Page 27 of Out on a Limb

My hand spreads over the glass, pressing hard like I could touch her. I’m so close now, and she’s here and whole and safe. A lump lodges in my throat, and I swallow hard as I knock.

Jana sits bolt upright, honey-brown eyes wide and fixed on me. Her dark hair is messier than ever, sticking up at the back. The sight makes my insides ache.

She left me. Why did she leave me?

Why is sleeping on Flint’s office floor better than a night spent by my side?

It takes what feels like forever for Jana to blink the shock away, then she pushes to her feet, shedding garments like the trees dropping their red leaves for autumn. I stare at her through the window, still too rattled to school my expression into something less raw.

Jana is here.

She’s safe.

But it’s not your business, is it, asshole?

The window sticks the first time Jana tries to open it. She huffs and sets her jaw, puts her shoulder into it, until the frame judders up enough for us to talk.

“I should have left a note,” is the first thing Jana says, barely meeting my eyes. Talking to my chest instead. “I thought about that on the walk down. I’m sorry.”

If my insides weren’t already an ash-coated wasteland, that shit would hurt. But now that I’ve found her safe and whole, the truth of what’s happened sinks in: Jana isn’t hurt or in any danger. She just wanted to get away from me.

Beyond the bone-trembling despair of that revelation, everything else barely stings.

“What would the note say?” I ask, tone dull.

Jana glances up at me, alarmed, and her forehead pinches with concern when she finds me a burned-out husk of a man. I’m propped up in the open window, but I’m not fully here anymore. “It, um. Stig? Are you okay?”

I shrug, feeling sicker than a dog.

Because it’s not Jana’s problem that she doesn’t feel the same way that I do. She’s got every right to slip away from my bed if that’s what she truly wants, and I refuse to make her feel bad about it. She doesn’t owe me shit.

But Christ, I’m ready to topple over into this grass and sleep until spring. Screw this. Screw all of this. Turns out I was right all along: disappearing into the wilderness is the smart way to go. Sticking around, falling in love, dreaming of a future… that’s how you get your ass handed to you.

“Are you wearing a t-shirt?” Jana reaches through the window and plucks at the thin cotton, gasping when she finds it sweat-soaked and ice-cold. “Oh, god. Stig! You’ll get hypothermia!”

Rubbing both hands down my face, I force out the words that will make her feel better. “I’ll warm up at the cabin. Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry about it? Oh, just get in here—”

With surprising strength, Jana yanks on my wrist, my elbow, my shoulder, forcing my numb body to climb through the open window.

It’s not graceful. I’m too dazed, too destroyed, barely present in my own chilled body, but I can never deny this woman anything. She wants me to climb through the window? Guess I’m climbing through the window. No problem.

My boots thump against the floorboards, and I stagger sideways and knock the desk with my hip.

“Careful,” Jana says, but it’s my hip she’s fussing over, not the desk, rubbing at my bruised bit through my jeans. I stare down at her hand on me, dry-eyed.

“Shoot,” she says when she feels my bare skin for a second time. My hands, my forearms, my biceps—I’m chilled everywhere, and under my clothes too.

And yeah, in hindsight, charging down the mountainside in nothing but a damp t-shirt on a cold night was the stupidest thing I could’ve done, but my rational brain wasn’t driving this car, okay? It was instincts all the way, and my instincts were screaming for Jana.

“We need to warm you up right now.”

“Skin on skin,” I mutter, thinking out loud more than anything else, going over all the first aid training I’ve ever had. And I’d never demand that of Jana, never expect that of her, especially since she just left me—but she shoves the window closed again, cursing as it rattles in the frame, then yanks her sweater over her head and follows it with her t-shirt and the yoga bra she sleeps in. They all hit the pile of garments with a soft thwump.

“Get in the nest.” She points at the mound of clothes on the office floor, and I cross there and drop to my knees without argument. When my fingertips graze over the t-shirt she just took off, the fabric is warm. I fight the urge to shove it against my nose and inhale.

“Okay,” she says. “I guess lie back?”

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