Page 11 of Out of the Cold

Her eyes were bright with tears, but that might have been from the smoke. He hoped to hell it was from the smoke.

“I’ll walk you through it. It’s not so bad.”

Kneeling in front of the woodstove, she opened up the front hatch.

“That’s right. You build it from there, but you stoke it by adding logs through the top.”

Her hands trembled ever so slightly as she laid a bed of paper, then pieces of bark and twigs. She looked at him for approval.

“That’s good. Now go ahead and light it.”

She picked up the long box of matches and struck one against the side, then again and again. Her slender shoulders rose and her back turned rigid as she failed to light it. Everything in him wanted to take over for her, but it was a minor thing, and he didn’t want it to defeat her.

When the match head broke off, she stared at it with a look of betrayal, clearly at the end of her rope.

“Hang on a second,” he said, heading into the laundry room, where a storage closet held all manner of household things. He pushed flashlights and batteries aside and found what he was looking for.

“Use this,” he said, coming back with the long electric lighter Len and Suzy kept for the grill.

She lit the bundle of paper and sticks, holding her breath as the flames surged up, then letting it out again as the bark and twigs caught and began a steady burn.

“That’s good. The wood’s caught. You can add a couple of the smaller logs now.” He held out his gloves. “Put these on. They’ll keep you from getting splinters.”

She slipped them on, though they were enormous on her, and fed some smaller pieces into the stove. “I guess it’s obvious I lied about knowing how to do this.”

“You could have told me the truth. I’d have showed you what to do.”

She stared into the fire, her expression troubled. “I didn’t want to prove you right about me,” she said finally.

He sat down in a chair so he wasn’t looming over her and watched the fire lick at the logs. He’d been up half the night and was still exhausted, despite sleeping later than usual.

He closed his eyes to relieve the sting of smoke and fatigue.

“Gabriel?”

His eyes snapped open. Lucy was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t read. Behind her, the fire had settled into the logs, and she’d brought the dog in from outside. He must have been asleep for a few minutes.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “You can add more wood now. See how the logs are glowing like a piece of coal? That’s when you know it’s hot enough.”

She stood up and grabbed two heavy logs, handling them clumsily in her small hands. It was an effort not to take them from her.

“Throw in as much as you can fit, and that’s it. With a stove this size, as long as you feed it every eight hours or so, you’ll never have to start it from scratch again. Stoke it before you go to bed at night and there will still be a few embers in the morning to get it going again.”

He hadn’t been around anyone in months, and if asked, he’d have said that was how he wanted it. Itwashow he wanted it. But right this second, it wasn’t so bad being in Lucy’s company. He had the urge to close his eyes and let himself drift off again.

He stood.

“I suppose you were born knowing how to build a fire,” she said.

“I had to learn like anyone else.”

She sighed, her shoulders dropping. “Thank you for your help.” She held out the gloves, but he waved them away.

“Keep them.”

She hesitated, then withdrew her hand. “I’m sorry for bothering you. It won’t happen again.”

Her mouth was wide and tipped up at the corners, as if to compensate for her sad eyes. He had a sudden vision of her in his bed, waking him with her mouth and hands, her slim body molding to his.

---