20. Kirk
KIRK
The apartment smells like her. That is the first thing I register when she steps back from the door and I move through it.
Beneath the city smell, the exhaust and concrete and the thousands of people pressed together outside these walls, there is her specific warmth.
Something soft and faintly floral and underneath it all, just Stella.
It hits me the way the cold hits when you step outside at altitude. Immediate. Unavoidable.
I am in her living room and I look at what she lives in.
All of it white and grey and angular, surfaces that reflect light back at you rather than absorb it.
A sofa the colour of fog. Art on the walls that is precise and expensive and completely without warmth.
The windows take up most of one wall and through them the city spreads out in every direction, all steel and glass and motion, a million lives stacked on top of each other and humming.
I look at it for a long moment. Then I look at Stella.
She is standing at the kitchen counter with her palms flat on the quartz and she is watching me with those hazel eyes that I drove six hours thinking about.
She has been crying. I can see the damp at her lashes even from here, see the slightly raw edge to her expression that she has covered over with that specific Stella brightness, that particular brand of fierce okay-ness she deploys like armour.
I have spent eight days learning the difference between her real smile and her bracing-for-impact smile.
This is the second one.
She starts talking. The words come fast and honest and I let them come, standing still on her grey rug while she tells me about before the storm, about misery she had not yet identified, and I watch her hands move against her curls shift as she speaks.
She calls me aggravating. Taciturn. The most infuriating man she has ever met.
She says it like those things are facts about the sky, just the observable weather of me, and then she says the other thing. About being alive. About the mountain.
She finishes. She looks at me. The apartment hums around us.
I look at her across the narrow width of the kitchen island.
I have been constructing this speech since the moment I found her scarf under my pillow, in the dark with Barnaby flat against my leg and the silence pressing down from every direction, and now that I am here and she is three feet away I find that words are still not my strong suit.
Have never been my strong suit. But she deserves the words so I am going to say them.
"I went back up that road," I tell her. My voice comes out low and rough and I do not try to smooth it.
"Went in. Barn was quiet. Dog wouldn't eat.
" I come around the island toward her, not fast, giving her time to read my intentions.
She watches me come. She doesn't move. "I sat in that chair.
Stoked the fire. Did everything the same as I always did. "
She is looking up at me now. Her chin tilts back slightly as I close the distance and stop on her side of the counter, facing her. The top of her head barely clears my shoulder. I have thought about that specific fact more times than I can account for.
"Something was gone," I say. "Not just you. Something I didn't know I had."
"Kirk—"
"I'm not finished." Her mouth closes. Beautiful eyes are very bright and very still.
I reach out and set the flat of my hand against her jaw, careful with it, and her skin is warm and city-soft and the feeling of it travels straight through my palm and up my arm.
"I have been up on that ridge a long time.
Thought that was the right shape for my life.
Thought I was doing the responsible thing, keeping myself separate.
" I pause. The words cost something and I pay it.
"Found out this week that I was just afraid. "
She swallows. I can feel it under my fingers.
"I can't breathe right," I tell her. It is the most honest thing I know how to say.
"Not since I drove away. And I'm not going to pretend that's going to get better if I stay up there alone.
" My thumb moves against her cheek. "So wherever you want to be.
City. Mountain. Somewhere else entirely. I'll be wherever you are."
The last word is barely out of my mouth when she grabs two fists full of my jacket collar.
She doesn't drag me down gently. She pulls hard, and I go because she is the only force on earth I have any interest in surrendering to, and her mouth finds mine and it is nothing like the controlled careful things I was trying to be a moment ago.
It is immediate and consuming. She kisses me the way she talks, with her whole self, nothing held back, and I get both hands around her waist and pull her off the floor without thinking about it, without making a decision, the same way you breathe.
She makes a sound against my mouth that I have been replaying in my memory for three days.
"Not cabin fever," she says into the half inch between our mouths, and I can feel her smiling. "I told you."
I turn and put her back against the nearest wall.
She fits between it and me like she was always meant to be there, her curls catching the afternoon light coming through those massive windows, and the city presses against the glass outside and I do not care about any of it.
She hooks her legs around my waist and her hands come up into my hair and I set my forehead to hers and just breathe her in for a second.
Just that. The scent of her filling my lungs.
"Kirk." My name in her voice. Low and wanting.
I pull back enough to look at her. Her hazel eyes are dark and her mouth is already swollen and she is looking at me like I am something she lost and found again and I feel that look in the base of my spine.
"Here?" I ask, because I want to be clear. I want no ambiguity between us about anything, not ever again.
"Here," she says.
I press her harder into the wall.
She works my jacket off my shoulders and I let her, shrugging it to the floor.
Her hands find the buttons of my shirt immediately, her fingers quick and certain, no hesitation in them, and I bury my face in the curve of her neck and breathe hard against her skin.
She smells clean and warm and like something that belongs to me.
Mine. The word rises up from somewhere primitive and completely unambiguous and I don't argue with it.
She gets the flannel open and shoves it off me, then finds the hem of the thermal underneath, and her small hands spread flat on my stomach and I exhale through my teeth at the contact.
Her palms are warm. She smooths them upward, reading the muscle and the old scar tissue with her fingertips, and I let her do it, completely still, every nerve I own concentrated beneath her hands.
"Missed this," she says quietly. There is nothing performative about it. Just a fact, delivered in the soft honest voice she saves for the real things.
I pull back far enough to get her out of her coat.
She is wearing something thin underneath, grey and fitted, city clothes that have nothing to do with staying warm, and I peel it over her head and drop it somewhere behind me.
She shivers, not from cold, this room is aggressively heated compared to anything I am accustomed to, and I cup both hands around her face and bring her back up to my mouth.
This kiss is slower. I make it slower deliberately, make myself take my time with her because she deserves that.
She makes a frustrated sound immediately, impatient, and I almost laugh, which is not something I have a great deal of experience with, and she pinches my side and says "don't you dare be controlled right now, I will not survive it. "
So I stop being controlled.
We end up on the grey sofa because it is the nearest horizontal surface.
I have a brief, irrelevant thought about the practicality of furniture this low to the ground and then she pulls me down over her and thought of any kind becomes a limited resource.
She fills every sense I have. The warmth of her.
The sound of her voice saying my name. The way her hands move against my back like she is trying to hold on to something she spent three days without and is not about to lose again.
I understand that completely.
Afterward the city is still pressing against the windows, relentless, grey and gold and enormous in the late afternoon light.
Stella is curled against my side on the narrow sofa, her head on my chest, her auburn curls spread across my collarbone.
My hand rests in her hair and I look above us, which is white and smooth and very far from timber rafters and chimney smoke, and I listen to the sound of this place.
It is loud. Even filtered through glass and steel and the altitude of her floor, the city pushes in from every edge.
Traffic. Sirens. A thousand mechanical pulses.
It presses against the inside of my skull in a way the wind and the weather never did, even in the worst of the storm.
The storm was honest noise. This is different.
This is accumulated and relentless and it has no pause in it.
Stella feels me shift. She tips her head back and looks up at me with those watchful hazel eyes.
"Too loud," I say.
She doesn't laugh at me. She just looks at me steadily and nods slowly, like this is information she was expecting, and then she says, "Yeah."
The quiet that follows is a real quiet. One of the ones I have only had with her, in the dark when the storm was working outside and she had run out of words and we were just two people breathing together.
"I quit my job," she says. Her voice is even, but I feel the small tension in her body when she says it, the particular quality of a person who has done the brave thing and is now waiting to find out what it costs.
"About forty minutes before you showed up in the hallway.
Jack was telling me the Thornbury account had been reassigned because of my absence and I just—" She stops.
Breathes. "I just stopped wanting to defend myself.
Looked at that office and all those windows and couldn't think of a single reason to argue. "
I look down at her. She is staring at the ceiling now, her expression impossible to read with her face turned up and the light flattening it. I know the geography of her face well enough by now to read what's underneath. The relief. The terror. Both living in the same space.
"What do you want?" I ask her. The same words I used in the doorway. They are still the only thing that matters.
She is quiet for a moment. Not nervous quiet, not filling-the-silence quiet. Actual contemplative quiet, which I have learned is a rare thing for her and means she is getting to the real answer.
"Not this," she says finally, and her hand moves over me, a small gesture that takes in the apartment, the city pressing against the glass, all of it.
"I thought I wanted this. The career and the address and the whole—" She makes a soft frustrated noise.
"The thing that was supposed to prove I was doing it right. "
"And now?"
She pushes herself up onto one elbow and looks at me directly. Her hair is completely disordered and her eyes are very clear and she looks more like herself right now than she has in any moment I have seen her outside the cabin.
"I want to know what comes next," she says. "I want to figure that out with you."
The knot comes entirely loose. The sensation is strange. Like setting down a pack you have been carrying up a long grade and standing straight for the first time in years.
I reach up and push a curl back from her face. She lets me do it, leaning into the touch slightly, and I leave my hand there against her cheek.
"Mountain's still there," I say.
Her mouth curves. Not the bracing smile and not the performance one. The real one, the one that reaches all the way up and does something complicated to the laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. "Six hours from here," she says.
"Five and a half, the way I drive."
She looks at me and the smile gets wider and something behind her eyes is the same texture as relief. "That's the most words you've said in a row since you got here."
"Don't get used to it."
She laughs then, a genuine one, and drops back.
I fold my arm around her and hold her there against the noise of the city and I feel her breathing slow and even out and I let myself think about it.
The ridge in winter. The sound the pine boughs make when the wind comes out of the northeast. The way the fire catches in the woodstove when the wood is good and dry.
Barnaby pacing the rug. And Stella's yellow coat hung by the door. Stella's voice filling up the rooms.
A life that is not a prison.
I lay my mouth to the top of her head.
"What about your things?" I ask.
She tips her chin up and looks at me. "What about them?"
I look around the apartment. The careful, expensive blankness of it. The art and the quartz and the enormous windows showing the grey city going on in every direction forever.
"Your lease," I say. "Whatever you've got here."
She considers this for a moment, her hazel eyes moving around the room, and then she looks back at me with an expression that is ninety percent resolved and ten percent terrified and completely Stella.
"None of it feels like mine," she says quietly. "I think maybe I've known that for a while."
I nod. Once.
Outside, another siren winds through the streets below, climbing and fading. The windows hold their grey light and the city goes on being enormous and indifferent and filled with people who are not her and are not us.
Her hand is flat on my chest over the scar.
I cover it with mine.