Page 10 of Cracking with the Mountain Man

Me:

Yes!! Can I have a double table? I want room for the rolling and the display.

Sage:

Girl you can have whatever you want. Is Owen coming?

The cursor blinks after the last message. I haven't answered because I haven't asked him yet, and the reason I haven't asked him tells me something I don't want to examine.

He's on my porch. Splitting kindling for the woodstove because the temperature dropped ten degrees overnight and he noticed my kindling box was low without me saying a word. Boone supervises from the steps. The sound of the hatchet is rhythmic. Steady.

"Hey." Stepping out with two mugs. "I want to ask you something."

He takes the coffee. Drinks. Waits. Owen doesn't prompt. He just gives you space and lets you fill it or not.

"The fall market in town this Saturday. Sage asked me to do a cooking demo for the cookbook. Chimney cake, the one I finally cracked thanks to you fixing the oven." Deep breath. "Come with me."

The hatchet stops mid swing.

"To town."

"To the market. It'll be fun. People, food, music. You can stand in the back and scowl if you want. I just want you there."

He sets the hatchet down. His jaw does that thing where the muscle jumps once. "I don't do town events."

"I know. But I'm asking."

"Priya." My name. Gentle but firm. The voice he uses when he's about to close a door. "I go to town for supplies. That's it. I don't do crowds or small talk or standing around pretending I'm part of something."

"Part of something. Is that what this is? You're pretending?"

"That's not what I said."

"It's what it sounds like." The mug is hot in my hands. Grounding. "I'm asking you to spend a Saturday with me. At a market. Where people might see us together. Is that the problem? That people would see?"

His eyes go flat. Gray and distant. The warmth that's been building all week draining out of them. "You don't know what you're asking."

"I'm asking you to show up. That's it."

"Showing up is how people get hurt."

The words drop out of him like stones. Heavy. Old. Worn smooth from being carried too long. And something in his face shifts, breaks open for a second before he seals it shut.

"Danny Reeves hiked that trail because I said it was safe. I had bear activity reports on my desk for two weeks. Grizzly sightings, fresh scat, a kill site a hundred yards from the path. The data didn't hit the closure threshold, so I kept the trail open. He walked in with a daypack and came out on a helicopter with his face torn apart."

My hands go still on the mug.

"Everyone I've been responsible for, everyone who counted on me, something went wrong. Danny's daughter watches her father go through surgery after surgery because I signed a form. Three years and I still can't stop reading those reports looking for the thing I should have caught."

The pain in his voice is raw. Exposed. A wound he's been pressing on for three years, alone in that cabin with only Boone to witness it.

"Owen."

"I'm not the guy who shows up at your market and holds your hand in public. I'm the guy who gets people burned." He picks up the hatchet. Drives it into the chopping block. Leaves it there. "You should know that before you start making plans that include me."

The words land exactly where they're aimed. Right in the center of the bruise Vikram left. Four years of a man who wanted me in his kitchen but never in his life. Who cooked my food at dinner parties but never told his colleagues I was writing a book. Who kept me close in private and invisible in public.

And now Owen is standing on my porch telling me the same thing in different words. That he'll sleep in my bed and eat my food and hold me at night, but the moment I ask him to step into the daylight, he can't do it.