ON DAY EIGHT, THE RAINcame.
It started mid-afternoon, a low sky that had been threatening all morning finally letting go, and within an hour the trails were mud and the river was loud and the cabin felt like it had shrunk by half. Cliff came in from the outpost soaked, stripped off his wet jacket and hung it by the woodstove, and I stood there while he pushed his wet hair back from his forehead with one hand, my stomach dropping in a way that was becoming familiar and increasingly difficult to ignore.
He caught me staring again. I looked down at my laptop.
“Rain's not stopping tonight,” he said.
“I can see that.”
He sat on the couch. I was at the dining table. The rain was loud on the roof and the fire was going and the light was the amber kind that made everything softer, and the distance between the table and the couch was eleven feet and that was not enough.
He picked up a book from the side table. I stared at my spreadsheet. The numbers could have been in Mandarin for all the sense they were making.
“Ask you something?” His voice was low, casual. He didn't look up from his book.
“Depends on the question.”
“Your manual. Section seven.” He turned a page. “Conflict resolution protocol.”
“What about it?”
“It says if one party has an unresolved concern, the other party has twenty-four hours to acknowledge receipt and schedule a discussion window.” He looked up. “Does that apply to the person who wrote it?”
“I wrote it to be equitable.”
“Good.” He set the book down. The firelight caught his jaw, the shadow of his beard. “Because I've had an unresolved concern for about three days and I'm running out of twenty-four-hour windows.”
My heart rate climbed. “What concern?”
He held my gaze. Gray eyes, steady. The same stillness he'd had when I'd first stepped out of the Prius, except now I knew what lived underneath the stillness — the humor, the gentleness with a cat, the way he woke before dawn and watched the trees. Knowing those things made the stillness harder to sit across from.
“I keep thinking about what Drew said,” he said. “That his algorithm doesn't lie.”
“That's not a concern. That's a statement about software.”
“It's a concern if the software's right.”
The rain hammered the roof. The fire popped. I was very aware of the eleven feet between us and how little effort it would take to close it.
“Cliff.”
“I'm not good at this part,” he said, and his voice shifted — the dry humor stripped away, the self-deprecation dropped. What was left was a man sitting in firelight telling me something true. “The talking part. I never have been. I'm better at —” He stopped. Rubbed the back of his neck. “I'm better at most things that don't require me to sit still and say what I mean.”
“You're doing fine.”
“I'm doing terrible. But I figure that's on-brand for me, so.” The corner of his mouth pulled up, but his eyes didn't match it. “I wasn't expecting you.”
Three words. My chest went tight around them and I couldn't breathe for a second, which was a physiological response I understood and an emotional one I did not, and before I could analyze the difference I was standing up from the table.
He stood too.
I crossed the eleven feet. Or he did. Or the cabin did what it had been doing for eight days and put us in the same space whether we'd planned it or not.
His hand came up to my jaw. His thumb traced my cheekbone and his palm was rough and warm and large enough to hold my whole face, and I stopped thinking.
I stopped thinking.
His mouth was on mine and the kiss was not gentle. It was the eight days and the touches and the flannel shirt and his favorite color and the way he left sugar by my coffee, all of it compressed into the pressure of his lips and the grip of his hand on my hip pulling me against him. I made a sound against his mouth that I would be embarrassed about later, and he responded by deepening the kiss, his tongue sliding against mine, one arm wrapping around my waist and lifting me onto my toes.
