4. Heath
four
Heath
It gets dark at six thirty, but neither of us mentions it.
We come off the slope at five with the light going copper, and she carries the empty supers into the shed without being asked, and she's washing her hands at the outside tap and saying something about the cabbage — less tamarind, more pepper.
I make soup while she sits at my table.
The stove gets the one room up to warm. She takes off her sweater. There's a thin shirt under it and a line of collarbone, and I look at the pot.
"Can I ask you something?” she asks.
"You can ask. Doesn’t mean you’ll get an answer."
"Why bees?"
I stir, and think about how much of it to say, and then find I'm saying most of it, which hasn't happened in a long time.
"My grandmother had four hives behind her house in the valley.
I got sent to her every summer from when I was six.
" I turn the heat down. "Wasn't a warm woman.
Didn't talk much, didn't hug, told you when you were wrong.
But she'd take me out to those hives and sit me on a stump ten feet back and say now be still. "
"And you were good at it."
"I was terrible at it. I was six." That gets a short breath out of her, close to a laugh. "Took two summers. Then one day I was still, and she didn't say anything about it, but she moved me up to five feet the next time."
"That's the whole reward? Five feet closer?"
"That's the whole reward."
I ladle it out. She takes the bowl in both hands like she's cold, though she isn't.
"She died when I was nineteen. Hives got sold. I fell timber a while; planted trees a while. Thirty when this parcel came up cheap." I sit. "Two years to build the cabin. Started with six hives."
"And now two hundred."
"About that. Some years less."
She eats, quietly, in a way I've decided I like.
"It's the first thing that's fully mine," I say. "Everything before it, I was working somebody's ground or somebody's schedule. Nobody signs off on this. If it's good, it's because I did it, and if it's bad, that's mine too."
"And that's enough?"
"That's been enough."
Rain starts on the metal roof and Moss groans and rearranges himself across both our feet.
She says, "I should think about driving down."
"You should."
Neither of us moves.
Anaya sets her bowl in the sink and comes back and stands in front of my chair with her knees against mine, the lamp behind her.
"I've been trying all day to decide if you'd hate it if I did this," she says.
"Do it and find out."
She puts her hands on my face. She reads it right, the way she's been reading me right all day, and waits.
Then I get my hands on her hips and pull her down onto my lap, one knee either side of me on the chair, and I kiss her.
Slow. I've learned what it costs to hurry a thing that comes once.
She tastes like pepper and underneath that like herself, and she makes a sound against my mouth that I want again, so I take it again, harder, my hand up into her hair.
She shifts on my lap until she's got herself where she wants it and grinds down through two layers of denim, and I let her do it twice before I stand up with her.
She wraps her legs around my waist and laughs into my throat, and I carry her the twelve feet it takes, because the whole cabin is one room and a bed in the corner and I built it that way on purpose too.
I put her down on the quilt and pull my shirt off, and she comes up on her elbows and looks at me with her hair a wreck and her mouth already swollen.
"Shirt off," I say. "Bra too. Slow — I've been looking at you all day through a veil."
She does it with her eyes on my face the whole time, because she likes what she's finding there and she wants me to know she knows.
Warm brown skin, gold in the lamplight. A scar under her left ribs I'll ask about later.
Her nipples go tight in the cold coming off the window and I put my mouth on one and she says my name on an intake of breath.
"Again," I say against her.
"Heath—"
"That's it."
I get her jeans off, down and off her ankles onto the floor. Her underwear goes after them. Then I put my hands on her knees and push them open and look at her for as long as I want, which is longer than most people would think was polite.
"You're very quiet," she says. Wry, and not steady.
"Wider."
She does it.
"Good girl." I take hold of her thighs and hold them where I put them. "Now hold still. I'm going to eat you until you can't hold still, and then I'm going to hold you still myself, and then you're going to come on my tongue before I put anything else in you. That's the order."
She looks down the length of her own body at me, and whatever she was going to say about how many words that was, she loses it.
I put my mouth on the inside of her thigh. Then higher. Then on her pussy.
She's soaking and she tastes clean and salt and I take my time.
Tongue flat and slow, the whole length of her, then narrow at the top where she lifts for it.
When I find the rhythm that gets her hips off the bed I stay in it.
That's the whole trick — people change what they're doing the second it starts working, and I've never understood that.
She gets a fist in my hair and pulls hard enough to sting, and I let her, and I put two fingers in her while she does.
"Oh! Oh, that's—"
I curl them and find the place that makes her stomach go tight and I stay on it and keep my mouth exactly where it is.
Her thighs start closing on my ears. I get an arm across her hips and hold her down flat on the quilt and don't let her move at all until she’s a mess.
Then she goes rigid and comes on my tongue with her heels dug in and her hand fisted in my hair.
I work her through it. I don't let up until she's pushing at my forehead with the heel of her hand.
"Okay. Okay — come here, come here."
Then I get over her and push in.
She takes all of my cock on one long exhale, and I stop there with my forearms braced either side of her head because if I move right away this is over.
"Fuck," she says.
"Yeah."
"You're— okay. Okay. Move."
I move. Deep and slow, the whole length, out to the tip and all the way back into her, and she meets me every time. Her hands go flat on my back and then her nails go in.
"Harder."
"No."
"Heath."
"Not yet." I get my hand under her ass and change the angle, and she stops arguing with me entirely. "You've been going fast since you got out of that car yesterday. You'll get it hard when I've had you like this first. Legs stay where I put them."
"You're going to kill me."
"You'll live." I take her wrists in one hand and put them above her head on the pillow and she lets me, and something goes through her when I do it that I feel from the inside. "Look at me. Not the ceiling. Me."
She looks at me.
And here's what happens to me. I've gone whole weeks up here without saying two hundred words out loud. The quiet's never been empty — it's been full, and it's been enough.
I'm inside this woman and it turns out I have things to say.
"You should see your face," I say against her jaw. "Wanted you since yesterday.”
"Yesterday? Yesterday, at the—"
I let go of her wrists and get both hands under her and fuck her hard into the quilt, her heels locked at the small of my back, the frame knocking the wall on every stroke. She's loud. I didn't know that about her and now I do, and every sound she makes goes straight through the middle of me.
"That's it," I say into her throat. "That's what you wanted. Take it."
"Don't stop — don't you dare—"
"Not going anywhere." I get my hand between us and my thumb on her clit and work it in time with the rest. "Come on. Let me feel it. I want you soaking this quilt."
She goes off around me a second time, tight enough that I have to stop moving, saying something with my name buried in the middle of it.
I go over right behind her with my face in her neck and my fist in her hair.
I make a sound that isn’t quite human, then the room is quiet except for our breathing.
The rain's still going on the roof.
I don't move off her right away, and when I do I don't go far.
I lie on my back with her half on top of me and I go completely still, the way I do, staring at the beam over the bed.
She lifts her head. Looks at me. And then she settles back down with her cheek on my chest, because she already knows what it means.