“Bed’s yours,” he said.
He said it already moving toward the desk, already pulling the chair out, already sitting down. The offer delivered and discarded in the same motion, a thing handed off without ceremony. He opened the laptop. The screen lit his face — blue-white, flat — and he started typing.
I didn’t take the bed. Instead, I crossed to the wooden chair beside the scanner and sat down. Straight-backed. Hands in my lap, fingers laced over the apron I’d never taken off. The apronstill had the pen in its pocket. The flip phone. The muscle memory of a shift I’d been closing when the world tilted.
He didn’t comment. Didn’t look up. His fingers moved on the keys with a quiet, consistent rhythm, and the scanner crackled beside me — long stretches of static, occasional bursts of voice too compressed to parse. I watched him work because there was nothing else to watch and because watching was what I did.
His focus was total. Not performative — he wasn’t showing me how busy he was, how important the work. He’d simply gone somewhere I couldn’t follow, into the screen and the data and whatever the red dots on the maps meant, and I was in the room but not in his attention, and the absence of his attention was —
I didn’t finish the thought.
The cabin smelled like coffee grounds and canvas and the faint mechanical undertone I’d caught in the parking lot, which turned out to be gun oil. A small bottle of it sat on the desk near the laptop, next to a cloth.
I intended to stay awake.
That was the plan. That was always the plan — you stayed awake in a new place. You learned the sounds, mapped the exits, tracked the breathing of whoever else was in the room. You didn’t sleep until you understood the architecture of where you were and what it might do while your eyes were closed. This was a strategy that had kept me alive in fourteen different beds before I turned eighteen.
My feet were flat on the floor, boots laced, ready. My eyes were open.
His typing was steady. A rhythm. Keys, pause, keys.
I counted things to keep the edges sharp. Pencil marks on the nearest map — seventeen visible from this angle. Papers on the desk — a stack of maybe forty sheets. Keys on his keyboard that his right hand favoured — the number row, the delete key, the enter key twice in a row.
My eyelids were heavy.
Not tired. Not that. Just — the adrenaline had somewhere to go now, and where it went was down. Through the muscles of my shoulders, through my arms, through my hands. A draining. The kind you don’t feel happening until the container is empty and you realize you’ve been running on fumes for hours and the fumes are gone.
Keys, pause, keys.
I don’t remember closing my eyes.
***
Dark outside. The window was a black rectangle, no stars, no moon, the kind of dark that meant clouds had come in. The scanner was still on, its static lower now, or maybe I’d just adjusted to it. The desk lamp was off. The laptop screen was dark.
A blanket was over my shoulders.
Not draped. Tucked. Folded at the edges, snugged around my arms, the hem smoothed flat across my collarbones. Whoever had put it there had done it without waking me, which meant they’d done it slowly, which meant they’d stood beside this chair in the dark and taken the time to get it right.
I breathed. Didn‘t move.
He was on the floor.
Between me and the door. On his back, one arm folded under his head where his jacket was rolled into a pillow, the other resting on his chest. His boots were still on. His breathing was even and deep, and in the faint light from the scanner’s display, I could see the shape of him — big, solid, settled — filling the space between my chair and the only exit.
Not blocking it. Guarding it.
The difference mattered.
***
Light came through the window in a flat grey bar and landed on my boots. I was still in the chair, still upright, the blanket pooled around my waist where it had slipped during the night. My neck ached on the left side. My back was a series of complaints, stacked like invoices.
The floor was empty.
No jacket, no pillow, no indication that a man had slept there eight hours ago. The space between my chair and the door was just floor — wood planks, clean, bare. As if he’d never been there at all.
The camp stove was hissing. He stood beside it with his back to me, pouring water from a plastic container into a small kettle. He’d changed his shirt. Same jeans, same boots, but the shirt was different — dark blue, plain, the collar worn soft. His hair was damp at the temples. There was a basin in the bathroom, which meant he’d washed.
