“Well then why won’t you look at me?”
He huffed out a long breath. “I can’t.”
“Why?” she pressed, exasperated now.
“I just can’t, Harper.” He didn’t know what more to say. His heart thudded, lungs tight. He was drowning, because even though she was okay, that worry wouldn’t just abate. He was still trapped in that moment when he’d found her, barely conscious. Almost gone. Every muscle in his body was still helplessly trying to figure out how to save her, how to stop the worst from happening.
“Fraser… It was an accident.”
“I know.”
She rubbed her face wearily. “I’m sorry if I worried you.”
He said nothing, only clenched his fingers around the arms of his chair.You did worry me, he wanted to say.You worried me so much I can’t fucking breathe.
“Maybe it’s good that I’m leaving,” she whispered finally. “I won’t keep getting myself into trouble. Won’t keep causing you problems.”
“Aye, maybe.” His words were harsh, unfairly so, and he knew he would regret them later. Now, he could only think about getting through this moment.
Harper’s chin wobbled. She looked down at the thick blankets encasing her. “You don’t have to stay.”
He did, actually. If she thought he was going to leave her here alone, she was mad. “The nurses say you’ll be discharged once your temperature is back to normal. You should be home by tonight. I may as well wait.”
“Well, if you may as well…” Sarcasm laced her voice, but she slumped into the pillow as though she was already defeated. “Why were you even at the cabin?”
He closed his eyes. He couldn’t tell her now that he’d wanted to make amends. What was the point when their separation was more inevitable than ever? The best thing he could do was leave things as they were. Distant. “Work.”
“It’s a Sunday,” she pointed out, because of course he could never fool her. She was too sharp to believe his excuses even after this.
“I wanted to spend some quiet time in the shed,” he lied. What he wouldn’t give to lock himself away now – but even in there, he wouldn’t be free of her. She’d tainted that, too, by needling into his most personal hobby and thrusting it out of the shadows. She’d refused to leave his simple little life the same way she had found it.
She nodded just once. “Then I’m sorry I stopped you.”
Silence engulfed them after that. There was nothing left to say, and even if there was, he was too tired, too trapped inside his own mind to articulate it. She rolled over, turning her back to him, and stayed that way until the nurses came in to check on her later that morning.
Fraser barely spoke on the drive home, except to ask if she was warm enough. The answer was yes, she was fairly sweltering against the heat blasting through his truck vent, thank you very much. He bid her farewell inside the car, not bothering to escort her into the cabin, despite having tried to convince her to use a wheelchair on their way out of the hospital. On that short walk from the truck to the door, it dawned on her: it was really over. No more kissing. No more falling asleep in one another’s arms.
What had happened? One moment, he’d been the closest person in her life. But on that hospital ward, he’d been a stranger. Talking to her like he blamed her for getting hypothermia. Unable to so much as look at her. What had she done to deserve that? Fine, bathing in an icy loch in November hadn’t been her smartest move, but she hadn’t meant to make herself ill.
She hadn’t meant to make him hate her.
She collapsed onto the couch, bone-tired and raw. The emptiness of the cabin crawled across her skin, and she knew she couldn’t stay here if this was how it would be. Tomorrow, she would leave. She didn’t want to feel like a burden to him anymore, and he clearly didn’t want that either.
Had she been silly to even wonder if she should stay? Had Fraser really fooled her with charm and kindness and dry humour, weaselling his way into her heart and her body until she hadn’t been able to see sense? Well, she saw it now. He was just like everybody else in her life. He’d grown bored of her. Annoyed by her.
She wasn’t good enough for him.
More than anything else in the world, she just wanted to go home. She stood on stiff legs, grabbing her laptop from her writing desk. Her manuscript remained open on the screen, the one she’d rushed to finish. Badly. So much of Fraser and her experiences with him had bled through into the story and characters, and he didn’t deserve to take up that space if he could wipe her away so easily.
She left the tab open and opened a new one to search for train tickets. It would mean a long and exhausting day of travelling while inhabiting a body that still felt strange and not hers, but anything would be better than sitting in a cabin where things had once felt magical.
So, she booked a train for ten a.m. the next morning, shoved her laptop under the couch cushion where the sight of it wouldn’t haunt her, and began packing.
Fraser had been right. Wild swimminghadprovided a reset, just not in the way she’d predicted.
31
Fraser couldn’t avoid the cabin forever. He did, after all, have wood to chop and furniture to craft if he was going to make a go of his new business. His fingers trembled on the steering wheel as he parked outside his gate, and after pulling his keys from the ignition, he urged Bernard onto his lap to bury his head in his fur.
