Chapter 25
Scout and I lay together at the edge of the pond, the blanket rumpled beneath us, both of us sweaty and breathing hard in the drowsy summer heat. The trees stood motionless overhead. A dragonfly worked the air above the pond, and somewhere in the canopy a wren ran through its long unspooling song.
Scout lay against me, her golden hair fanned across my skin, her hand resting possessively on my softening cock. Her breasts were slippery against my damp chest and I could feel her heartbeat gradually settling.
"I'd forgotten how much I missed this," I sighed. "Out here. Under the trees, the sky, the sun on us."
I ran my hand down the curve of her back, loving the strength in her muscular ass.
"Why did you stop going outside?"
"It was a gradual thing. I used to do this with my wife all the time.
We'd go car camping, fuck like rabbits beneath the stars.
That faded along with the rest of our marriage.
" I kissed the top of Scout's head, breathing in the scent of her hair.
"It's good to have that passion back. Here. With you."
"This is how it was always meant to be." Scout tilted her head up to look at me.
"We are animals, Thomas. We forget it because we build boxes and live inside them.
But this is the oldest thing there is. Two people, in nature, doing the most natural thing there is to do.
There is nothing to be ashamed of. The shame is the invention, our burden from the Garden of Eden. "
"You make everything sound like scripture."
"Some things are best left in scripture." She smiled and pushed herself up. "Let's go for a swim. I want to cool off."
She walked down to the water and waded in and I followed. The pond was warm as bathwater across the top, sun-heated and still, but a few feet down the cold rose up from the bottom.
We waded over to where the stream fed in at the north end. It was a gentle trickle this late in a dry summer. We sat down in the waist-deep shallows where the fresh water came in clean and cold over the stones.
Scout sat with the current moving past her, her head tipped back, her eyes closed. Water sheeted off her shoulders and ran down her in bright lines. Once again, I was struck by how stunning Scout was, her natural beauty a wonder to behold, still the forest nymph I had imagined when we first met.
I must have been grinning because she opened one eye.
"What's funny?"
"Nothing. You're beautiful, that's all."
The color came up in her cheeks the way it always did, no matter how many times I said it. I leaned over and kissed her, and the cold stream ran past us both.
"How's your father?" I asked, relaxing back into the water.
"Better. Stronger every day." She trailed her fingers through the water. "The oxygen machine helps more than he'll admit. The inhaler too. He inveighs about depending on machines, but then he sleeps through the night and has color in the morning. He can't argue with that even though he tries."
"He's a hard man to help."
"He is the hardest. But the thing that troubles him most isn't the oxygen." She laughed, low and warm. "It's the telephone."
"The phone?"
"He keeps it charged because I made him swear to, so he can call if there's an emergency.
But the rest of the time he keeps it wrapped in foil inside a metal coffee tin.
" She shook her head, delighted. "A Faraday cage.
He constructed a Faraday cage. He says he won't have the phone 'listening' when it isn't needed. "
"Abner is a man of admirable consistency," I laughed. "Honestly I'm just amazed that phone gets a signal out here at all."
"So is he. It offends him that it works."
She turned to face me, the water moving around her waist, and her expression softened.
"Thank you, Thomas. For the phone. For tending the homestead while we were gone.
For driving us to Seattle and sitting in that waiting room for hours and buying me a phone in a gift shop because you knew I needed one.
" She put her wet hand against my jaw. "For all of it. I don't have a way to repay any of it."
"I don't give a damn about repayment. You know that. I just help the people I care about." I covered her hand with mine. "That's the whole of it. There's no ledger."
"I know. I just wanted to put it into words. When you speak a thing, you make it known."
She settled back into the curve of my arm and we sat in the cold inflow for a while, not talking, the warm pond stretched out in front of us and the trees standing close and green all around.
When you speak a thing, you make it known.
Scout's words echoed in my mind. Because there were things we needed to speak about. Things we needed to make known.
"Scout?"
"Hmm?"
"The call from Seattle. What you told me on the phone the other day. I need to understand what you meant. You said something, and then you hung up before I could ask, and I've been carrying it around ever since. I need to know what you were telling me."
Scout was quiet for a moment, gathering herself. She picked a smooth stone from the streambed and turned it in her fingers.
"I have thought about how to say this for a long time," she said slowly. "I want to say it correctly, because it matters, and because if I say it wrong you'll believe something I don't mean."
"Okay. I'm listening."
"I love you, Thomas Harmon. You know that.
I told you in Port Townsend before I knew whether you'd say it back, and I say it again right now because it's true, and the truth doesn't wait on permission.
" She set the stone on her knee. "But loving you and owning you are not the same thing.
People confuse them. They think that if they love a thing, they must close their hand around it. Keep it. Hold it tight."
She looked at me, her blue eyes bright in the sunshine.
"What happens to a small creature when you close your hand around it too tightly?"
"It can't breathe."
"And it dies. You crush the very thing you were trying to keep.
" She let the stone fall back into the water.
"I've lived away from others, but I still understand how this happens.
People love each other into a cage and then they cannot understand why the love stopped singing.
Because love is not tamed, it is wild. My father told me once that you cannot keep a wild thing by trapping it.
You keep it by being a place it wants to return to. "
The stream murmured past us. A water strider tracked across the still surface beyond the inflow.
"I won't pretend it's simple," she went on. "If I'm honest, there is a part of me that wants you only for myself. That wants to be greedy. That sees you with Claire and wants to bare its teeth. I feel it. I feel it sharp." A faint smile. "I just won't obey it."
"Why not?"
"Because smothering the best thing that has ever happened to me would be a way of killing it.
And because I love you enough to want you whole.
Not only the part that fits in my hand." She drew her knees up out of the water.
"You and Claire have a bond. I've watched it grow all summer.
In the harvest, at her table, with DJ. That bond is real and it is good, and I have no wish to break it.
It would be like snapping a living branch because I hadn't planted it. "
She found my eyes and held them. There was no hurt in her face that I could find, but something steadier than that. Something she'd made her peace with.
"'Love one another,'" Scout said, "'but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup, but drink not from one cup.'"
"Who are you quoting?" I asked.
"Gibran. Kahlil Gibran." She laughed softly.
"My father disdains him. He says Gibran is sentiment dressed as wisdom.
But I adore him. I found a copy of The Prophet in a used bookstore in Port Angeles for fifty cents, and I keep it by my bed the way Father keeps Marcus Aurelius by his.
We are different that way too. He wants his philosophy with armor on. I want mine with the armor off."
"Two solitudes," I said.
"Rilke. You remembered."
"I haven't thought about much else."
"Protecting and bordering and greeting each other." She nodded. "Love is not a fence, Thomas. It doesn't work by enclosure. I told you that and I meant it."
She reached over and took my hand under the water.
"So this is what I'm telling you, plain and clear. If you love Claire, then love her. Love her as well and as truly as you're able. I will not ask you to choose, and I will not ask you to give anything up, and I will not stand at the edge of your life with my teeth bared, guarding my property."
"Scout..."
"I ask only two things." She held up her hand the way her father did when a thing was important.
"That you respect my dignity. And that you are never false with me about what you feel.
If your feelings for me change, you tell me.
You don't perform an affection you no longer have just to spare me.
A love that's acted is worse than an honest absence.
I would rather you walk away than pretend. Can you give me that?"
I looked at her, waiting for my answer. She was twenty-one, but it was me that felt out of my depth.
"I know how I feel about you, but not about us," I admitted. "Not fully. I'm still trying to untangle it. You're asking me to be honest and the honest answer is that I don't know what's inside of me."
"I know." There was a gentleness in it that almost undid me. "That's the thing, Thomas. I think Claire and I may know your heart better than you do."
She squeezed my hand tightly, almost painfully.
"You'll find your way to it. And until you do, I'm content to wait. I'm content to share what there is to share. That isn't me giving anything up. I want you to understand that. It isn't me settling for a portion. It's me refusing to crush a living thing in my fist."