7. Bea
BEA
P enn comes to dinner.
That's the whole story, except it isn't. Everything that's happened in the last eight days has been leading to this moment.
I didn't know it until he walked through the door of the dining room, sat down in his chair—the empty one, the one I've been setting a plate for since day two—and looked at me.
I looked back.
His eyes are dark. Not dark like a color description—dark like they're working on something. Processing. He looks like someone stepping out of a long argument with himself—a beat to take stock of the room before he settles into it.
"Bea," he says.
"Penn," I say. Like we're picking up from the two AM kitchen, which I guess we are.
Fletcher sets the food on the table. He's doing the thing where he's not showing how happy he is, which means he's extremely happy—very still, very deliberate, focused on the table like placing the bread basket in the exact right spot matters very much.
Ronan's at his end. He looks at Penn, looks at the table, looks at his plans. Back to eating. Cory's between me and the window, same as always. The room has all its people in it.
I didn't realize how much I'd been noticing the empty chair until it's not empty.
The thing about Penn is: he's quiet in a completely different way from the others.
Ronan is quiet like the lodge is quiet—something that's been standing long enough to be solid.
Cory is quiet like a room where someone's listening.
Penn is quiet like a sentence that's not finished yet.
Like there's something he's working out and when he gets there he'll say it and it'll be the right thing, but he hasn't got there yet.
He eats Fletcher's food with the focused appreciation of someone who's been subsisting on whatever Fletcher leaves outside his door and is now eating it fresh, at a table, at an appropriate temperature. After the second bite he looks at Fletcher and says: "The fennel is better."
Fletcher, not looking up: "I changed the ratio."
"It worked."
That's the whole conversation. Fletcher takes it like he's been handed something important and puts it in his pocket for later.
Penn doesn't talk much after that. He eats. He's present in the room—more present than I expected, actually, for someone who's been upstairs avoiding it. He's not uncomfortable here. He's just—thinking. Working something out. Whatever it is.
Halfway through dinner he refills my water glass.
He reaches across, lifts the pitcher, fills mine without asking. Sets the pitcher back. Goes back to eating.
My eyes drop to the glass.
I look at him.
He's reading his water glass like it's an interesting object.
After dinner Ronan builds the fire up. Fletcher brings out the thing he's been working on for dessert—something with apples, the whole kitchen smelled like it for two hours.
Cory takes his usual position at the far end of the room where he can see the window and the door.
Penn sits in the chair by the bookshelf that I now know is his—it's angled toward the fire but with a line of sight to the hallway, which I've decided tells you something about Penn, though I'm not sure what.
I sit on the hearth rug.
It's warm. The fire is doing the thing fires do in an old stone lodge at the end of October—it fills the room up, makes the walls feel closer, turns the whole place amber.
I've been warm since the first night here.
I keep noticing it. I spent the better part of a month cold, sleeping in my car, watching my jacket not be a rain jacket, and I've been consistently, thoroughly warm for eight days.
It keeps striking me at strange times. Like right now, sitting on a rug in front of a fire with a bowl of apple something on my knee and four people in the room who all seem to think I belong here.
I'm going to start crying if I keep going with that thought.
"The shortcut to the ridge," I say, mostly to Ronan. "You said there's a better way in from the south side."
"The bluff trail." He sets his bowl down. "It's steep but it's shorter. Better view at the top."
"Can we do it this week?"
"Tomorrow, if the weather holds."
Penn says, without looking up from his book: "The weather holds through Thursday."
We all look at him.
He turns a page. "I checked."
Fletcher makes a sound that is definitely not a laugh. Cory's mouth does something at the corner that isn't quite a smile. Ronan looks at me and I look at Ronan and we have a very brief conversation entirely in raised eyebrows.
"Tomorrow then," Ronan says.
Penn turns another page.
The dinner scene has a shape I didn't expect.
I've eaten with three of them for a week.
I know how they sit, how they pass things, where the silences live.
This is different. The room has all four of them in it, which means it has whatever the four of them are as a unit—and I've been in the lodge for eight days absorbing that unit from its edges, but being in the middle of it with all of them present at once is its own thing entirely.
They have a language. Not words. The way Ronan sets his coffee cup down when Fletcher says something he wants to respond to but won't. The way Cory shifts his position when he's decided something.
The way Penn goes very still when he's listening—and he is listening, all through dinner, to the room.
To me. He doesn't look at me constantly but He's attending to me even when his eyes are somewhere else.
It's not uncomfortable. That's what's strange about it.
Eight days ago I would have called this overwhelming.
Right now it feels—like the right number of people.
Like the room has the right amount of furniture in it and I've been walking through a room that was missing pieces without realizing it, and now they're all here.
My suppressants are almost gone.
I put that thought away. I'll deal with it tomorrow.
I go to bed later than usual. The fire burns low and nobody rushes to let it.
The dessert becomes a second serving. A general reluctance to move settles over everyone.
Cory falls asleep in his chair at some point—upright, back to something solid, hand on his knee, looking like he could be awake in under a second if needed.
Fletcher does the dishes so quietly they barely make a sound.
Ronan stays at the table after everyone else drifts, looking at the fire.
When I go past him to the hallway he says good night in the low, certain way he says things. I say it back.
Penn is the last one I pass. He's still in his chair, still reading. When I reach the hallway he says, without looking up:
"The bluff trail is better in the morning. Before the light shifts."
I stop. "Morning."
"Six or so. The way the light comes over the ridge at six—Ronan can confirm."
"Ronan will be awake at six."
"He'll be awake at four." Penn turns a page. "Good night, Bea."
"Good night, Penn."
I go to my room. My room—I've completely stopped putting quotes around that in my head. The cedar smell, the lamp, the window where the pine trees make shapes in the dark.
I lower myself onto the edge of the bed.
Eight days. The road cleared on day two. I haven't been to my car since.
I reach for the pills—habit—and find the nightstand empty.
Three days, I'd said. Pharmacy on the mainland, ordered ahead. That's what I told myself. Four days out, ordered ahead, totally planned, totally managed.
I hadn't ordered anything.
I lie in the dark and count back through the days. I took the last pill four mornings ago. Normal half-life on my suppressant brand is seventy-two hours. By now I should be feeling something. My body is starting to remember what it does without the suppressant telling it to stop.
I put my hand on my sternum. My heartbeat is a little fast.
That could be the walk up the south trail. That could be dinner. That could be eight days of—this, of whatever this is, of four men who treat me like I'm already theirs without having said a word about it.
That could be the heat coming.
I don't say that out loud. I hold it there in the dark, quiet, while the lodge settles around me and the pines move outside the window and somewhere upstairs Penn is probably still reading.
I know what this is.
I go to sleep.