Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Wren
The third day the sun comes out and lies to us beautifully, and Eli teaches me to load his pistol.
"If it comes to it," he says, "and I'm not where I should be, you don't run.
" He's got my hands around the grip, his own around mine, and we are both pretending this is purely tactical and both failing.
"Running's how you die out here. Cold kills you slow, the slope kills you fast. You hole up.
You point this at the door and you make them earn it.
Magazine in. Slide back, let it go, don't ride it.
There. Safety's here. On, off. Say it back. "
"On, off. Don't ride the slide. Make them earn it.
" My voice is steadier than my pulse. His chest is a flat warm wall against my back and his beard is near my temple and he smells like woodsmoke and cold steel and something under it that's just him, warm, and I am supposed to be learning to defend my life and I am thinking about the heat coming off his skin. "Eli."
"Again." His voice is patient, which is its own kind of cruel, because patient means he's not feeling what I'm feeling, or he's better at hiding it.
"If your hands are shaking, the safety is your friend.
If they're steady, the safety is the thing that gets you killed half a second late.
You decide which one you are before you touch it, not after. Run it again."
I run it again. Magazine, slide, safety, the cold weight of the thing learning the shape of my palm, and the whole time the front of him is against the whole back of me and neither of us says it.
He adjusts my grip with two fingers. Drops my elbow a quarter inch.
Every correction is an excuse to touch me that he would die before he'd admit was an excuse to touch me.
I know it's an excuse. He knows I know. The pistol is the most honest liar in the room.
"Eli."
"Mm."
"You're standing very close for a man with a line on the floor."
He goes still. The stillness travels through both of us where we touch, a held current. He should step back. I've learned the choreography by now, the retreat, the rebuilt distance, the cost-counting beat. I brace for it.
He doesn't step back. His hands are still around mine on the grip and he doesn't move them, and when he speaks his voice has dropped to the bottom of the quarry where it lives.
"I'm aware of the line."
"Are you going to tell me why it's there?"
"You know why it's there."
"I want you to say it." I turn in the circle of his arms, slow, careful of the ribs, until I'm facing him, the pistol set down on the bench, both of us empty-handed now and very close, and I tip my head back to find his eyes and they are not cold at all.
They are doing something that contradicts every careful distance he's kept for three days.
"Say it, and I'll respect it. But say it. "
The beat. The longest one yet. The fire ticks. The dog sighs in her sleep.
"You're twenty-four years old," he says, low and rough.
"I'm forty-two. You're hurt and you're stranded and you're depending on me to keep you alive, and a man who would touch you in that arithmetic is a man I don't want to be.
That's the line. I built it the first night. It's the only honest thing I've got."
"It's not arithmetic." I'm closer now, or he is; the line is gone, the line was always just a story we agreed to tell.
"I'm not a number you're babysitting until the road opens.
I know exactly how old you are and exactly how old I am and exactly what I'm depending on you for and none of it is why I can't stop looking at your hands.
" I take a breath that hurts the ribs and don't care.
"I want you to know something true, since you only deal in true.
I've never done this. Any of it. I'm twenty-four and I've never let anyone close enough, because everyone leaves, you taught me that's why I love rocks, remember, so I just never.
There's never been anyone. And I'm telling you that not to scare you off but because you should have the real number too. "
I watch it hit him. I watch a war happen behind his eyes: the protector and the man, the rule and the want, nine years of locked-down solitude against three days of me.
I see the exact moment the want surges and I think, yes, finally, and his hand comes up to my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, his whole enormous careful body leaning down into the small space left between us?—
And then he stops.
His forehead drops to mine instead of his mouth. We breathe the same air. His hand trembles against my face, this man whose hands don't tremble, and I understand that the not-kissing is costing him more than the kiss would.
"No," he says, and it's wrecked. "Not like this.
Not when you're hurt and snowed in and I'm the only warm thing in forty miles.
If I ever—if this is ever becomes real, Wren, it's going to be because you chose it from solid ground, not because I was the only door out of the cold.
" He pulls back, just far enough to look at me, and his eyes are bright and furious and tender all at once.
"You've never let anyone close. I'm not going to be a man who took that because the weather handed it to him. You deserve a clear day to decide."
He steps back. He rebuilds the line, not on the floor this time, but in himself, and it's worse to watch because I can see how much it hurts him.
I should feel rejected. I've just laid the most private thing I own at the feet of a man who turned away from it.
But that's not what it feels like. It feels, standing there with my heart slamming and his thumb's warmth still on my mouth, like the single most respecting thing anyone has ever done for me.
Like being handed back to myself, whole, with a note that says when you're sure.
No one has ever wanted me enough to refuse me for my own sake.
No one has ever made my yes matter that much.
I love him. The thought arrives plain and enormous and entirely without my permission, the way the snow came. I love him, this lethal, lonely, gentle, impossible man, and he just made it impossible to do anything but.
"Okay," I whisper. "A clear day."
"A clear day," he agrees, rough.
Juniper's head comes up off her paws.
A half-second later, so does Eli's. His hand is on the rifle and his whole body has changed, gone to that terrible stillness, and he's at the window, and his voice when it comes is no longer the man who almost kissed me.
"Get away from the glass," he says. "Now. Somebody's on the saddle."