21. Stella
STELLA
The city hums through the glass like a living thing that never sleeps, never pauses, never lets you catch your breath. I've lived here for years and I never noticed how relentless it is until I spent a week in a place where the loudest sound was wind and the crackle of a woodstove fire.
Kirk's heartbeat is steady under my palm. Slow and deliberate, like everything else about him.
"Okay," I say. "I need to think out loud for a minute and I need you to not just stare at me like I'm a particularly confusing weather pattern."
A low sound in his chest. Not quite a grunt. Almost amusement.
I push myself up and sit cross-legged facing him, tucking my feet under my knees because the apartment is always cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature.
He stays where he is, one arm behind his head, watching me with those dark, steady eyes.
His plaid shirt is rumpled and his face is all shadow and he looks absolutely, completely wrong in this apartment and absolutely, completely right in front of me.
"We don't have to pick extremes," I say.
He doesn't say anything. Which means he's listening.
"Everyone thinks it's binary, right? You're either a city person or you're a wilderness hermit with a dog and an axe and frankly alarming quantities of dried beans." I pause. "No offence to the beans."
"None taken."
"But it's not actually binary." I pull one of the throw pillows into my lap and hold it, because I need something to do with my hands when I'm thinking and I left my clipboard at the office this morning before the whole glorious professional implosion.
"There's this whole spectrum of places that are neither.
Towns that are actual towns, with a coffee shop and a post office and people who know your name, but that are right on the mountain so that you can be in actual wilderness in under ten minutes if you need to hear yourself think. " I look at him. "Like Harlow."
Harlow is the town at the base of his ridge.
I know this because I drove through it on my way up the mountain the night of the storm, which feels like a different geological era of my life.
I know it has a diner and a volunteer fire department and a small main street with a hardware store and an estate agent's office and a bar that doubles as a community centre on weekends.
I know this because I have a significant amount of time in a motel room looking at it on the internet with the single-minded focus of a woman who has finally stopped running toward someone else's idea of success and started thinking about her own.
Kirk is very still.
"You live forty minutes outside Harlow," I say.
"Thirty-five."
"There you go with the driving thing again.
" I feel my mouth pull sideways. "My point is.
The town exists. It has infrastructure. It has a population of actual human beings who occasionally need events planned.
Weddings. Fundraisers. The kind of community things that don't have a corporate budget but absolutely need someone to make sure the flowers show up and the caterer doesn't accidentally double-book with the high school graduation.
" I watch his face. "I'm good at that. I'm genuinely, professionally good at making things run and making them feel like something.
I just spent years doing it for people who scheduled team-building retreats as performance theatre and called a room full of name badges and lukewarm canapés an experience.
" I breathe out. "I could do it for real. "
Kirk sits up slowly. He moves the way he does everything, without any wasted effort, and when he's sitting upright facing me he fills up the entire visual field in a way that should be claustrophobic and is instead the opposite.
"You've been thinking about this," he says. It's not a question.
"Since about day three in the cabin," I admit. "Which I know is insane because at that point I was still wearing your thermal shirt and eating tinned beans and I had no idea if you even liked me or if you were just—" I gesture vaguely. "Medically obligated to keep me alive."
The corner of his mouth shifts. A fraction. "Not just that."
"High praise." I press the pillow to me.
"But yes. I've been thinking about it. There's a property that's been listed in Harlow for six months.
It's on the eastern edge of town, it backs onto forest, it has a main house and a converted barn space that somebody started turning into an events venue and then ran out of money or nerve or both.
" I hold his gaze. "It's been sitting there. The price has dropped twice."
The silence between us has a different quality from the silences in the cabin.
Those were full of weather and woodsmoke and the weight of things unsaid.
This one is full of the sound of the city and the two of us sitting in it, looking at each other across the very real and slightly terrifying architecture of a future.
"I'm not asking you to give up the ridge," I say.
"I know what that land is to you. I know what the cabin is.
" I know it's the place he went when the world got too loud in his head and he needed somewhere that asked nothing of him.
I know it's the reason he survived whatever he survived, and I would never ask him to hand it over like it's just square footage.
"But a second property. Something that's a little closer to the rest of the world.
Something that's ours." The word lands and I watch it land and I don't take it back.
"We could keep the cabin for weekends. For the winter.
For whenever you need the ridge and the quiet and Barnaby to go absolutely feral in a snowdrift. "
Kirk looks at me for a long time. The city noise presses at the glass. A siren somewhere, very far below, and then gone.
"You said ours," he says.
"I did."
"You quit your job this morning."
"I did that too."
"And you want to buy property."
"The order of operations is a little chaotic, I'll give you that.
" I uncross my legs and sit forward on my knees, I have to tip my chin up to keep his eyes.
"But I've never wanted anything this clearly before.
I've spent years being very busy in the direction of things that other people told me were worth wanting and it turns out none of it was.
And then I spent a week snowed in with an enormous grumpy man who strips wallpaper with his bare hands and makes soup from scratch and somehow I came out the other side knowing exactly what I want.
" I put my palm flat on his chest again, over the flannel, over the scar.
"I want to build something real. I want it to be somewhere I can breathe. And I want to do it with you."
He covers my hand with his. Same as before.
"The barn space," he says, and I can hear the gears of his practical mind engaging, the same focus he uses when he's assessing a problem, reading the weather, making a decision with his whole body committed. "How big?"
"The listing says eighteen hundred square feet. High ceilings. Original timber frame." I watch his face. "You'd know better than me what it would need structurally."
"I would."
"I was hoping you'd say that."
His thumb moves across my knuckles, a slow deliberate stroke that is probably not intended to be distracting and absolutely is.
"The main house?" he says.
"Three bedrooms. Covered porch. Wood-burning stove already installed, which I feel like is fate." I let out a slow breath. "The photos make it look like it needs work."
"Most things worth having do."
"Was that a metaphor?"
The almost-expression on his face is the closest he gets to sheepish. He says nothing and I decide to love him for it very quietly and not announce it at full volume, which takes significant restraint.
"We should look at it," I say. "Before we do anything else.
Drive up, walk through it, and you tell me what you actually think.
Not the polite version. The full structural assessment with all the words like 'load-bearing' and 'drainage issue' and whatever else.
" I feel the excitement of it moving through me, real and warm and completely different from the brittle, caffeinated buzz of a corporate deadline.
This is something that goes all the way down.
"If you walk through it and it's a money pit or the bones are wrong or you just have a bad feeling about it, we stop and find something else. But I want you to see it."
Kirk looks at me for another long moment. The city slides its grey light through the windows across the planes of his face, the jaw, the brow, the eyes that are almost black in this light and give nothing away except that they are entirely, completely focused on me.
"When?" he says.
"Tomorrow," I say. "If you can stand one night in this city."
"I've slept in worse places."
"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me."
He reaches out and takes my chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting my face up, and the touch is so deliberate that my entire nervous system rearranges itself around it.
"Stella."
"Yes."
"Stop talking."
So I do.
The estate agent's name is Deborah and she is extremely cheerful and slightly nervous about Kirk, which is fair and also quietly hilarious.
She gives him a very wide berth as she unlocks the front door of the property and she talks primarily to me in the way that people do when they have made a quick social calculation and decided I am the more approachable conversational target.
The house smells like cold wood and dust and the particular stillness of a building that has been waiting for someone to arrive.