by Tarin Lex
My lungs feel squeezed together as I wipe the blood. The gunshot wound is swollen, blackened red and purple anger. I can’t see the bullet, but I would guess it’s lodged just beneath or up against his clavicle bone. Ouch. I bite back the urge to gag. As I clean it more, I notice a patch of dull-pink fibrous tissue peeking just below the entry point of my .38, right where Steele’s axillary nerve is likely to be. It seems to narrow an invisible eye at me as I uncover it—one that keeps buried secrets and a scar that’s ripped more than skin. In college I tended to retired military vets as part of my volunteer work. It was required, unrelated to my degree, rewarding but difficult. I’m reminded why right now. I’ve seen old combat wounds just like this one.
Steele has been shot in this shoulder before. And the first time, it was bad.
I choke back questions and tears and dress the wound and tie up the tourniquet. Rhett groans his displeasure when I don’t give him back the bone.
“Thanks,” Steele says.
“Sure,” I say.
We layer up and step outside to get to work. The snow reaches almost into the bed of the truck. I wouldn’t have guessed there’d be so much. Steele has shovels and other tools in the storage box in the bed. He hands me one.
It’s colder outside than anything I’m used to, but we warm up fast. It’s hard work and Steele is in significant pain this morning. He’s all big breaths and clipped sentences, and he hardly even looks at me. I can’t help but wonder if I did something wrong. I mean, aside from my attempted murder.
I try to loosen some of the tension with conversation. “You never answered my question,” I tease, keeping my voice light in spite of the fact I’m out of breath and we are just about out of water.
Steele replies with a grunt.
“You know…” I prompt, “…about why you live out here all alone.”
This time he doesn’t make a sound except for his one-armed shoveling, which is surprisingly a lot more effective than my shoveling with two good arms. Or just two arms.
He doesn’t say anything for a long time.
The sun rises more and softens the snow, making our task marginally easier as our muscles become more fatigued.
“I’m a writer,” he finally says. “I need to use my imagination. That means no distractions. Nothing intruding creative thought.” He pauses to catch a few breaths. “No city noises. No people. No irritating questions,” he huffs, and my heart takes shelter in my throat. Tender heart. “And the mountains…inspire me.”
I don’t disbelieve him. Nor do I buy it as the full story. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but I feel entitled to his story. I gave him my flower. I can handle his grittier truth.
“How did you get the other scar?”
He pulls a face. He says, “Salerno,” and I know better than to prod for more detail.
“I bet you were happy to come home.”
“I was married,” he says, surprising me. His next words are measured thin. “I saw horrible things. I did horrible things. So did she. Lauren had been cheating on me with my best friend. Decided not to tell me until I came home. Thought maybe it would hurt less. It didn’t. They were in love. I was done with the Army. Done with…everyone.”
“Oh, Steele. Oh my god. I’m so sorry—”
“You keep saying that.” He frowns, letting it show, and thrusts his shovel into the snow. His narrowed gaze pins me in place. “You think I’ve isolated myself out here so I can be pitied?”
“N-no.” I gulp. “I didn’t mean… I’m sor—” I bite my tongue.
“We’re almost done,” he clips. “Let’s just finish this and then you can get back to your regular life.”
I didn’t even know how hard I could be crushed until he does it. My heart breaks in tiny pieces and a sob wedges in my chest but I get it done. I just work. When it’s done I feign resolve. I can drive outta here in my own damn car. I place the shovel back in the bed and give Rhett a kiss goodbye. I turn away to start my descent.
Steele starts lumbering behind me as I slog downhill. “What are you doing?”
I don’t look back. “Getting my car.”
“Elsa.”
“You can still be the hero, Steele.” I glance back to wave him off. “You don’t need to follow me.”
Halfway down the steep hill I think I see where the roadside ends and the cliff drops off, but I don’t see the road itself. Or my rental. Only a sheet of bright, white, untouched snow. “What on earth. Where is my car?”
I wasn’t certain he’d follow all the way until Steele’s left arm wraps gently over me and he reaches for my hand. He points my finger with his until my sight finds the tiny black nub peeking up through the snow. I shudder hard at the implication.
“That isn’t…”
He sets his chin on my head. “It is.” The antenna. The only indication there’s a whole tiny car buried under the heavy snow.
“I could’ve. I almost.”
“You didn’t,” he soothes. “You’re safe.”
I spin toward him. I bury my face in his warm chest. The tears fall. All the tears. He strokes my back and my neck and rests his hand atop the bomber hat that I never gave back.
I know I wouldn’t have left the car, not until it was too late. And where would I have gone?
“Because of you,” I sob. “I’m alive…because of you.”
Steele is quiet for a minute, holding me tight. Then he says it.
“I’m falling in love with you, Trigger. That’s insane, but it’s true. I just don’t know if I can love you well.”
Fresh tears assault my eyes at his confession, and his doubt. I don’t even care how my face looks when I throw my head back to meet his gaze. I have something for him, too. But the words I want to say are pushed down deep in my chest.
“Let’s get to my cabin, it’s not too far. There’s coffee and cellular. We have some calls we need to make. Your sister…”
“Your doctor.”
And us.
Seven
Steele
There’s no more appropriate time to get cold feet than the middle of winter in the Wylder Bluffs.
Elsa helps me with the column shifter as we drive toward the cabin. Once we’re in range of a cell tower, her cell phone blows up with approximately seven thousand missed texts, calls, and voicemails. Looking almost numb to emotion, she replays one of those on speaker and I feel my eyes go wide as we listen together to her sister’s confession.
Elsa didn’t miss the ceremony last night…because there wasn’t one. Ari got cold feet.
She clicks the phone to sleep and holds it to her chest as she stares out the windshield.
I clear my throat. “You gonna call her back?”
“I will.” Her face pales when she turns again to look at me. “It’s my fault.”
I shake my head. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“I literally told her not to marry him.”
Okay, so maybe it is a little her fault. “Didn’t you say you hated him?” I press, gently. “Why?”
She takes a breath, then sighs, “I thought James was too controlling,” as if she’s second-guessing it now. “Like, Ari could only wear the clothes he bought for her, and he told her where she could go and who she could see, and she had to be home by ten every night. And little things. My sister had dyed her hair platinum blonde before they met and James had insisted she keep it that way. He paid for that upkeep too. So maybe, I dunno, maybe I was jealous of him. She’s my twin. I missed her. But maybe that was all just…normal.”
She slides me a look before I can tell her how not normal all of this sounds. We’re rolling into Stanbery, the small mountain town niched in the heart of Wylder Bluffs.
Elsa makes a little half-grin/half-frowny face that’s damn charming. “I’ve never had a boyfriend before. But, let’s just say in a hypothetical world, you were my boyfriend and you wanted to change your hair. Say you wanted to cut it all off or shave your beard”—she smiles for real, but I know she�
�s serious—“I’d be pissed.”
“Double standard,” I tease, enjoying the image of her hypothetical world more than I should. I slow the truck at a red light that turns green before we stop.
“Isn’t it though?”
“Maybe.” I flick my chin at the column shifter, and Elsa moves it back into second. I ease on the gas. “Maybe every relationship has its own set of terms. No one should ever be controlled, but autonomy exists on a spectrum. Like…a Venn diagram,” I pose as she listens with interest. “There’s space on one side where you’re just you, and space on the other where I’m just me, and a place in the middle where the two circles come together. If Ari wanted to stop dying her hair, I would think that decision falls in her own, autonomous circle.”
“Next to staying out late with me sometimes.”
“Absolutely,” I tell her. “Could James demand that Ari be home by a certain time, every night? No. That is kinda fucked up. But could she just stay out as late as she wanted whenever she wanted and never call him to tell him her plans? Maybe some relationships work like that. I would think that’s unfair.”
“I don’t disagree with that, but he wasn’t like that, Steele. He wasn’t reasonable.”
I don’t know the other details, but I can’t help feeling glad for Elsa, and her sister, for the called-off marriage.
“A Venn diagram,” she echoes. “I like that.”
I turn slightly to Elsa and give her a wink. “In our relationship, my long hair and scruffy beard can fall in the middle.”
“Our relationship?” She arches both of her eyebrows. “I said hypothetical.”
“You planted the visual, Trigger.” It hurts like hell to reach my right arm over the bench seat and take her hand, but I still do. “All I’m doing is keeping it there.”
Elsa
“You built this place?” Past Stanbery and into more woods, we finally come to the log cabin. It’s like something from a movie, or a Christmas card. I’m beyond amazed that he built it with his own two hands. Rhett’s tail swooshes intensely as we get closer and then he sits bolt upright when I shift into park.
Steele smirks. “I’m good for more than making you come.”
“And saving my life?”
“You saved mine.”
I smile big. We step out. There are tall pine trees, spruce, and firs dotted all around. Their branches look weighed down by the snow that lightly falls from them and blankets the ground and the roof of Steele’s cabin. Home. Rhett bounds all around the real-life winter wonderland. I want to sit in the rocking chair on his front porch right now—it looks so cozy against the backdrop of the striking Wylder Bluffs mountain range.
We go inside, where Steele’s home is charming and warm, rustic and homey, yet spacious. Everything is made of solid wood, except the stone fireplace and a few things made of wrought iron and stainless steel. It doesn’t need much of anything else, just a little…feminine touch.
Don’t go there, Els.
But he did say…
“You’re welcome to look around.”
Rhett follows me all around as I do just that. There’s a small hallway with two doors, one closed, the other ajar by an inch. I don’t venture back there, yet. I look around the open kitchen and living space and survey the pictures of his parents on the mantle, and their parents, and a pretty brunette who must be Steele’s younger sister. Someone who’s not a twin might say, they could be twins. Suddenly I want to know all their names and their stories. Where do they live? Do they ever come visit?
“Did you make this?” I ask, doffing his gloves to run my fingers along the oak.
“Sure did. The coffee table, too.” He points. The polished maple coffee table is scattered with journals and trade paperbacks and books on writing. I want to read his stories, too. “Call your family, Trigger.”
“Right. I need to. They must be worried sick about me.” I press my clammy palms together. The more time passes, the more I stall making the call. I miss my family. I miss Ari. I know they’re going to be worried…and also pissed with me for waiting so long to call them after we came into cell service. I ache for my sister and I’m so, so goddamn proud of her.
I take a breath and take out my phone from Steele’s jacket I’m still wearing, and he gets his. Before I call, I look up at him once more and without warning my heart lodges in my throat. “They’ll come get me,” I mutter. “And an ambulance will come get you.”
“Yes.”
The impending separation hurts more than I thought it would. Maybe because I hadn’t thought of it at all. Too wrapped up in the present moment. Wrapped up in him.
Steele might be at the hospital for a couple of days. My flight back to Dallas leaves tonight.
“Will I ever see you again?” I ask.
“You will,” he says.
“How do you know?”
He just grins. I see the creative spark in his eyes when I look at him now, past the deeper shades of blue. Past the tender spot where he still lets himself hurt, sometimes. Past his desire to be all alone. Therein lies an indomitable confidence. His spirit.
He comes toward me and says, “When you know, you know.”
I angle my head sideways at him, trying and surely failing to copy his grin. “How ’bout an answer I don’t have to decrypt?”
He steps closer, looking so damn self-assured. “I know because I’ll be here.” He traces a line down my cheek with one finger, then coasts his hand into my hair and his bomber hat slips off my head. “…and you will come back.”
I tilt my chin way up to meet his stare.
“El-sa,” he says it like the first time. “Call your folks. And then if you want, you can jump in the shower while you wait for them.”
I giggle at that, but I’m sure I really need one. And something to eat. And… “Is this your idea of seduction, sir?”
“You’ve already ended me, Trigger.” His voice steels me as he whispers, “I’m not joining you in there. I’m making pancakes.”
Ooh, yes! A man after my own heart!
With his eyes, then with his mouth, and with everything—he kisses me.
Epilogue
Babygirl,
I always thought, if I just had to fall in love, the least I could do was fall in love someplace warm. Or with someone who’d ever consider living someplace warm—sunny, sea level, maybe a little bit hoity-toity? ;)—but we don’t get to choose who we fall in love with.
We love who we love.
Not that I’ve complained. It’s beautiful here. Not a lot of shopping, but plenty to do. I’m now working toward a nursing degree online, but when I get the itch or need some retail therapy, Boise isn’t too far away. Nursing feels right like your dad feels right. Like nothing else ever has.
It’s been eighteen months since that fateful night. I’m sitting up in bed in our homey log cabin—now with all the girly touches I hope you’ll love—watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding and writing to you over my big fat pregnant belly. I smell pancakes and fresh coffee. It’s decaf, but at least Daddy’s got that huckleberry jam I go nuts over. Have I mentioned your dad makes the best pancakes on Earth? Yep—I am seven months’ pregnant with the daughter of the world’s all-time greatest pancake-maker.
Aren’t you and I a lucky pair? :)
This life is such a trip! I love watching your little kicks against my abdomen. I could wait and stare for hours. Sometimes I wiggle a bit to prod you for more. There’s this electric yet sober anticipation of your next movement. And the next. I press my hands to my belly and it’s mind-blowing to actually feel you there, so acutely. And to almost, sort of…see you in there. A real-live lovebug. Made of the two of us—so much love.
Babygirl, please, try to never scare me like I scared our family that night. You’ll hear the story a hundred times before you’re ten, how your nana kissed me as if I’d actually died and been resurrected the next morning. How Papa crossed his arms and said a firm ‘I told you so’ before he wrapped me in a teddy-bear hu
g. There were tears in his eyes when we came apart and that’s when I knew how worried he’d really been over me. How my heart made a tight fist.
Your aunt Ari was quiet at first. I was too. We held each other last. It’s rare for us to not have a clue what the other is feeling, you’ll see, but that’s what it was. When the time came, I told her all about my snowy night with the insane mountain man. She told me how anxious she’d been about marrying James, and when I didn’t show up for the ceremony, that little piece of her that had felt unscrewy and rattled around in her heart had stopped second-guessing and snapped in tight. She finally knew. She couldn’t marry him, it didn’t feel right. It hadn’t felt right for a long time. Neither of us ever really believe in signs, but my sister took it as one. My absence was her validation she desperately needed.
Aunt Ari is finally coming to visit us here, just as soon as you arrive. Now that the memory of this place isn’t so raw. Your dad says she should rewrite her story—make these mountains her own instead of his or the way things ended. The fact is Ari took back her life here. Started something new. She took the wheel in Wylder Bluffs and felt a little guilty for breaking the man’s heart but never looked back. That’s something to remember. Not something to try to forget.
Remember that.
Oh Babygirl, I’m almost as excited to see her again as I am to meet you! To have my whole, complete family. Even if your dad fits in with ‘my’ side like one of those kitschy British fascinators. Meaning he doesn’t fit naturally at all, but he tries, and it’s perfect. There’s love there. That’s what matters, Babygirl. All the love.
Our life together is cozy, quiet bliss—at least until you’re here. We’ll need to pin down a name for you soon. Daddy likes Charlotte; I’ve been nudging him toward Leia for weeks. You’re a princess already, but it’s almost impossible not to come up with a name your dad has already used for a character he’s killed off. (I promise that’s funny, although I do worry about him sometimes! XD) I adore Leia, and it seems I’ve got Daddy halfway on board… We’ll see!