Page 10 of Caleb's Salvation
“Kate’s in Nome,” Eli said. “Been there for weeks, apparently, working as a local cop.”
“Are you shitting me?” I whistled. She’d come back for him. That sure as hell meant those five days together in the woods were just as important to her as I knew they were to Jackson. The guy was clearly lovesick. At least now he had to know she felt the same way. “Then what the fuck are you doing here?”
“My business.”
I snorted in disgust. Jackson could be so damn stubborn, but the truth was I didn’t have it in me to give him a don’t-screw-up-your-life speech.
“You know what? You’re right. I don’t care. I’ll just say this. I’ve known you for three years, Jackson. I saw you in a bar with Kate for ten minutes before she was taking you home. That, my friend, was the only time I ever saw you truly happy. But you do what you want. I got my own damn problems. Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot. I’m not talking to any of you.”
I took my beer and went to sit at a table alone.
I forgot to tell Eli about Vivienne needing wood. Shit.
Oh well. I would do it myself. This time.
3
The next day
Vivienne
“Where is he?” Caleb asked, as I came outside with a thermos of coffee for him.
He meant Sam. Because Caleb didn’t want to actually use my baby’s name. I wondered why that was. Maybe he didn’t like kids, but it’s not as if you couldn’t like Sam. He was a wonderful baby. Caleb just needed to spend more time with him and he would see that.
“Sleeping,” I told him.
I offered him the thermos. “I hope you take it black because I’m running low on sugar.”
He eyed it warily like it was a trap of some kind.
“You’re doing a nice thing for me, so I brought you coffee. That’s all, I promise,” I said.
He pointed toward the side of the cabin to a stump with a smaller axe leaning against it. “I brought you something you can handle. You need to be able to chop wood.”
I looked at the axe skeptically. I walked over and picked it up. It was considerably lighter than what Caleb was wielding, but I thought it might take forever to get through a tree. “You really think I can cut down a tree with this?”
He looked me up and down. “No. You’re not cutting down any trees. You just need to split logs.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going to cut down that tree over there then all I have to do is chop it up into smaller pieces. I think I can do that.”
He shook his head looking exacerbated.
“Vivienne—”
“Hey, you do know my name!” I teased him.
“Go home. Go back. Go…somewhere besides here.”
I don’t know why, because he made it clear all the time that he wanted me gone. But this time it hurt a little more. Maybe because I at least thought we were becoming friends.
“Why can’t you accept that I’m committed to staying?”
“Because you don’t know that I’m going to cut down that tree and split it into rounds. Then I’m going to stack it, cover it and sometime next fall after it’s had a chance to dry out, then and only then will that wood burn.”
I felt as stupid as he intended. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I come from Plainview, Texas. We don’t have a need to make a lot of fires.”
“Exactly. Which is why you don’t belong up here. Up here everything is a challenge.”
