I eased out from under her. She murmured, shifted, settled back into the pillow. I pulled the quilt over her shoulders, found my boxers on the hallway floor, and stood in the dark.
My phone was on the kitchen counter. I picked it up. Three bars, the cell booster holding.
I looked up the number. Dialed. It was after hours, but that's what voicemails were for.
"This is Cliff Masterson. I need to schedule a consultation for a vasectomy reversal." I gave my number. Hung up.
My hands were shaking. Not from cold.
I set the phone down. Walked back to the bedroom. Stood in the doorway and looked at her. Nell Chambers, asleep in my bed, wearing my shirt, with a ring I'd put on her finger ten days ago.
I didn't know how to square the call I'd just made with the deal I'd made with Drew. Didn't know how to hold both things at once, the money I needed and the woman I wanted and the lie sitting heavy in the middle.
I didn't try to figure it out. I got back into bed. She shifted toward me in her sleep, her forehead pressing against my shoulder, and I lay in the dark and listened to her breathe and did not sleep for a long time.
Chapter Five
Nell
THERE WAS NO PROTOCOLfor this. I had protocols for client onboarding, quarterly reviews, travel delays, and the optimal sequence for packing a carry-on. I did not have a protocol for waking up next to a man who had spent the better part of a week putting his mouth between my legs and making me forget my own name.
I lay still. His arm was heavy across my waist. My body carried a tenderness I was learning to live with, a low ache that had settled in and stopped asking permission, and my brain was doing the thing it did when a spreadsheet returned an error it couldn't trace: cycling, cycling, not landing.
These nights kept happening. Not just the sex, though the sex had redrawn my assumptions about what my body could do so thoroughly that the new version was starting to feel like the original. But the after. How he'd held me with his face pressed into my hair, his heartbeat slowing against my back. The silence between us had felt less empty than full, and I hadn't wanted to leave it. That was the part my spreadsheets couldn't process. I'd wanted to stay.
I turned my head on the pillow. He was on his stomach, face half-buried, one arm flung across me. His shoulders rose and fell with deep sleep. He looked younger with the careful stillness gone, and I watched him for reasons I wasn't ready to examine, which was new enough to notice and too fragile to pick apart.
The manual was on the kitchen counter, untouched. The exit strategy sat in an email I hadn't answered. I was lying in bed next to a man I was supposed to use and leave, and my chest ached.
Cliff stirred. His arm tightened, pulling me closer, and he pressed his mouth to my shoulder without opening his eyes. The warmth of it traveled straight through me and settled somewhere behind my ribs.
"Morning," I said. My voice came out rougher than I expected.
"Mm." He nuzzled into my neck. "What time."
"Early."
"Go back to sleep."
"I've been awake for twenty minutes."
"Overachiever." His hand found my hip and squeezed, lazy and possessive. My breath caught. His hand on my hip carried a certainty now that would have undone me two weeks ago, and my body knew it before my brain could intervene.
I got up because I needed to move. Needed my hands busy. Needed a task with steps I could follow while the rest of me caught up to what had happened.
In the kitchen I pulled out eggs, milk, cinnamon, the thick bread Cliff kept on the counter. French toast. My grandmother's recipe — vanilla in the egg wash, a dusting of cinnamon so heavy it made the kitchen smell like her kitchen on a Sunday morning. I hadn't made it in years. I'd stopped somewhere around the second promotion, when weekday mornings became coffee over a laptop and weekends became meal-prepped containers labeled by macronutrient. I didn't know why I was making it now.Maybe because it was the only recipe I knew by heart, and my heart was the organ currently running the show while my brain stood in the corner trying to reboot.
I'd found wild berries on a walk two days ago, small and dark, growing along the trail behind the outpost. Cliff had shown me which ones were safe. I'd picked enough to fill a bowl and kept them in the fridge, not sure what they were for until right now.
I poured his coffee black and mine with sugar. The sugar bowl lived next to my mug on the counter, both of them migrated to the same spot without anyone deciding it. I'd picked wildflowers yesterday and put them in a mason jar on the dining table, purple lupine and a few yellow blooms I still couldn't identify. The jar sat between my laptop and a stack of topo maps he'd left there. Our things mixed together on every surface. My jacket on the hook next to his. My trail shoes by the door. The cabin had absorbed me so gradually I hadn't noticed until I looked around and couldn't find a room without evidence that I lived here.
I plated the French toast, spooned berries on top, and set the table. He came out of the bedroom in jeans and nothing else, scratching his jaw, and stopped in the doorway.
"You cooked."
"Don't sound so surprised. I've been cooking since Tuesday."
"You heated soup on Tuesday." He looked at the plate. "This is French toast."
