He didn’t answer. His face gave nothing. The rain was picking up behind me, fat drops hitting the wooden deck, and the wind was pulling at my wet jacket.
"You can’t be cruel enough to leave me out here in the cold," I shivered. "Can you?"
His throat moved as he swallowed, Adam’s apple dipping and rising, deciding my fate. Then, he stepped aside.
The cabin hit me in waves.
First the size of it, larger than I expected, all wood and glass, modern but warm in a way his office never was. Then the cleanliness, every surface pristine, the air carrying that faint antiseptic note I’d learned to associate with him, but underneath it something else. Wood smoke. Pine. Like the mountains had seeped into the walls and he hadn’t been able to keep them out.
Books lined an entire wall, floor to ceiling, and even from the doorway I could tell they were organized in some system I’d need a manual to decode. The kitchen was open and spotless. The floors were bare wood, clean enough that I felt guilty for the wet footprints my shoes were leaving.
I was shivering. He noticed before I said anything.
"There are towels in the bathroom. Second door on the left." He paused at the kitchen entrance without turning around. "I’ll make tea."
There was no warmth in his voice, but I nodded. I studied his broad shoulders for a second as he moved across the kitchen.
A week ago, this man kissed me like the world was ending. Now he couldn’t look me in the eye long enough to offer me a towel in person.
I found the bathroom. On the shelf beside the towels, a folded sweater. His. I pulled it over my head because I was freezing. It smelled like him, odorless, yet warm. It was too big in the shoulders and too long in the sleeves, and I stood in his hallway wearing it and felt closer to him than I had in days and further away than ever.
I came back to the living room. He was in the kitchen, his back to me, and he didn’t turn around when he heardmy footsteps. The cold wasn’t just the rain. It was him. Every movement, every word, every angle of his body said you shouldn’t be here.
I decided to look around a bit. Jace Hunter’s space.
The living room told me he read constantly. History. Architecture. Philosophy. An entire shelf dedicated to film theory. There was a blanket folded on the couch. A Rubik’s cube sat on the side table, solved. Another rested on the bookshelf, also solved. A third was on the windowsill. I was starting to think the man bought them in bulk.
Down a short hallway, I found the piano room. A grand, black and polished, its lid closed. I ran my fingers along the surface and the wood was cool beneath my hand. Sheet music sat on the stand, handwritten, the notes tight and precise. I tried to picture him here. Those long fingers I'd watched pull on gloves and solve cubes and sign contracts, moving across the keys instead, playing something he'd written himself, alone in a cabin in the mountains with nobody to hear him.
Further down the hall, paintings. Originals. Seascapes in deep blues and greens where the light hit the water at angles I would have spent an hour trying to capture with a lens. A city scene at dusk. And a portrait of a little boy around six with a gap-toothed grin holding a toy airplane. I stopped in front of each one. The seascapes were so layered I swore I could smell the salt air if I stood close enough. Whoever painted them understood color the way I understood light.
I stood in front of the boy with the airplane for a long time. The gap-toothed grin. The eyes. Gray, even in paint. A version of Jace from before.Who painted it?It couldn't be him—the painting was too carefree, too alive and warm.
I kept walking. The hallway ended at a door left wide open, like he'd walked out mid-session and hadn't thought to close it behind him.
I stepped inside.
The room was small. Gray moonlight filtered through the skylight, softened by the rain. An easel faced the window. A workbench was covered in charcoal pencils and fixative spray, everything arranged with the meticulous order I’d come to expect from every space he touched.
I walked around the easel.
My legs stopped working.
It was me.
Charcoal on paper. Half-finished. My face, my jaw, my hair. The exact way my curls fell when I tucked them behind my left ear. He’d drawn the way the light came through, detailed and careful, each strand given individual attention. But it was the expression that made me forget to breathe. I recognized it. The elevator. The moment I was counting, my hand on his face, telling him to breathe. He’d drawn me in that moment. The concern in my eyes. The focus. The way my lips were slightly parted because I was mid-count.
I stared at it. The care in every line. The charcoal was heavy where my hair fell and light where the elevator light caught my cheekbone, and he’d spent time on my mouth. More time than anything else. Like he’d been trying to get it right. Like getting it right mattered more than the rest of the drawing combined.
I stood there and waited for the alarm. The instinct that said this is too much, this is obsessive, this is a man alone in a cabin drawing a woman who told him she wasn’t interested. I waited for the prickle at the back of my neck that said someone is watching you too closely and you need to leave.
The alarm didn’t come.
What came instead was warmth. Spreading through my chest, slow and dangerous.
"I can explain."
His voice came from behind me. I didn’t know how long he’d been standing there.
