Nellie smiled at the chaos and then made herself a cup of tea. There’s nothing better than a steaming cup of chamomile while a storm is tossing the outside world into chaos.
It was a very good storm. She stood at the window and watched it with the mug warm in both hands, the generator doing its quiet, purposeful work, and felt, for the first time in several weeks, something close to uncomplicated contentment. The world outside was conducting itself with enormous, indifferent drama. Nellie was inside with electricity and a full kettle and the kind of deep upholstered couch you could theoretically sleep on for a week if the conditions required it, which they did not, but it was good to know. Field ecology had taught her to appreciate shelter the way you appreciated fresh water: fully, earnestly, and without taking the ceiling for granted.
A loud knock came in the deep breath between thunderclaps.
Nellie frowned at the door for a long while before she padded across the flagstones to open it. She was almost certain she knew who it was and decidedly less certain about whether she wanted to welcome such a visitor inside.
Unsurprisingly—or extremely surprisingly depending on who you asked—Sawyer Alburn was standing on the cottageporch absolutely drenched. Not caught-in-a-sprinkle damp. Not jogged-fifteen-feet-from-the-car wet. She was rain-had-a-vendetta-against-her-specificallydrenched. Her jacket had gone dark with it, her silvery hair clung to her cheeks, and there was a steady stream running along her jawline and dripping from her chin onto her no doubt ludicrously expensive shoes. She looked Nellie up and down with rapid, scanning attention.
“Are you alright?” she demanded.
Nellie blinked. She leaned against the doorframe and looked at the state of her guest. “I’m fine. Are you?”
“The power’s out all over?—”
“I have a generator.” Nellie tilted her head. “In fact, I have two. You had a backup installed, remember?”
Sawyer’s jaw ticked. “Yes, I know.”
“And you brought me enough fuel to last weeks.”
“I remember that too.”
“But you’re here to check on me anyway.”
Sawyer chewed her cheek as if she were mulling over an answer, but Nellie had not asked a question. The rain arrived sideways and hit the porch railing hard. Sawyer was barely even blinking. Something had morphed in her features. She did not wear the indifferent, superior neutrality she usually wore to every occasion as though it were part of the dress code. Instead, all the stiffness seemed to have drained out of her, as if it were following the water dripping onto her toes. Her pale eyes were wide, raw and unguarded in a way Nellie had never quite seen them before. She looked almost undone again, the way she’d looked on the ridge, except wetter and more defeated, like whatever she’d been working through in the intervening twenty-four hours had finally deposited her here on this porch as its only possible conclusion.
“Yes,” Sawyer said. “I am.”
Nellie nodded wordlessly. Two thoughts showed up simultaneously and attempted to occupy the same space, which wasn’t ideal. The first was that Sawyer Alburn driving forty-five minutes through a blackout in torrential rain to check on her was the most quietly devastating thing anyone had done for her in recent memory. The second was that Sawyer Alburn had kissed her back on a ridge only a day ago and walked back into the forest like it had meant nothing.
For a woman who got her eight hours of sleep a night like her life depended on it, Nellie was tired—genuinely, bone-deep tired—of trying to figure out what the hell was going on every time this woman appeared.
Despite all this, she stepped back. “Come inside. You’ll catch your death.”
Sawyer stood awkwardly in the middle of the cottage’s single front room while Nellie went and got a towel, which took longer than it should have because she’d put them all in the wrong place after last week’s laundry, and by the time she returned, Sawyer was dripping quietly onto the flagstones with her hands in her pockets and her eyes tracking a curious circle from the tiny corner kitchen to the paper-laden dining table to the sagging couch and glowing wood-burner.
Nellie handed her the towel. “Have a seat.”
Sawyer dabbed at her face and hair, not sitting. The storm pressed against the windows.
“I saw the lights go out right across Phoenix Ridge,” she murmured.
“The whole grid?”
“As far as I could see.”
Nellie settled herself in the corner of the couch, tucked her feet up, and wished she had brewed another cup of tea just for something to do with her hands. Sawyer remained a somewhatsupernatural looking, a dripping statue in the middle of the room.
Nellie rolled her eyes. “I need to say something.” The words came out more clipped than she’d been expecting them to. She’d have preferred to have scripted it or at least run it past her internal committee a few more times, but the committee had apparently adjourned without informing her.
“Alright,” Sawyer said slowly, folding the towel and hanging it over the back of a dining chair.
“Youkissedme. That first time, when I twisted my ankle, you kissed me. I didn’t imagine that.”
“You didn’t.”
“And then you acted like it hadn’t happened.”
