6. Heath
six
Heath
I don't sleep much. I lie in the dark with her against my side and think about February.
Around four I get up and put wood in the stove and stand watching it catch, and Moss leans on my leg because he can't get up on the bed anymore and doesn't like being left out of things.
She wakes at six.
"You've been up."
"Little while."
"Come back."
I sit on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees. "I built this life so I wouldn't need anybody."
She sits up. Pulls the faded quilt around her. Doesn't say anything, which is how I get through it.
"I don’t say it for pity. I looked at how most people live and how I wanted to live and I picked, and then I spent eleven years finding out I'd picked right." I look at my hands. "A well I dug. A roof I put on. I've been happy up here in a way most people wouldn't credit."
"I credit it."
"I know you do. That's the problem." I turn enough to see her.
"It worked. Right up until the second week of October, when a woman told me not to put my own honey in tea.
And it's still working, that's the part I can't get around — the bees are still right and the wood's still stacked and everything about this place is still exactly what I wanted.
It's all still here. It stopped being enough anyway, and I don't have a system for that. I've got a system for everything else."
She's quiet for a while.
"You know I can work from anywhere," she says.
"You've got shoot dates."
"Third to the seventh, in a studio in Vancouver, and I'll be at them, and then I'll drive back.
" No flourish on it, which is how I know she thought it through before this morning.
"The book isn't in Vancouver. The book is a full pantry and a story worth telling, and there's more of both within four kilometres of this cabin than in my entire neighbourhood.
My last proposal had a chapter on ingredients I could buy from a wholesaler in Richmond.
This one has a stand of old-growth spruce and an insect nobody's heard of. "
"That's the book. What about you?"
"You want me to say I'd move to a cabin with no wifi."
"No." That's true, and I'm glad she made me find it. "I'd rather you didn't. I don't want a woman up here going quietly out of her mind by January because I decided the treeline was the only place worth being."
"I can get satellite internet." She shifts round to face me, knees up. "It’s not a compromise I'm making for you. I've been in that apartment for four years and I have never once slept as well as I sleep in this room."
I put my hand on her ankle first, which isn't a plan, it's what's nearest.
She pulls the quilt off her shoulders and lets it go down around her waist and sits there in the grey light and lets me look at her.
I lie down and pull her over me and she comes up on her knees astride my hips, and I get my hands on her waist and hold her there and don't do anything else for a while.
We're chest to chest, her thighs over mine, close enough to feel her breath change when I put my mouth on her collarbone.
I take my time. Her throat. Her jaw. Down to her breast, and I stay there until she's rocking against my stomach without knowing she's doing it.
She gets her arms around my neck and holds on.
"Say something," she says.
"You want the talking now?"
"I want the talking now."
"Been thinking about your mouth since four this morning while I was pretending to think about February." I get a hand up her back, spread wide between her shoulder blades. "Been thinking I want you in this bed in January when there's a metre of snow on that roof."
"Keep going."
"Been thinking that this is the only thing in eleven years I've wanted that I didn't build myself."
She kisses me for that. Hard, one hand in my hair, and I feel her smile against my mouth in the middle of it.
"Up here," I say, and my hands are already under her thighs. "Knees either side of my head. I want you sitting on my face when the sun comes up."
She goes up the bed and braces on the beam behind the headboard, and I get my hands around the backs of her thighs and pull her down onto my mouth, and whatever she was going to say about specificity doesn't get finished.
I take my time again. I lick her up and down, teasing her clit, savouring her taste.
I keep it slow and flat and steady until the swearing turns into something with no consonants in it.
Her thighs start to shake against my ears.
When she tries to lift off me I put a hand flat on her stomach and hold her exactly where she is.
"Stay," I say against her. "You don't get to run from this one either."
She grinds down on my mouth and comes with the heel of her hand flat on the wall.
She slides down my body afterward, boneless, and lands on my chest. My beard is covered in her juices, but she kisses me anyways.
"Give me a minute."
"Take five."
"Unnecessary smugness from a man who—" She stops. She's found me with her hand and she's wrapped it around my cock. Her expression changes. "Okay. You've made your point."
"Keep doing that and this goes a different way."
"Noted." She pumps my cock twice more, watching my face, entirely on purpose. Then she settles over me and takes me inside her, all the way down in one slow drop, and stops there with her hands flat on my chest.
I can feel every part of her holding me.
"I can feel your heart," she says.
She sets the pace, unhurried and deep, riding me with her forehead against mine and her breath going ragged in my mouth. I let her run it as long as she wants.
I get my hands on her thighs and hold her open, watching her take herself down onto me, over and over. “You look like a Goddess, taking my cock so well.”
"Say that again."
"You heard me."
She loses her rhythm halfway through, so I roll us over without pulling out, and she laughs, cut off when I push back into her.
"There it is," she says.
"That what you wanted?"
"Harder."
"Hands over your head. Leave them there."
She puts them there and keeps them there, grabbing the pillow. I give it to her hard with her ankles crossed behind my back, the frame knocking the wall in the same spot it did the first night, her breasts moving under me on every stroke.
"Touch yourself," I say. "I want to feel you go while I'm this deep in you."
She gets her hand between us and does it, and tells me exactly what it's doing to her the whole time, and I tell her back in four words that aren't polite and two more that are worse.
Anaya comes with her eyes open, looking straight at me, and doesn't close them.
The feeling of our intense connection makes me lose control. My abs clench as I go over hard with my face against her temple, filling her up with every drop.
The room is grey and getting lighter. Outside, the first bees are testing the cold and finding it's too much and going back in. We do the same.