17. Penn
PENN
M y restraint has exactly four hours left in it.
I've felt it draining since yesterday evening—checked it against myself every couple of hours, and there's less of it each time. By midnight I'll either go downstairs or I'll have learned to sit still through something I don't have a word for, and I don't believe I'm going to learn that tonight.
I'm in my office.
I've been in my office for most of two days.
Not hiding—I want to be clear about this, mostly to myself, since there's no one else in the room to be clear to.
Working it out. I work things out by sitting with them until they make sense, and this has refused to make sense since the first day, and I've burned two sleepless days on it anyway.
Here's what's true. I put money into this lodge three years ago—took a share of it instead of a loan, because Ronan building this place meant more to me than being paid back.
I've worked well here. I've been comfortable here.
I've kept my own edges inside the pack with a lot of solitude and rigid routine and a careful sense of when to come downstairs and when to stay up.
I should not be going downstairs right now.
I am going to go downstairs.
I've known it since she laughed at something Cory said in the yard on day five and I closed my laptop and walked down there without being asked.
I've known it since she handed me the rest of her coffee, no preamble, like she'd had me figured out for weeks.
I've known it since I stayed twenty minutes in the kitchen and said nothing useful and she didn't seem to mind and I went back upstairs furious about it and then thought about it for three hours.
I'm in serious trouble. I knew it on day five. I've only known it harder since.
What I keep coming back to:
Day one: she came through the door with rain in her hair and took stock of the room the way I take stock of rooms—reading it, not performing. She asked Ronan where to put her bag and when he said anywhere she put it in the single spot that made structural sense. I noticed.
Day three: I watched her hand Fletcher back his own whittling knife when he'd left it on the table. She didn't say you left this. She just handed it over. The lack of performance in it. I noticed.
Day five: Cory made a dry remark about the flooding and she laughed—real laugh, full laugh, the one I didn't find out she had until that moment. I was halfway down the stairs before I knew I'd moved. I noticed.
Day seven: the coffee. No preamble. No transaction.
She just handed it over like she'd known exactly what I needed since she arrived, which she probably had, which I should have found unsettling and found instead—I tried fifteen different words for it and the one that fit was one I didn't want to say.
Day eight: she came out to the drive while I was walking the perimeter.
Early morning, the fog still coming off the mountains.
She didn't say anything. Just stood and watched it.
I completed the perimeter and came back and she was still there—holding two mugs.
She handed me the second without looking at me.
Like she'd been waiting. Like she knew the perimeter loop's duration.
I tried seventeen words for that one. Same word fit.
I've been watching her. She's been watching me back.
Through the walls—quieter now. The between-wave settling. Her scent, which has been running through this lodge for two days, softer now. Warm. The underlying wildflower of it, the thing that's been pulling at the center of my chest since night one, quieter but still there.
Still pulling.
I tell myself the reasons one more time. Everything I've built here. Every careful distance. Every wall I set on purpose, brick by brick, so nothing could get in and take this much of me.
And underneath all of it, the only thing that's true.
I shut the laptop.
The bond-thread—not formed yet, not mine—but the proto-bond is already running through the pack.
Ronan's thread, settled and certain, the thing the whole structure sits on.
Fletcher's, warm and ongoing, a frequency that has been running since the moment she stepped into his kitchen.
Cory's, taut and precise, the perimeter-thread, the one that will never fully stand down because Cory doesn't stand down. Three threads already woven.
And underneath: her. Her wildflower warmth, bleeding through the proto-thread that isn't quite mine yet—that could be mine, that is mine in everything but the final step, that is waiting for me to stop arguing with myself and go downstairs and make it mine.
A pull in my sternum I've been calling several different things for two days, all of which are wrong. It's not a metaphor. It's not a feeling I can talk myself out of. It's not a thing I can explain away or wait out.
It's her.
It's always been her.
I've spent twenty years trusting myself to know a thing the moment I know it.
I also know exactly what I'm doing right now: I knew the answer days ago, and I've kept turning it over since, finding one more angle, one more reason to wait—using the thinking itself as the place to hide from what I'd already decided.
Thinking as a way to not act. I've known that about myself for a long time.
I've been doing it for nine days.
I stand.
I'm not ready.
I've never been less ready for anything in my life.
I'm going anyway.
The stairs. Twelve steps. I've walked them every day for three years—I know the third step from the top has a tell, I know the fifth creaks more on the left side, I know the sound of this descent at every hour because I've made it at every hour. Right now twelve steps feel like crossing a border.
Which is what they are.
I make them.
Ronan is in the kitchen. He's standing at the counter with both hands around a mug, looking at nothing, and when I come down the stairs he turns and looks at me the way he looks at all things he's been expecting.
"You waited long enough," he says.
"I shouldn't be doing this," I say.
"I know." He sets his mug down. "Go."
I look at him. Then the hallway.
"Penn," Ronan says.
I look back.
"She chose all four of us with her eyes open," he says. "She's known what she wanted from the beginning. Stop running the analysis. Go."
I've never heard Ronan deliver that many sentences in a row about something that wasn't structural.
He means it.
I go.
The door to the room at the end of the hall.
I've been here before. Not at this door—I've been past it, past the doorway, down the hall, up the stairs, in the orbit of this room for nine days without going inside it.
I stand outside it for one full minute. Sixty seconds. I know because I count them. Old habit—counting steadies me, gives my hands something to do while the rest of me catches up.
I don't need the sixty seconds to decide anything. I decided days ago. I take them anyway, because standing here— breathing, my hand not yet lifted to the door—feels like the last thing I'll do as the man I was before I knock.
After I knock I'm someone else.
Not a worse someone. Just a different one.
I knock.
"Come in," she says. Her voice is soft, between-wave, warm. Present.
I come in.
She's sitting up in bed. Her hair is everywhere.
The firelight catches the copper in it and I've been not-noticing this for nine days and Three marks now—the one at her neck visible from the doorway, the one at her hip below the sheet, the one at her wrist where she's holding it up against the light, looking at it.
She turns it over when she sees me.
She looks at me.
"Penn," she says.
"I know I'm the last," I say. "I know I've been?—"
"You needed time," she says.
"I didn't want to need time."
"I know." She holds my eyes steadily. "Come here."
I'm across the room before I make the decision to be.
I sink down beside her. She moves over. She looks at me and I look back at her and the pull in my sternum is not a metaphor. It is a real, physical, present thing. I have been managing it for nine days and it has not gotten smaller with management.
I'm done managing it.
I'm done. Done holding part of myself back and calling it patience, calling it wisdom. You're all the way in or you're not, and I have never in my life wanted to be all the way into anything the way I want this.
I reach for her hand.
Her hand turns up in mine.
"I need to explain something," I say.
"You don't," she says.
"I do. I need to say this." I look at our hands. Her small pale hand in mine, the freckles across her knuckles. "I don't do this. Any of this. I chose this life deliberately—the distance, the management, the schedule. I had reasons."
"I know," she says.
"I'm aware my reasons don't hold up under current conditions."
Something crosses her face—warm, wry, a little undone. "Penn."
"What."
"I know." She squeezes my hand. "I know exactly what you've been doing and I know exactly why and I'm not asking you to stop being who you are. I'm asking you to come here."
I look at her.
She looks back.
She waited nine days. She counted my place at the table before she knew my name.
She handed me her coffee without asking and watched me drink it and didn't make it a thing.
She has been the most patient person in the room every single day she's been here and now she's looking at me with the whole of her patience aimed at me and I?—
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?" She laughs. Short, warm.
"Okay," I say again. "I'm here. I'm done fighting it. I'm here."
She takes my face in her hands.