5. Anaya
five
Anaya
October mornings go hard with frost that doesn't burn off till ten. The larch on the far ridge turns that unreasonable gold and starts dropping. And the hives go quiet — genuinely quiet, so that crouching by a box now there's barely a hum under the wood at all.
"They're clustering," Heath says. "Balling up around the queen. From here on they're a furnace with wings and everything they do is about staying warm till February."
He says it like a man reading a clock.
Twelve days. My motel bill is embarrassing, considering I've only slept there four times.
I've made eleven recipes with his honey.
A black honey and pepper glaze for duck.
A rasam where the honeydew replaces the jaggery and the whole bowl goes savoury and strange and better.
A burnt-butter payasam that made him close his eyes for four full seconds.
He's got a hot plate and a woodstove and no oven, and I've done all of it up here anyway, because down at the motel my hands work fine and nothing tastes like anything.
My editor emails Tuesday. Lock final scope by the 30th? Studio dates in Vancouver are Nov 3–7 and we can't move them.
My flight out of Kamloops is the 28th. It's been sitting in my inbox like a stone in a shoe and I've been walking on it.
Thursday I'm up at the yard and the light does its four o'clock thing — low and sideways through the spruce onto the boxes, and the old sage-green one at the end of the second row goes luminous.
And I take out my phone and photograph it.
Then I move two steps left and photograph it again.
Then I crouch to get the blur of the entrance in the foreground and think caption: the last warm hour of a season that's ending, and think about which frame crops square, and somewhere in the middle of that I hear the shed door.
He's standing there with a stack of empty frames on his shoulder. He isn't angry — that would be easier. He's got the look of a man checking a forecast he already suspected.
"Good light," he says.
"Heath—"
"It is. I'm not being smart with you." He puts the frames in the truck bed without looking back at me. "Best light of the year, that hour. I've watched it hit that hive for eleven seasons."
"And you've never photographed it."
"No."
He goes back in the shed.
I stand in the good light by myself and feel the ground tilt under the last twelve days.
This isn't content, this is different, I've stopped narrating my every move and just started to… live.
He's different for the rest of the day.
He does the wintering work with his back to me, and when I laugh at something Moss does he doesn't look over to see what it was.
Friday's the same, and at eight I get my coat and say I should sleep at the motel, and he says okay.
That's all. Okay. He doesn't walk me to the car.
I drive down in the dark with my headlights making a tunnel out of the spruce, and by the culvert I'm crying, which is humiliating and takes me completely by surprise.
I don't go back on Saturday.
I tell myself it's because of work. Laptop on the motel bed, heater rattling, four hundred words by noon and every one of them bad in a way I can feel without rereading.
I've done twelve-day trips before. Haida Gwaii, the Peace, a salmon camp on the Skeena. I've always liked the last day. There's a clean feeling to closing a notebook and driving away with the thing you came for in the passenger seat.
I don't have that clean feeling. I have an ache under my sternum, low and constant, because there is a man forty minutes up a fire road who spent nine days letting me into the only thing he's ever fully owned and who has now, correctly, begun closing the door.
I don't call him. There's no signal up there and no phone in the cabin. I never asked about it, not once, because it never came up — because I never thought about how you'd reach him if you needed to.
Sunday morning I drive back up.
He's at the woodshed when I come through the gate. He stops with an armload of split fir and watches me park.
He doesn't say you came back. Doesn't say anything about it at all — carries the wood in, comes out and looks at me.
"Do you want me to leave?"
"No."
"Then talk to me. You've been shutting the door an inch at a time since Thursday, and I spent a day and a half in a motel room finding out what the finished version of that feels like, and I'd rather you slammed it."
"You've got a flight," he says.
"On the twenty-eighth. I've had a flight the whole time. You knew about the flight."
"I knew about it Thursday differently than I knew about it Tuesday. Knew about it again yesterday, when your car wasn't on that road."
"You could have come down."
"I could have. I didn't. Because your face went somewhere else while you were standing right there." He looks up. "I've watched two hundred colonies for eleven years. I know when something's split its attention. You went out of the yard and your body stayed."
That lands, because it's accurate.
"That's fair," I say. "I'll own it, and I want to say something about it. But first you're going to say the other thing."
"What other thing?"
"The thing where you've decided how this ends and you started moving out of the way three days early. You're doing the thing where you disappear before I can decide to."
He doesn't answer.
Moss shifts by his feet.
"Heath."
"You want me to deny it."
"I want you to say it."
He looks at the window, where there's nothing to see but our own reflection and the dark cabin interior behind it.
"I know how this goes," he says. "You go back to a city with two million people in it and a job you're good at and a book with your name on it.
First week you'll call. Third week you'll call.
By February the drive up that fire road is going to look a lot longer than it does in October.
" He turns the mug back the other way. "So yes.
I started getting ready. That wasn't a decision.
That's a thing I caught myself already doing on Thursday, and I didn't stop it. "
I set my shoulders and march up to him, so close that our boots are almost touching. Moss sniffs and looks between the two of us, wondering if he needs to pick sides. I haven’t prepared myself for any of this conversation, so I hope it comes out right.
“For three hours on that first Saturday, and for most of last Wednesday, and for the whole time you were telling me about your grandmother and the five feet, that part of me was not in the room.
That's never happened. In five years, not once, not at home, not with anyone.
You think the phone means I'm going. It means I'm scared, because the only thing I know how to do with something I love is turn it into a story, and I don't want to do that to this. "
He's quiet.
I've learned to wait through it now. I wait.
"Say it again," he says.
"Which part."
"The one where you said love."
"I love you," I say. "That's the part. I've known you eighteen days and I love you, and I've been carrying it around like something I might drop."
Heath gets a hand around the back of my neck, thumb under my jaw, and holds me there and looks at my face like he's checking the sound of a hive before he opens it. Whatever he's listening for, he finds it.
Then he kisses me and it isn't careful.
I grab a fistful of his flannel. He walks me backward and my shoulders hit the shed wall and he makes a sound against my mouth, low, annoyed at himself, and pulls back enough to strip his jacket off and shove it between me and the boards.
Then his mouth is on me again. Canvas at my back, warm from him.
The whole shed smells like split fir and the cold underneath it.
He gets my zipper down and my jacket open and pushes my sweater up with both hands, and the October air hits my ribs and I gasp and he swallows it.
His hands are rough. Hive tools and wire and eleven years of the same work — I feel every callus, and I want them, and he knows it because I say his name into his shoulder.
"Say the rest of it," he says.
"You first."
"I love you." Flat. Like a measurement. Like a thing he checked twice before reporting. "Been true a while."
I stop breathing properly after that.
He goes down on one knee in the dirt and works my boots off, one, then the other, and my jeans and underwear come down with them, and I'm standing in his yard in a sweater and nothing else, and I don't care.
He puts his mouth on the inside of my thigh.
Then higher. My hand goes into his hair and grips.
He licks into me slow, the same way he does everything, and it's unbearable.
My leg gives and he takes it over his shoulder and holds my hip flat to the boards with one forearm so I can't move away from him, and I couldn't have anyway.
His tongue finds the exact place and stays.
He isn't guessing. He hasn't guessed once, not the first night, not since.
"Heath! I'm—"
He doesn't stop. He hums against me and that's the end of it. I come with my back scraping his jacket and my fingers locked in his hair and a sound coming out of me that I've never made anywhere with anyone, and it echoes off the treeline because there's nobody up here for eleven kilometres.
He stands while I'm still shaking. Wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist.
"Turn around," he says.
"No." I get my hands on his belt. "I want to see you."
He goes still. That stillness I've learned to read now — the one that means something's landed too hard to answer. Then he nods once and lets me open his jeans.
I get my hand around his cock and he braces his forearm on the shed above my head and breathes out against my temple. He's hot in my palm. I stroke him and his hips move and he says something into my hair I don't catch.
"What?"
"Said don't stop." He drags my hand away anyway. "Not like that. Come here."
He lifts me. Hands under my thighs, my back on his jacket on the boards, and I get my ankles crossed behind him and he holds me there for three full seconds with the head of him right there, looking at my face.
"Please," I say.
He pushes in and I take all of him and it's so much I have to put my forehead on his shoulder. He gives me time. He always gives me time and I have never once had to ask for it.
Then he starts to move.
It's not gentle. It's the other thing, the thing he's been holding since Thursday when he decided he was going to let me go quietly — every thrust is an argument against that, and he's winning it. The shed wall knocks against my back.
"Look at me."
I lift my head.
"You're not going anywhere," he says. He says it the way he says the weather is turning and the hives are light and the honey flow is done, and he drives into me on the last word and I feel it in my teeth.
"No," I say. "I'm not."
"Say it again."
"I love you."
He kisses me hard enough to bruise and comes with his hand splayed across the small of my back, holding me down onto him, and the noise he makes as he comes is the loudest thing I've ever heard out of him.
We stay like that. His face in my neck. My heels still hooked behind him. My breath and his breath are clouding in the cold.
“I love you.”