Page 90 of Curvy Cabin Fever
The kitchen freezes in a state of domestic bliss interrupted—Morgan with the spatula half-raised, Rhett with his coffee cup hovering near his lips, Damien turned halfway from the window, his expression unreadable.
Morgan’s the first to break the silence. He doesn’t look up from the skillet where pancake batter has begun to bubble at the edges. “That’s fine,” he says, too quickly, his voice unnaturallybright as he flips a pancake with practiced ease. “We’ll go with you. Make a day of it.”
“No,” I respond, quieter than I intended, my voice barely carrying across the kitchen. “I mean...I have to take it back. As in...return it and leave here.” The latter words hang in the air between us, impossible to take back once spoken.
This time, they all freeze. The mood shifts, like a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure before a storm. Rhett sets his mug down with enough force that coffee sloshes over the rim, spreading in a dark puddle across the wooden table. Morgan stops humming, his shoulders tensing beneath the worn cotton of his borrowed shirt. Damien finally turns fully from the window, his expression sharpening as he focuses entirely on me.
“I was only supposed to stay for two weeks,” I continue, trying to keep my voice level despite the tightness in my throat. “I told myself this was temporary. That I’d come here to...disappear for a little while. Breathe and reset. Figure out what comes next after everything fell apart back home.”
“You can breathe here,” Damien interjects. His voice is calm, but I can see the tension in his jaw, the slight narrowing of his eyes that betrays his concern. The morning light catches the angles of his face, highlighting the stubble along his jawline that I’ve traced with my fingertips in the darkness of our shared bed.
“Yeah,” I whisper, looking down at the swirling coffee in my mug. “That’s the problem.” The admission costs me something to voice aloud—the acknowledgment that breathing has become easier here, with them, than it ever was before. That leaving might mean returning to that feeling of suffocation I’d grown so accustomed to that I hardly noticed it anymore.
Morgan walks over and takes the coffee from my hands, setting it down on the counter with careful precision. Then he pulls me close, wrapping his arms around my waist and resting his forehead against mine in a gesture so intimate it makesmy heart ache and my lower lip wobble. “Don’t do that,” he murmurs, his breath warm against my face, eyes searching mine with an intensity that makes it impossible to look away. “Don’t start saying goodbye before we even ask you to stay. That’s not how this works.” His hands are steady on my waist, anchoring me when I feel like I might drift away on the current of my own uncertainty.
“I’m not saying goodbye,” I whisper back, my hands finding purchase on his shoulders, feeling the solid warmth of him beneath my palms. “I’m just...trying to figure out what comes next. What happens when the snow melts completely and we all have to go back to our real lives?”
“Then let us help you figure it out,” he suggests with that quiet confidence that drew me to him from the beginning. “You don’t have to decide everything alone anymore.”
I turn to Rhett, who hasn’t moved from his position at the table. His arms are folded defensively across his chest, creating a barrier between himself and whatever emotions are threatening to break through. He’s staring at the table like it personally betrayed him, jaw working as he grinds his teeth in the way he does when he’s processing something difficult.
“Rhett,” I say softly, needing to hear from him, too.
He exhales sharply, nostrils flaring as he finally looks up. The vulnerability in his expression nearly undoes me—Rhett, who has spent so long hiding behind walls of sarcasm and indifference, now looking at me with everything laid bare in his eyes.
“I don’t know what this looks like outside of here,” he confesses, his voice rough with emotion he’s still learning how to express. “I barely know what it looks likeinhere. This wasn’t supposed to happen. None of it was.”
“But you want it,” I counter.
It’s not a question.
He lifts his eyes to mine, and everything is there, written in the depths of his gaze. All the pain, the heat, the confusion. The want that terrifies him even as it draws him forward.
“I wantyou,” he states simply, the admission costing him visibly. Then, with even greater effort, he adds, “And him.”
He doesn’t look at Morgan when he says it. But Morgan hears it. I feel it in the way his body tenses against mine, the slight intake of breath that betrays his surprise at hearing Rhett acknowledge what has been growing between them.
“No offence taken,” Damien snorts, and I can’t help but laugh.
I fucking love Damien.
Rhett swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “I’ve spent my whole life trying not to bethis—to not want this. And now I do, and I don’t know how to fucking be myself without breaking something.” The rawness in his voice fills the kitchen, honest and terrified and brave all at once.
“You’re not breaking anything,” Morgan says, his voice quiet but sure as he keeps one arm around me but extends his other hand toward Rhett. “You’re building something. We all are. Something that didn’t exist before, that we’re figuring out as we go.”
Damien walks over and folds his arms across his chest, his presence solid and grounding as always. He looks between the three of us, his expression thoughtful rather than troubled. “What doyouwant, Aria?” he asks, cutting through the emotional tangle with his characteristic directness.
I blink, momentarily thrown by the simplicity of the question. “What?”
“We know whatwewant,” he says, gesturing to include Morgan and Rhett in his statement. “We want you, all of us do. Even if it’s messy or complicated. So what do you want?”
Well. It’s not that I don’t know. It’s that saying it out loud makes it real. It makes it something I can lose, something that can hurt me when it inevitably falls apart, as everything in my life eventually has.
But I do it anyway.
“I want all of you.”
The words come out like a prayer. Like a confession. Like a fucking war cry against every doubt and fear that’s tried to convince me I’m asking for too much, wanting something impossible. “I want this. I wantus. I just don’t know what that looks like when we’re not trapped in a cabin with snow piling up around us. When the real world comes crashing back in with all its judgments and expectations.”
