Precious and Fragile Things Read online

  When Gilly came out of the bathroom, she found the man sitting at the dining room table. He’d lit the lamp there and spread out a bunch of wrinkled papers. He held his head in his hands like the act of reading them all had given him a headache.

  Gilly cleared her throat, then realized she hadn’t used her voice since they’d stopped for gas. Four, five hours ago? Less than that or longer, she had no idea. She waited for him to look up, but he didn’t.

  He ran his fingers again and again through the dark lengths of his hair, until it crackled with static in the cold air. Gilly waited, shifting from foot to foot. Awkward, uncertain. Even if she did speak, what could she possibly say?

  He looked up. Under the thin scruff of black beard, his face had fine, clean lines. Thick black lashes fringed his deep brown eyes, narrowed now beneath equally dark brows. He wasn’t ugly, and she couldn’t force herself to find him so. With a shock, Gilly realized he wasn’t much younger than she was, maybe three or four years.

  “My uncle,” he said suddenly, looking up at her.

  Gilly waited for more, and when it didn’t come she slipped into one of the battered chairs. She folded her hands on the cold wood. It felt rough beneath her fingers.

  He touched the pile of papers, shoving a couple of them toward her. “This was my Uncle Bill’s place.”

  Gilly made no move to take the papers. She found her voice, as rusty as the gate had been. “It’s…quaint.”

  His brow furrowed. “You making fun of me?”

  She expected anger. More knife waving. Perhaps even threats. Anger she could handle. Fight. She could be angry in response. Instead she felt hollow shame. He’d spoken in the resigned fashion of a man used to people mocking him, and she had been making fun.

  “Was it a hunting cabin?”

  “Yeah.” He looked around. “But he lived here, too. Fixed it up a little at a time. I used to come here with him, sometimes. Uncle Bill died a couple months ago.”

  Condolences rose automatically to her lips and she pressed them closed. It would be ridiculous to express sorrow over a stranger’s death, especially to this man. Her fingers curled against the table. Surreal, all of this.

  You’re not dreaming this, Gilly. You know that, right? This is real. It’s happening.

  She knew it better than anything and yet still couldn’t manage to process it. She stared across the table. “He left you this cabin?”

  “Yeah. It’s all mine now.” He nodded and gave her a grin shocking in its rough beauty, its normality. They might’ve been chatting over coffee. This was more terrifying than his anger had been.

  She looked around the room, like maybe it might look better with another glance. It didn’t. “It’s cold in here.”

  He shrugged, pulling the sleeves of his sweatshirt down over his fingertips and hugging his arms around himself. “Yeah. I could light a fire. That’ll help.”

  “It’s late,” Gilly pointed out. She’d been about to say she needed to go to bed, but she didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. Fear flared again as she watched him run his tongue along the curve of his smile. He was bigger than she was and certainly stronger. She wouldn’t be able to stop him from forcing her.

  “Yeah” was all he said, though, and made no move to leap across the table to ravish her. He blinked, cocking his head in a puppyish fashion that might have been endearing under other circumstances. “Let’s go to bed.”

  Stricken, Gilly didn’t move even when he pushed away from the table and gestured to her. Her throat dried. Lie back and enjoy it, she thought irrationally, remembering what a friend of hers had said a blind date gone horribly wrong had told her to do. Gilly’s friend had kicked the would-be rapist in the nuts and run away, but Gilly had given up the chance for running back at the gas station. Even if she ran, now, where would she go?

  He went to the propane lamps and lowered the flames to a dim glow, then jerked his head toward the steep, narrow stairs. “Beds are upstairs. C’mon.”

  On wobbly legs she followed him. She’d been right about the stairs. Dark, steep, narrow and splintery. Festooned with cobwebs and lit only by the lantern he carried.

  The stairs entered directly into one large room that made up the entire upstairs. More propane sconces, wreathed in spiderwebs furry with dust, lined the walls beneath the peaked roof. The windows on each end were grimy with dirt and more cobwebs. A waist-high partition with a space to walk through divided the room in half widthwise. A low, slatted wall protected unwary people from falling down the stairs.

  “Beds.” He pointed. “You can have the one back there.”

  He meant beyond the partition. Gilly realized he didn’t intend to follow her when he handed her the lantern. She passed the double row of twin beds, three on each side of the room, then went through the open space in the middle of the partition. On the other side were a sagging full-size bed, a dresser, an armoire and an ancient rocking chair. A faded rag rug covered the wooden plank floor.

  “Cozy,” she muttered and set the lantern on the dresser.

  The man had already crawled into one of the beds on the other side. Gilly, mouth pursed with hesitant distaste, pulled back the heavy, musty comforter. The sheets beneath were no longer white, but still fairly clean. Nothing rustled in them, at least nothing she could see.

  She unlaced her useless boots and slipped them off with a sigh, wriggling her toes. She hadn’t realized how much they hurt until she took off her boots. Without removing her coat, Gilly crawled into bed and pulled the knobby cover up to her chin. The thought of putting her head on the pillow made her cringe, and she pulled her hood up to cover her hair.

  His voice came at her out of the dark. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Gillian. Gilly.”

  “I’m Todd.”

  She heard the squeak of springs as he settled further into the mattress. Then exhaustion claimed her, and she fell asleep.

  4

  What finally woke Gilly was not a warm body burrowing next to hers and the stench of an overripe diaper. Nor was it the sudden blaring of a television tuned permanently to the cartoon channel. What woke her this morning was the numbness of her face.

  She hadn’t slept without nightly interruption for more than five years but now her eyes drifted open slowly. Gradually. Bright morning sunshine dimmed by the dirt on the window glass filled the room. She’d rolled herself into the covers, cocooned against the bitter winter air. Her hood, pulled up around her hair, had kept her head warm enough. Her face, though, had lain exposed all night. She couldn’t feel her cheeks or her nose or her lips.

  The night rushed back at her. Her heart thumped, and her mouth behind the frozen lips went dry. Gilly sat up in the sagging double bed, fighting to untangle the covers that had protected her through the night.

  She managed to push them off. On stiff legs she got out of bed and hugged her coat around her. Her boots were gone.

  Everything in the dusty attic room shone with an unreal clarity that defied the fuzziness of her thoughts. How long had she slept? The sudden, panicked thought she might have slept for more than just one night, that she’d been gone for days, forced her into action.

  In the light of day she could no longer take solace in the dark to hide her actions, to excuse her decisions. She’d made a terrible mistake last night. She could only hope she had the chance to fix it.

  Gilly pounded down the stairs, breath frosting out in front of her. She hurtled into the living room and stumbled over her own feet. She caught herself on the back of the hideous plaid sofa.

  From the kitchen, Todd swung his shaggy brown head around to look at her from his place at the stove. “You all right?”

  She didn’t miss the irony of his concern. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  By the time she walked across the living room and entered the kitchen, her stomach had begun to grumble like thunder. The last thing she’d eaten was half a granola bar Arwen had begged for and then refused because it had raisins in it. Gilly swallowed a