I pop a blueberry into my mouth and keep moving, running my free hand along the pine wall, the wood smooth and cool under my fingertips. The warmth from the stove reaches even here, a low steady heat that the stone fireplace will add to later.
Outside, through the single window, the Black Pine Mountains are dark shapes against a sky thick with stars.
I've never seen so many stars in my life.
I stand there for a moment, bare feet on warm wood, blueberries in hand, his t-shirt grazing my thighs, and feel something I haven't felt in as long as I can remember.
Like I could belong here, fit here, when I haven’t fit anywhere else in my life.
The thought is as painful as it is provoking.
I rinse my dishes and pad toward the bedroom. The sheets are plain and white and smell like cedar and clean air. I climb in, pull the covers up to my chin and wonder if I’ll stay awake waiting for him to come in.
Interestingly enough, I don’t.
7
IRIS
Something pulls me out of sleep.
A sound. Small and broken, like an animal caught in a trap somewhere in the dark. My heart lurches before my brain catches up and for a disoriented second, I don't know where I am. The ceiling is wrong, the smell is wrong, everything is?—
Then it hits me. Woodsmoke. Cedar. The particular silence of a mountain at four in the morning.
My mountain man.
His cabin. My safe haven, inexplicably, after the most chaotic day of my life.
But that sound…
It comes again and this time it tears at something behind my sternum, fills my throat with sudden tears I wasn't expecting. Low and ragged, more moan than cry, the sound of someone in real pain. The kind that lives deep and doesn't let go.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand and squint at the screen. 4:07 a.m. No service—same as it was all day, not a single bar. Outside the window, dawn is nothing but a thin pink line barely scratching the horizon, the mountains still dark andmassive against it. The stars are fading at the edges. Everything else is black.
I turn on the flashlight. The beam cuts across the room and finds Elias.
He's on the floor beside the bed on a sleeping roll I hadn't noticed when I climbed in and he's not still. His body’s rigid and thrashing at once, arms thrown out, legs pushing against the floor like he's trying to get purchase on something that keeps sliding away. His breaths are shallow and choppy, each one catching in his throat.
The cabin settles around us with a low creak. Somewhere outside, far off in the dark trees, an owl calls once and goes quiet. The wind sighs through the pines outside.
Elias makes those sounds again. Small and wrecked and completely at odds with the mountain of a man I've spent the day watching hold himself together with iron control. It’s unbearable.
I push the covers back and move to the edge of the bed and nearly fall to the floor. My knees hit the hardwood with a crack that sends pain shooting up. I recover, eyes watering, and crawl toward him. I have to get to him.
Up close he's worse. His face is slick with sweat, hair damp against his forehead, his bare chest heaving with those ragged broken breaths. The flashlight catches the scars in the low light. Various sizes, various shapes, scattered across his chest and torso. At his hip, a wide ridge of mangled flesh, angrier and deeper than the rest. This, I realize slowly, is the thing that makes him rub at his hip.
The tears that filled my throat earlier spill over and I swipe at them impatiently.
He cries out again—a raw, gutted sound.
I scoot closer, reach out and gently cup his cheek in my palm. His skin is burning hot under my hand. "Elias." My voice comesout steadier than I feel. "Wake up. Elias, please—you're okay. You're safe."
His arm comes out of nowhere.
The blow catches me square across the jaw and pain ricochets up through my face. The force of it nearly knocks me sideways. My eyes water. The cry that wants to slip out of me rises fast and I swallow it back down, pressing my lips together, breathing through my nose until the worst of it passes.
I'm not leaving him like this. I can’t.
