CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The cabin held one chair at the kitchen table.
Claire stood in the middle of the kitchen.
She was shaking.
Not the shaking of yesterday at Eli's table. Yesterday's had been her body doing the math on a meeting. Tonight's was rage.
He stood six feet from her.
The wolf was at the surface. He didn't need a mirror to know his eyes had gone gold.
He was pressing, and the pressure in his throat was something he hadn't felt in fifteen years, and it wasn't territorial in the reductive sense.
It was the wolf having identified an enemy and being unable to reach it.
The wolf hated being unable to reach it.
So did he. For the first time in thirteen years, they were in complete agreement.
"They tried to make me into a person I am not," Claire said.
"I know."
"They told me my career depends on it."
"I know."
"I am not going to be that person."
"I know."
He was not, in any version of his life, going to say anything else. Anything else would be commentary. Anything else would be the wolf trying to take this off her, and the wolf could not take this off her. This was hers. He could only stand in his kitchen and witness her not breaking.
She moved.
Three steps.
He met her at the third.
The kiss was not the kiss of the fire tower.
The fire tower had been recognition. This was rage.
She kissed him with her hands fisted in the front of his flannel and her body pressing against his as if his body was the thing she'd been driving toward when she hadn't known what she was driving toward, and he let himself be the thing she drove into.
He set his hands on her waist. He held her.
The wolf at the surface was not pressing him to take or to push but to receive — to be the wall against which she could break.
He was the wall.
He was, he understood with a clarity that felt like cold water, the only wall.
She was not breaking. She was, in his kitchen, refusing to break.
The intimacy was furious.
She got his shirt off. He got hers. The cabin was warm from the stove and cold at the windows and the kiss broke and she said his name once, Jackson, and he said hers, and they moved across the kitchen toward the hall, and the bedroom was the bedroom of a man who'd slept alone for thirteen years and had not, until tonight, considered that the bed was a bed for one. Tonight it was not a bed for one.
The wolf surfaced in a register he hadn't known he had. Possessive language pressing at the back of his throat. Endearments he hadn't used in fifteen years. Mine over and over, and yours, and here, I have you, here. He said most of it. Some he didn't get out. She didn't need him to.
She was furious. Not at him. At a man in expensive shoes, and at a corporation with names and lawyers, and at the geological tradition of nineteen years that had taught her to type a finding in language that buried half of what the finding was.
She was furious for her grandmother. She was furious for two people in West Virginia whose names he didn't yet know but would learn.
The fury was the fuel of the body. It was, in the bedroom of his cabin in Pine Ridge in late August, the most honest thing she'd ever brought him.
He took it.
He took it with care. With the wolf at the surface and himself underneath.
He went where she pulled him and slowed where she'd let him slow.
The going-slow was the same going-slow as the fire tower, except the fire tower's slow had been reverence.
Tonight's was restraint, and both were the wolf's way of saying I have you, I will not lose you, I will not let go.
She didn't let go either.
After.
The bedroom was dark. The window was open at the bottom and the cabin smelled of pine and woodsmoke and the smell of the two of them in the dark.
They were both awake. Her head on his chest. His arm around her back.
Her leg over his. The bed, which had been a bed for one for thirteen years, was, in the dark, a bed for two.
He didn't say anything for a long time.
Neither did she.
The cabin around them was different. He knew it. She knew it. It had not had another person in it in thirteen years and now it had, and it would never again be the cabin it had been at 1800 the previous evening. The change was not negotiable. The cabin had decided.
In the dark, his hand found hers.
His fingers laced through hers.
She didn't move them.
The wolf in his chest, at the surface the better part of two hours, settled.
He didn't let her hand go.
He didn't let it go for the rest of the night.
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