Page 35 of Faultline

"I'm not going back to the guest room," I say.

He doesn't answer with words. He steps back far enough for me to slide off the table, and my bare feet hit the cold floorboards. My legs are unreliable. He steadies me with a hand at my hip, and we walk down the hall together, his palm warm against my skin.

Past the guest room door. Past the bed with the hospital corners I pulled tight this morning. A museum exhibit behind a velvet rope.

His bed is unmade. The quilt shoved to one side, the sheets holding the impression of a body that sleeps alone and takes up the whole mattress.

He pulls me down beside him and drags the quilt over us, and his arm locks around my waist before I've finished settling.

He pulls away once. I hear the front door lock turn, the quiet beep of the sensor arming. Then his weight is back, his chest against my spine, his arm banding across my ribs with a possessiveness that doesn't soften when his breathing evens out.

Neither of us discusses it. The guest room door stays open. The bed I made this morning stays made.

In the morning, his hand will be on my hip and the quilt will be twisted around my legs because I steal blankets in my sleep. His body will be pressed against mine, warm enough to make the cold irrelevant. The coffee will need making. The tree line will need reading. The investigation will need another day of calls and files and the slow, grinding work of proving that a corporation with clean paperwork is doing dirty things to vulnerable people.

All of that can wait until the sun comes up.

Right now the cabin is warm, and the man beside me is holding me like he has no intention of waking up without me.

I let him.

11

LIAM

The woman in my bed steals blankets the way a creek steals a bank. Slow, inevitable, completely without apology. I wake up with a strip of quilt across my shins and the rest of it wrapped around her in a cocoon that leaves one shoulder exposed and her hair fanned across the pillow like she's been tossing in her sleep.

She has been. I know because I woke twice in the dark and found her restless, her legs moving under the stolen quilt, her breathing shallow and fast enough to tell me she's running from something that only finds her when her guard drops. Both times I locked my arm across her ribs and pinned her against my chest until the breathing slowed. She didn't wake. She didn't fight it.

Her body has stopped arguing with mine, and how she settles under the weight of my arm, like it's the only perimeter that holds, does something to the base of my spine that has nothing to do with sleep.

The morning light comes through the east window in a cold gray band that hits the opposite wall first, then crawls down to the bed in increments. Late September light. Tired on arrival and gone by four.

I've been awake for twenty minutes. The curve of her spine is warm under my palm, and the weight of her against my ribs is the specific gravity of a decision I'm not planning to unmake.

The guest room is down the hall, the bed made with corners tight enough to bounce a coin. A monument to something that stopped being true before last night.

My hand traces the line of her shoulder blade to the dip of her spine. She stirs. Doesn't wake. Her wrist is turned on the pillow, and the faint discoloration where the table edge pressed into her skin is visible in the gray light.

I remember the sound she made when her hands locked on that wood. I remember what I was doing to her when she gripped hard enough to mark herself. The memory settles into my hands and stays, and leaving this bed becomes the hardest thing I'll do today.

I slide out of bed without waking her, pull on jeans, and walk barefoot to the kitchen. The floorboard outside the bathroom creaks like it always does, and I skip it out of habit that predates her presence in this cabin by a decade.

The woodstove needs feeding. The coffee needs making. The tree line needs reading.

The forest is quiet when I push back the kitchen curtain. No wind. The spruce hold their positions against a sky that's been gray since before dawn, overcast nailed to the ridgeline and not moving for days.

I check the sensor display on the counter. No alerts overnight. The access road is empty.

I build the fire. Grind the beans. Fill the pot. The routine runs on rails that were laid long before Tosh's coffee mug appeared beside mine on the counter, but the rails have bent under her weight. Her jacket on the hook beside mine. Her laptop charging at the outlet beside the table. Her files colonizing every flat surface in the kitchen.

Weeks ago this cabin was mine. Now it's full of evidence that a woman has breached every perimeter I built. The part of me that should want the space back is the same part that lay in bed cataloging the marks on her wrist. Wanting to leave more.

She comes down the hall wearing my flannel over nothing. The hem hits her mid-thigh. She moves straight for the coffee with the single-mindedness of a woman who doesn't function before caffeine and has stopped pretending otherwise.

My fingers stop moving on the counter. The flannel is buttoned wrong, one side hanging lower than the other, and the collar sits wide enough to show the red mark my mouth left on her collarbone last night. She hasn't looked in a mirror yet. She doesn't know it's there.

I do. The knowledge lands low and heavy, and I grip the counter edge because the alternative is crossing the kitchen and showing her exactly how much damage I can do to a morning routine.