Page 31 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

We barely make it to the shelter before the first crack of thunder splits the sky, a sound so loud it reverberates through my molars. The North Ridge shelter is a glorified box of cedar and stone, built forty years ago by my grandfather for trail crews who got caught out by the Cascades’s erratic temperament. It’s single-occupancy by design, a narrow space meant to keep one person dry and alive until morning. It has a wood stove, a small kitchenette that consists of a shelf, and exactly one bunk tucked into the corner.

I slam the heavy door shut and drop the iron bar into place just as the wind hits. The force of it makes the entire structure groan. Rain follows a second later, hammering the tin roof. I flip the light switch. Nothing happens. I try it again and again, a rhythmic clicking that’s the only sound in the room besides the storm.

“The generator,” I mutter, staring at the dead bulb. “I told Walt the spark plug was faulty. I specifically wrote it on the maintenance board in red marker.”

“The creek is already rising,” Rowan says from the window. He’s a silhouette against the gray chaos outside, his height making the small room feel like a dollhouse. “The footbridge on the lower trail won’t hold. Not in this.”

I sit down on the single bunk, the springs squeaking in protest. The reality of the situation settles over me like wet wool. We’re six miles out. The bridge is likely nothing but toothpicks now. The power is out, the generator dead, and the storm sounds like it’s trying to peel the mountain’s skin off. The bed is barely wide enough for me, let alone a man built like a structural support beam.

“So,” I say, raising my voice to be heard over the roar of the wind, “I guess we’re roommates for the night. I should warn you, I’m a blanket thief. It’s a documented character flaw.”

Rowan turns away from the window, his expression unreadable in the deepening shadows. There’s no panic or annoyance in his face. This is a man who has lived through three hundred years of weather and isn’t impressed by this particular iteration. He moves to the wood stove, the two steps he takes making no sound on the floorboards, a jarring contrast to his sheer mass.

“You should get out of those wet clothes,” he says, his voice a low rumble that seems to vibrate through the floor as he begins stacking logs inside the stove. “The temperature will drop soon. I’ll get the fire started.”

I glance down at my flannel shirt, which is plastered to my shoulders. My pants feel like they weigh twenty pounds. He’s right, of course, which only makes it more irritating. I reach into my pack for the change of clothes I keep in a waterproof bag—a habit my father hammered into me during our few disastrous camping trips. Retreating into the far corner of the room behind the small dining table, I start peeling off the wet layers.

The fire catches, a flickering orange glow that helps the darkness in the room recede. I pull on an oversized sweatshirt and a pair of leggings, the dry fabric a sudden, immense relief against my skin. When I step back into the light, Rowan is kneeling in front of the stove, his hands spread toward the heat. His damp shirt is clinging to the ridges of his back and the heavy curve of his shoulders. In the flickering firelight, he looks powerful and strange and entirely too close.

“Your turn,” I say. “Unless you have some kind of internal Guardian heater I don’t know about. Actually, given the beeswax smell, maybe you just melt if you get too hot?”

He doesn’t laugh, but the corner of his mouth quirks up. It’s the Rowan equivalent of a stand-up routine. Standing, he pulls his shirt over his head in one fluid motion. I’ve seen him in his Guardian form—bark-skinned and terrifyingly beautiful—but there’s something more intimate about this. This was just skin. Taut, olive-toned skin over muscles that look like they’ve been forged in a high-pressure environment. There’s a jagged white scar over the ribs on his left side, which stands out against the warm tone of his flesh.

I look away, suddenly very interested in the label on a can of peaches. My heart has started a frantic, uneven rhythm against my ribs, a physical reaction to the sheer amount of space he is taking up in my head and inside the room. I’ve spent weeks telling myself this is only a business arrangement, even when his breath brushed over my lips. I’m the marketer; he’s the product. We’re in a strategic alliance against the internet. But business partners don’t usually find themselves trapped in a ten-by-ten box while the world is ending outside.

“There are blankets in the chest under the bed,” he says, draping his wet shirt over the back of a chair. “They’re wool. They’ll be scratchy, but they’ll keep the heat in.”

“Wool is fine,” I say, my voice a pitch higher than usual, my cheeks suddenly very hot, which has nothing to do with the fire in the woodstove. “I’m an art history major. I spent four years in unheated libraries wearing vintage knitwear. I’m basically part sheep at this point.”

I drag the chest out, the heavy wood scraping against the floor, and pull out two thick, gray blankets that smell of aged cedar. I hand one to him and keep the other, wrapping it around my shoulders as I sit back down on the bunk. The fire is roaring now, throwing long, dancing shadows against the walls. Outside, the wind howls, a desperate, lonely sound that makes the shelter feel like the only safe place left on earth.

Rowan pulls the single wooden chair closer to the stove and sits. For a moment, I worry that his large frame will break it, but it holds—a trick of his will, the magic, concealment, or whatever. He looks perfectly at peace with his legs stretched out in front of the stove, a man who has spent centuries waiting for things to pass.

The firelight catches the amber in his eyes and the sharp line of his jaw. He’s so still. It’s a kind of stillness that doesn’t exist in my world of pings and notifications and the constant, buzzing anxiety of a failing bank account.

“Don’t you ever get tired of it?” I ask, the question slipping out before I could edit it. “The waiting. The being alone. I get twitchy if my phone is in the other room for more than twenty minutes. I don’t know how you’ve done it for decades.”

Rowan turns his head toward me, his expression thoughtful. “Time is different when you aren’t trying to outrun it. Humans spend their lives building fences against the wind. I just watch the wind move.”

“Spoken like a man who doesn’t have a mortgage,” I mutter, pulling the blanket tighter. “Fences are expensive. Especially when they’re heritage-listed and falling into a ravine.”

“You’re still thinking about the lodge,” he says, rising from the chair and walking toward the bunk. He sits down on the end, his weight tilting the mattress so I slide a few inches closer. “You should sleep, Wren. The bridge won’t be passable until the runoff slows. That will be hours.”

“I can’t sleep when it sounds like someone is playing a drum solo on the roof,” I say. I am hyper-aware of the distance between us. Six inches of scratchy wool and heavy air. I can smell the pine on him, the salt of his skin, and that clean, cold-air scent that I’d started to associate with safety. “And you can’t sit in that chair all night. You’re seven feet tall. Your spine will turn into a question mark.”

“I’ve slept in worse places,” he says, his voice low. “Trees. Stone ledges. The ground is often more honest than a bed.”

“Well, this bed is honest enough for two if we’re strategic about it,” I say, my heart taking another frantic leap. “It’s just... physical proximity. Like a very crowded elevator. Or a survival documentary. We’re just conserving thermal energy. It’s purely scientific.”

Rowan’s heavy, unfocused gaze lands on me. There’s no mockery in his eyes, no clever redirect. Just a terrifying, ancient honesty that has my breath stuttering. He reaches out, his hand hovering over mine for a second before he lets it settle on the blanket. His skin is warm, even through the wool.

“You are very bad at lying to yourself, Wren Cassidy,” he says softly.

The air in the room seems to thicken, the sound of the storm fading into a dull roar that doesn’t matter anymore. I glance from his broad, steady hand to his face. He’s waiting for me to be sure. Rowan isn’t the type to push or demand. He won’t accept my offer of sharing the bed until he’s absolutely certain that it’s what I want. I reach out, fingers trembling as I touch the line of his jaw. His beard is rough, a reminder that he is here, in this moment, with me.

“I’m not lying,” I whisper, my thumb tracing the curve of his lip. “I’m just... negotiating the terms.”

He leans forward, closing the distance until his forehead rests against mine. His breath is warm against my mouth, and I ache to close the distance. I’ve imagined his lips on mine since that first time I felt his breath brushing over me. But he doesn’t kiss me yet. He waits, giving me every second I need to back away, to make a joke, deflect and revert back to the curator of the myth. I don’t do any of that. I lean in, my eyes fluttering shut as my lips finally meet his.