Page 38 of Claimed on the Ridge

"He's checking conditions. The pass should open soon."

The pass is opening. The road out is right there. The route I've been planning since the first night is about to become real. I can still feel his mouth on my skin from a kiss that never finished. Every night since, the bag on the floor has been the only thing keeping me honest about why I'm still here.

I should want the pass to open. Every day I stay is another day Gary has time to narrow the search.

I don't want to leave. The realization sits in my throat like something I swallowed wrong.

"The pass should open soon," I say. Testing the sound.

Alex picks up his mug. Drinks. Sets it down. The pause before he speaks lasts long enough that I notice it.

"It should."

Two words. Yesterday he would have followed that with road conditions, switchback warnings, fuel stops. Yesterday he was a man conceding ground he didn't want to give. Today the concession is gone. Something behind his face has closed, and the thing that replaced it is harder, quieter, more certain.

"You're not going to tell me the route," I say.

"I'll tell you whatever you want to know." His voice is even. His hands are still. The stillness is new. "When it's safe for me to tell you."

Yesterday that line would have been about respecting my choices. Today it sounds like a man buying time, and I don't know what he's buying it for.

"What changed?" I ask.

"Nothing you need to worry about."

The deflection is so clean it's almost invisible. Almost. I've spent years reading the distance between what a man says and what a man means. Gary trained me for it.

The gap between Alex's words and his body is wider this morning than it's been since I got here. Whatever changed between yesterday's argument and this morning's coffee, he's not offering it up. The fact that a man who told me he'd check my tires and let me go is now measuring his words like ammunition tells me everything his silence won't.

The way he says it, the rawness underneath the control, tells me something shifted between yesterday's argument and this morning's coffee. I don't know what. But the man standing across from me isn't fighting the same fight he was fighting yesterday. This one is bigger.

The honesty is the problem. Gary was charming. Gary brought flowers, spoke softly, framed every locked door as protection. This man stands in his kitchen and tells me flat out that he won't explain himself. Not yet. Not until it's safe. Thewithholding is in his jaw, his hands, the measured weight of every word he chooses not to say.

The words come out bare, unpolished, with no performance behind them. He wants what he wants and he says so, and the directness of it does more to me than every performance Gary produced in years.

"Stop looking at me like that," I say.

"Like what?"

"Like you're deciding something."

"I already decided."

"What?"

"You'll know when it matters."

The words land somewhere I wasn't guarding. The heat has been building since the night he put his mouth on my throat, since his hand found the ridge of bone that shouldn't have been there. The night that ended before it started.

I should walk away. Pour more coffee. Make a joke about Cameron's oil stains or Amberly's spirometer. Put the banter back between us like a wall I can hide behind... I don't.

"And if I'm ready now?"

The kitchen goes quiet. Not the easy quiet from before the conversation started. It's the kind that happens right before something irreversible.

Alex stays exactly where he is. His hands stay flat on the counter.

"Then come here."