My body vibrates.
My skin feels too tight.
The cabin feels too small.
I glance at the clock and see it’s only three am.
There’s no way I’ll fall back asleep. I need to do something to work off all this coiling tension writhing inside me. There has to be some release before I explode.
For a moment, my gaze drifts back to the bottle of bourbon, but I shouldn’t have any more.
Fuck.
I stalk back up the stairs, tug on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, shove my feet into a pair of boots, and yank open the front door.
Crisp, clean mountain night air hits me, and I suck in a long breath, filling my lungs with it before I head out to the secondary barn that doubles as my workshop.
My footsteps crunch on gravel and grass, the noises familiar and soothing in a way I hadn’t imagined they could be.
All these real things help ground me in the now, keep me from thinking about the past.
By the time I reach the barn and slide open the door, my heartrate has almost returned to normal, and the trembling in my hands seems to have somewhat abated.
With as much time as I spend out here, I should have created thousands of pieces by now, but I’m too much of a perfectionist. I spend too much time picking out the perfect tree, cutting the perfect pieces from it, then carving them into whatever it tells me it wants to be.
Which means that each and every piece I make is unique, and each and every piece takes time. Like the one sitting in the middle of the workshop now.
This is the one that set everything with Willow in motion.
I’d been waiting to cut down that particular tree and build this rocking chair from it for over a year before the day Connor, Killian, and I went up there to chop it down and instead discovered Willow in the river. And now it sits only a quarter finished because working on it only reminds me of that day, and of the spiral it sent me down after.
Yet tonight, my hands itch to do something.
To mold something.
To build something instead of breaking it down the way I’m breaking down.
I snag my tools from the workbench and try to push the nightmare to the back of my head as I focus on the task at hand.
The scent of fresh wood fills the air, and the sound of my tools moving across it, slicing off pieces, sanding it down, becomes a soothing melody that finally starts to lull me away from that dark place I went.
By the time I hear footsteps approaching, sunlight is already starting to trickle in through the open barn door.
Killian steps in, then leans back against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest as he watches me work. “How long have you been out here?”
I shrug as casually as I can, knowing full well that if he knew how little sleep I’m really getting, he’d worry. “Not long.”
He snorts and pushes himself off the wall, making his way toward me. “Given how much you’ve done on it since I came over here yesterday, that’s a fucking lie.”
Killian eyes me with an all-too-knowing look. I try to avoid meeting his gaze, but eventually, I do and he raises a brow.
“Have you been sleeping?”
Hell.
I must really look like shit for him to want to get into this so damn early in the morning. “We’re not doing this, Kill.”
After hours losing myself in this work, fighting against the nightmare, I’m not ready to confront it with him. I push up to my feet and stalk over to the workbench to grab a different pad of sandpaper, then return to my spot, trying to fine tune one edge.
