He huffs and turns to look out the window.
The road out to the cabin is all gravel and switchbacks, carved through trees that have been here longer than the town itself. I've driven it enough times that I could do it blind. Muscle memory. The same way I can fieldstrip a rifle or dig a foxhole or wake up at 0400 without an alarm.
Some things just get into your bones and stay there.
I shouldn't have talked to her.
That's the thought that keeps circling back, like a vulture looking for something dead. I shouldn't have corrected Frank. Shouldn't have shown her the basin wrench. Definitely shouldn't have stood there in the parking lot having a conversation like I'm someone who does that.
I don't do that.
Haven't done that in six years, and there's a reason for it.
The cabin comes into view through the trees. Small, rough, exactly the kind of place that doesn't ask anything of you except that you keep the roof patched and the firewood stacked. I park the truck and Ridge jumps out before I've even killed the engine, heading straight for the tree line like he's got important business to attend to.
I grab my gear from the bed and head inside.
It's quiet. It's always quiet. That's the point.
No neighbors. No traffic. No voices except my own, and I don't use that one much these days. Just me and the trees and the kind of silence that doesn't expect you to fill it with small talk or explanations or reasons why you're the way you are.
I drop the toolbox on the counter and stare at it. I gave her the basin wrench speech. The whole thing. Like I was running a training exercise for some boot who didn't know his ass from his elbow.
*You'll need a basin wrench. Don't overtighten. You'll crack the seal.*
What the hell was I thinking?
The answer, unfortunately, is that I wasn't thinking. I was reacting. She'd been standing there with that smile, the kind of smile that people who haven't had the optimism beaten out of them yet still manage to pull off, and I'd opened my mouth before my brain could catch up and remind me that I don't do this anymore.
I don't help.
I don't engage.
I definitely don't stand in parking lots explaining plumbing to women I don't know.
Ridge scratches at the door and I let him in. He trots past me, heads straight for his water bowl, and drinks like he's just crossed a desert.
"You're a traitor," I tell him.
He ignores me.
I move to the sink and start washing the dirt off my hands. The water's cold. It takes a minute for the heat to kick in out here andI watch it run over my knuckles, over the scars, over the calluses that have built up from six years of swinging an axe and hauling timber and doing anything that makes my body too tired to let my brain take over at night.
She'd crouched down to pet Ridge like it was the most natural thing in the world. Didn't hesitate. Didn't ask permission. Just dropped down and gave him the kind of attention he loves, and he'd eaten it up like the attention whore he is.
*Your dog likes me.*
*Do you?*
No.
I meant it when I said it. I don't like people. Not in the way she probably meant. Not in the way that involves getting to know them or letting them get to know me or any of the other things that used to feel normal before everything went to shit.
But the truth, the part I didn't say, is that it's not about liking or not liking.
It's about distance.
It's about the fact that proximity to me costs people something, and I learned that lesson the hard way in a desert on the other side of the world when the men I was supposed to bring home came back in boxes instead.
