12. Kirk
KIRK
She says my name like that and something inside me that has been locked and rusted and soldered shut for years simply gives way.
Not slowly. Not with any grace. Just gives way, the way a dam gives way, all at once and without warning, and there is nothing left between what I want and what I do.
I bring my mouth down on hers.
She makes a sound against my lips, a short, surprised exhale that becomes something else immediately, something warmer and more urgent, and her wrists flex in my grip but she's not pulling away, she's pressing forward, rising onto her toes, and I feel the tiny inches of height difference as a physical thing, the way she has to angle up toward me, and something primal and possessive lights up at the base of my spine.
I release her wrists and both my hands go to her face again, cradling it the way you cradle something you know is fragile, tilting her up toward me, and I kiss her properly, deep and deliberate, and she grabs fistfuls of my flannel at the chest and holds on.
She tastes like the coffee we had after dinner.
She tastes warm. I have no better word for it than that.
She is warm all the way through and she kisses me back with an enthusiasm that is completely unguarded, no calculation in it, no performance, just Stella doing what Stella does, throwing herself at it with her whole self.
My hands move from her face into her hair. Her curls tangle around my fingers and I grip gently and she makes another sound, lower this time, and the sound goes through me like a current.
The door at her back is cold. I feel it against my knuckles when I flatten my palm against the wood beside her head.
I step into her fully, my chest meeting hers, and she is so small against me that it should feel wrong and it feels exactly right, it feels like a correction, like something that was knocked askew being set back to level.
Her fingers are quick and certain on my shirt, not fumbling, and the shirt falls open and her palms press flat, and the heat of her hands burns through the thin fabric and my breath shudders out through my nose.
I take the hem of her borrowed shirt, my shirt, and she lifts her arms without being asked.
I pull it over her head and she stands there in the firelight, her hair a complete disaster around her face, her hazel eyes dark and very direct, and I look at her for one long moment because she is the most beautiful thing that has ever been inside this cabin, the most beautiful thing that has looked at me without flinching in longer than I can put a number on.
She reaches up and pulls at my flannel, pushing it off my shoulders. I shrug it to the floor.
"Kirk." Her voice is steady. Her eyes are steady. She is not nervous, not the rambling, bouncing woman who chattered at the ceiling two nights ago. She is entirely present. Entirely certain. She puts her hand flat over my sternum. "Come here."
I come here.
I pick her up, my hands at her waist, and she makes a startled noise and wraps her legs around me without hesitation, her ankles crossing at my lower back, and I carry her the few steps from the door, her back arching away from the cold wood, and lower us both onto the thick rug in front of the woodstove.
The fire roars at our side. The logs shift and spark and the light moves across her skin in warm, unsteady waves.
I work at the waistband of her leggings and she lifts her hips to help me yank them down and off and toss them somewhere behind me.
"You're staring," she says.
"I know." I put my hand on her ankle. Drag it slowly up her calf. "You're worth staring at."
She lets out a breath that is not quite a laugh and her eyes go very bright.
I work my way up the length of her, taking my time, because I have been taking no time for anything for years and she deserves time.
She deserves everything slow and deliberate and careful.
My hands learn the landscape of her, the curve of her hip, the soft give of her stomach, her warm ribcage under my palms, and she makes quiet, responsive sounds that I catalogue and file and intend to revisit.
When I lower myself over her she reaches up and grabs the back of my neck, pulling me down, and we find the same rhythm fast, faster than I expected, like her body and mine have been running the same calculation in the background this whole time and arrived at the same answer simultaneously.
She arches up under me. Her nails drag lightly across my shoulder blades and the sensation is sharp and clean and I place my forehead against her temple, breathing through it, trying to hold onto the edges of my control.
"Don't," she says, directly into my ear. Her voice is wrecked, barely there. "Don't hold back."
I pull back enough to look at her face. Her eyes are open, looking straight up at me, and she means it. She is asking me for the full weight of this, not the careful managed version. She is asking for Kirk Jotham, unfiltered, without the lid on.
I lower my head to the curve of her neck and I stop holding back.
She cries out, her hands gripping the back of my head, her whole body rising to meet mine, and we move together in the firelight with the storm screaming outside the walls and Barnaby long since retreated to his corner with his nose buried under his tail, and none of it matters except the press of her skin and the sound of her voice and the heat of her hands on my back.
She comes apart under me with my name on her lips and I follow her over the edge with my face buried in her hair.
For a long time after, neither of us moves.
My weight rests mostly on my forearms, my chest against hers, and her breathing slowly comes down from wrecked to normal. My own heartbeat gradually stops hammering at the inside of my ribs. The fire crackles and settles. The wind outside, still constant, still mean, feels very far away.
Stella's hand moves slowly up and down my spine. Not demanding anything. Just present.
I push up enough to look at her face.
She looks back at me. Her curls are a complete catastrophe, spread out around her head on the rug, and there's a flush across her cheekbones that the firelight turns copper. She looks entirely undone and entirely unashamed of it.
A corner of her mouth curves.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi," I say back.
She laughs, soft and private, and turns her face into my shoulder.
I roll onto my back, pulling her with me, and she settles against my side with the ease of a woman who belongs there.
Her head on my chest, her arm across my stomach, her knee bent over my thigh.
I wrap one arm around her back, my hand flat between her shoulder blades, and I peer up and I think about nothing.
Deliberately nothing. Just her and the fire and the slowly deepening quiet.
It has been a very long time since I thought about nothing.
I reach over and drag the heavy quilt from the couch armrest, pulling it down and spreading it over both of us without dislodging her. She makes a low, approving sound and burrows further in.
Barnaby lifts his enormous head from his corner, regards us both with one heavy-lidded eye, and puts his head back down.
The fire settles into its long, steady burn.
The logs I stacked before dinner are solid hardwood, good for four hours at least. Outside the windows the wind still drives the snow horizontal but it sounds different now.
Sounds like weather, not a threat. Sounds like the outside world doing its thing while we do ours, and the two are separate.
Stella's breathing slows. Her arm goes slack across my stomach and her fingers uncurl. She is not quite asleep yet, I can tell by the irregular rhythm of it, but she is close, drifting in the warm dark under the quilt, her hair spread across my chest.
I look above me. The lamplight throws the grain of the log beams into sharp relief and I know every knot and dark streak in those beams. I have spent years lying under them alone and cataloguing them, and they look different right now.
They look like the ceiling of a place someone actually inhabits rather than a place a man goes to not be around other people.
She shifts against me, a small unconscious adjustment, pressing closer.
I tighten my arm around her back.
I think about what she said against the door, her eyes steady and her voice steady, telling me that some things need wrecking.
She didn't say it to wound. She said it the way she says everything, direct and without malice, because it was true and she saw it was true and Stella Pincot doesn't appear to be capable of leaving a true thing unspoken.
I think that in a week, when the plows come and the road clears, she will leave.
She has a life somewhere. A job that calls her on the phone and talks at her like she is a task to be managed.
She has a city and a wardrobe full of canary-yellow coats and boots with heels that have no business in snow. She has all of that.
I think about what I have.
I don't finish the thought.
She makes a small sound in her sleep and turns her face into the hollow of my shoulder and the thought dissolves, because right now, in this exact moment, I have this.
I have her weight and her warmth and the fire and the storm and the sound of Barnaby's slow, heavy breathing from his corner.
Right now the equation is simple. I am not going to make it complicated.
Her hair smells like the cedar soap from the washroom shelf.
She has appropriated it entirely, along with my second-largest thermal shirt, and somehow these small accumulating thefts irritate me less than they should.
They don't irritate me at all. That is the truth I don't fully look at, lying in the dark.
Sleep comes, which is not something that often comes without a fight.
I don't know how long I'm under.
But it pulls me back up hard and fast, the way something specific always does. Not a sound from inside the cabin. Something outside it, underneath the storm noise, a different texture entirely against the consistent white roar of the blizzard.
My eyes open. I am fully awake in the same second.
Mechanical. Intermittent. Rising and falling with the wind as if the wind is carrying it in from some distance down the valley.
I lie still and I listen.
Stella breathes against my shoulder. Barnaby is still, his ears not yet up, but his ears come up on the second pulse of the sound, both of them rising slowly, and his big head lifts from his paws.
There it is again.
The thin, high whine of a snowmobile engine, working hard, pushing through deep snow. Maybe half a mile down the lower ridge. Maybe less. Moving in this direction.
I sit up. Stella slides off my chest and makes a disoriented, unhappy sound, reaching for me.
"Kirk?" Sleep-rough and confused.
"Someone's on the ridge." I'm already pulling on my jeans, my thermal shirt, reaching for the flannel. "Stay here."