever wall he builds when people get too close.
So I take a sip of my tea and let the silence sit.
“You should stay off that ankle for a few days,” he says without looking at me. He’s looking at my ankle, which is still propped on the cushion he put there without asking. “Keep it elevated. Ice it twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off.”
“I work tomorrow.”
“You should call in.”
I almost laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because the idea of calling in to work is so foreign to me that it sounds like a different language.
I don’t call in. I show up. I’m the one who covers other people’s shifts when they call in, the one who stays late and comes early, and says yes to every extra hour because someone has to—and it might as well be me.
“I’ll be fine,” I say.
He looks up at me then, and something in his expression makes my breath catch.
It’s deeper than frustration, deeper than concern.
It’s the look of a man who heard what I actually said underneath the words I used.
Like he knows that I’ll be fine means I don’t know how to put myself first, and I never have.
“You keep saying that,” he says.
“Saying what?”
“That you’re fine.”
The way he says it makes it sound like an observation he’s been collecting for months. Every morning at the bakery when someone asks for something and I say it’s no problem. Every time I smile when I’m tired. Every time I give and give and give and pretend I don’t need anything for myself.
I don’t know what to do with a man who sees that. Nobody sees that.
“I am fine,” I say.
But my voice comes out quieter than I meant it to, and he doesn’t look away, and the cabin feels very small and very warm.
I’m suddenly aware that I’m sitting on this man’s couch in his flannel with my ankle on his pillow and a mug of peppermint tea he made me in my hands, and that this is the most taken care of I’ve felt in as long as I can remember.
My eyes sting. I look down at my tea.
“I should get home,” I say. “My car is at Linda Marshall’s.”
He stands up without arguing. Gets his keys from a hook by the door, comes back, and crouches in front of me again.
His hands are careful as he eases my shoe back on over the swollen ankle.
He doesn’t lace it tight, just enough to keep it on.
When he’s done, he stays there for a second, his hand resting on the top of my foot, and I hold my breath.
“Lean on me,” he says. The same words from the trail, but softer now. Like he’s asking for something more than help getting to the truck.
I nod. He pulls me up gently, and I rest my arm across his shoulders.
He walks me to the truck and opens the passenger door and lifts me in before I can tell him I can do it myself.
His hands stay on my waist a beat longer than they need to, and when he lets go, I feel the absence of them all the way to my chest.
The drive to Linda’s is quiet but not awkward. The headlights cut through the dark trees and the road unspools in front of us, and his hands are steady on the wheel. I watch them because I can’t help it.
He pulls up beside my car. The bag of apples is still sitting on the ground where I left it, and the sight of it almost makes me laugh.
Three hours ago I was carrying boxes out of Linda Marshall’s garage, and now I’m sitting in Elias Riggs’s truck wearing his flannel and trying to figure out what just happened to my life.
He gets out and comes around and opens my door and helps me down. My ankle screams when it takes weight, and I grab his arm and his other hand goes to my hip and we stand there in Linda Marshall’s driveway, closer than we’ve ever been, breathing the same cold air.
“Thank you,” I say again. It doesn’t feel like enough.
“Stay off it,” he says.
His hand is still on my hip, and his voice is rough and low. He’s looking at me the way he looked at me on the trail—like I’m the only thing on this mountain that matters.
Then he steps back. He waits until I’m in my car with the engine on before he gets in his truck. He follows me all the way back to town, his headlights steady in my mirror, and he doesn’t turn off until I pull into my apartment parking lot.
I sit in the car for a long time after his taillights disappear. My ankle throbs. My hands are still warm from the mug. His flannel is still around my shoulders.
I don’t take it off.