Chapter 6 #3
It does not, the way I had feared, end quickly.
The body remembers. The wolf remembers. We move together for a long time, the rhythm of it building and gentling and building again.
I slow when I feel her closing toward the edge too soon.
I gentle her down. I kiss the line of her jaw.
I let her steady. Then I move again, deeper, slower, the kind of slow that has her shuddering against me within a minute, and I do it again—build her up, gentle her down—because I have, I realize, fourteen years of patience stored up in this body and I am going to spend all of it on her tonight if she will let me.
Her hand stays on my face. My hand stays at her hip. The cherry medallion bounces softly between us with every motion until I lift it and place it carefully against the side of her neck where it will not fall again.
When she finally comes apart, she comes apart quietly.
Her forehead against my throat. Her arms tight around my shoulders.
Her thighs clenching around my waist. A small broken sound against my collarbone that I am going to remember for the rest of my life.
I feel her clench around me—tight, then tighter, then a long shuddering pulse that travels the length of her body—and I keep moving through it, slow and steady, because she asked me to move and I am, in this moment, willing to give her anything she asks for.
I follow her a moment later.
I follow her slow and full and completely undone.
I press into her as deep as I can go and I hold there and I let the wave take me, and the wolf in the back of my mind shudders out a long approving breath against the inside of my chest, the wolf and the man at once, both of us emptying ourselves into the woman who has, in two months, brought us back from a stillness we had thought was permanent.
My face is in her hair. My mouth is at her ear.
I am saying her name, I realize—Rue, Rue—the way I have said it inside my head every day for two weeks and have not, until tonight, been permitted to say it out loud.
I do not, for a long time, move.
She does not ask me to.
The workbench is hard. The cedar dust is everywhere.
The lamp is guttering. I have, I realize at some point, a small splinter in my forearm from leaning against the corner of the bench.
None of these things matter. Her hand is in my hair.
My mouth is at her temple. The cherry medallion is warm between us.
When I do finally lift my head, she is smiling.
It is not a small smile.
It is the whole smile—the one I have seen perhaps three times since I met her, the one she saves for moments that deserve it.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"You did not do that badly."
I laugh.
I laugh out loud, in the workshop, in the cedar dust, with my arms still around her and my body still warm with hers, and the laughter comes out of a place I had thought was sealed shut, and the laughter is, like everything else tonight, slow and full and not afraid.
"I am told," I say, "the lid is going to need re-sanding."
"It is."
"I am told that we made a mess of the workbench."
"We did."
"I am told this is not strictly traditional behavior for a coffin maker and a hospice nurse."
"Nothing about us," she says, "has ever been traditional."
I kiss her.
I help her up. I find my shirt. I find hers.
We dress slowly, neither of us in any hurry to leave the workshop, neither of us, I think, willing to break the thing that has been built tonight by stepping too quickly out of it.
I rebuild the lamp. I sweep the cedar dust into the small pile under the bench.
She sits on the chair by the stove with my flannel around her shoulders and her bare feet tucked up under her, and she watches me work, and the watching is now the watching of a woman who knows exactly what she is watching and has, I understand, been watching this way for some time.
When we walk down the hill together at midnight, the first snow is falling.
She tips her face up to it. She laughs. The snowflakes catch in her dark hair, and her cheeks are pink, and the cherry medallion is back at her breastbone where it belongs.
I take her hand.
We walk to her cottage.
We sleep there, in her bed, this time without the careful distance, this time with my arm under her head and her hand on my chest and the wolf at the back of my mind finally, after fourteen years, resting because there is, at last, a reason to rest.
In the morning, when I wake, she is already up. She has brought coffee.
She sets the mug down on the bedside table next to the HAZZ-ERD oak and the carved wolf and the open paperback of Mountain Ghosts and Hollow Folk. She climbs back into the bed. She tucks against my side.
"Good morning," she says.
"Good morning."
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"You build beautiful things."
"They are for the dead."
"They are made by the living. That counts."
I do not answer her.
I pull her closer, and I press my face into her hair, and I do not, this morning, get up.