8. The Space Between Us
Chapter eight
The Space Between Us
Beck
Sleep, as a concept, is simply not available to me tonight.
The barn loft mattress is doing its usual thing, which is to say it has opinions about every position I attempt and none of those opinions are supportive.
But the mattress is not the issue. The mattress is blameless.
The issue is that every nerve ending in my body has been reoriented by a single minute in the cider barn, and my brain has elected to replay it in full sensory detail at fifteen-minute intervals for the entirety of the night.
The grip of her hands on my flannel. The taste of apple juice and something that was specifically, irreducibly Sloane.
The small, involuntary sound she made when my hands found her waist, the kind of sound a person makes when something they were bracing against turns out to feel like relief instead.
I have been in love with this woman for ten years and I have kissed her once, and it was comprehensively better than every version I built in the privacy of my own imagination, and now I know what she actually feels like and I am supposed to treat this information as a workplace communication that has been addressed and filed.
I get up at four forty-five because lying horizontal pretending to sleep is a less productive use of my crisis energy than going to the barn.
She is already there, of course. War braid today, pulled back so severely it changes the geometry of her face, tight and angular and closed, which is the Sloane Mackenzie equivalent of a "do not engage" notification.
She is cleaning equipment with the focused aggression of a woman who has decided that physical labor is a morally superior response to complicated feelings, and I respect this philosophy because I share it.
"Morning," I say.
"Forty bushels to sort." She does not look up. "Bruised fruit goes to the second press. Festival samples from the premium batch only."
"Right." I pick up my station without ceremony. "Forty bushels."
We work. The barn fills with the quiet mechanical sounds of sorting, the soft thud of apples hitting the crates, the creak of the sorting table under the weight of the morning's haul.
The silence has changed its character completely from what it was in week one, less hostile, more loaded, the way air changes pressure before weather arrives.
Every time we pass each other in the sorting space, some force field activates between us that neither of us has the technical vocabulary to address.
Her shoulder near my arm. My hand close to hers on the table.
The six inches of space between our bodies is the most consciously occupied six inches of real estate in Vermont, and we are both fully aware of it and both committed to behaving as though we are not.
At noon, she cracks first.
"We should probably talk about—" she starts.
"Yes," I say immediately, with more enthusiasm than is useful.
"—the cider menu for the festival booth."
There is a pause during which I perform the internal adjustment of a man who misread the assignment. "Right," I say. "The menu. Obviously."
She glances at me then, quick and darting, and immediately redirects her attention to the nearest apple crate with the focus of someone suddenly very interested in fruit quality assessment.
But in that half-second, I see it clearly: the same low-grade chaos that has been running in my system since yesterday afternoon is running in hers too.
She is not unmoved. She is deeply, specifically terrified of being moved, which is a meaningfully different situation.
The distinction matters to me more than I can reasonably explain.
We will talk about the cider menu. We will discuss booth layouts and festival logistics and apple varieties and every practical operational detail that requires our mutual attention.
And every word will carry a subtext that we are both fluent in and both pretending not to speak, and that is, for now, completely acceptable.
I have been waiting ten years. Sloane Mackenzie's timeline is not something I am going to attempt to rush.
The south field is the prettiest section of the orchard by any objective assessment.
The late October light comes through the thinning canopy at an angle that turns everything amber and gold, the mountain visible in the distance through the gaps where the leaves have come down, and the whole scene has the composed, irreplaceable quality of something that will only look exactly this way on this specific afternoon and never again.
I am looking at it and also, significantly, not looking at it, because Sloane is working the row twenty feet ahead of me and I keep losing the thread of the landscape.
She moves through the orchard with an efficiency that has softened slightly over the past three weeks, less punishing, more rhythmic, the difference between someone fighting their environment and someone working with it.
The dark circles that were carved into her face when I arrived have faded to something lighter.
She ate a full dinner last night and the night before without the expression of someone accepting aid under protest.
I realize I have been watching her for longer than is professionally defensible.
She turns around.
"You're staring," she says, flat and certain.
"I'm conducting a landscape assessment. It's a professional activity."
"I am not a landscape."
"No." My mouth continues operating without full authorization from my brain. "You're more of an ecosystem. Self-sustaining, deeply interconnected, with a complex internal logic that rewards extended study."
She stares at me with the expression of someone running a real-time evaluation of whether this deserves a response or pity. "You just called me an ecosystem."
"In the most complimentary possible application of the term."
"That is genuinely the worst compliment anyone has ever aimed at me."
"To be fair," I say, "your established benchmark for positive feedback is 'acceptable pasta,' so I'm working with a fairly compressed scale."
The corner of her mouth moves. The twitch, the specific micro expression I have catalogued with more devotion than I have given to any professional project in my career.
It is imperceptible to anyone who has not been studying Sloane Mackenzie's face with the focused attention of someone for whom it is the most interesting landscape they have ever encountered.
She turns back to the trees. I pick up my basket. We continue.
The kitchen is warm after dinner, the farmhouse holding heat the way old houses do, through the bones of the walls rather than any modern efficiency.
We are both having cider from the festival batch.
The single candle on the table between us is a coincidence of available light sources and absolutely nothing more.
She shows me the photographs without preface, just angles her phone across the table while I'm clearing plates, and I look down at images I was not expecting.
Textile pieces. Woven work, architectural in structure, the kind of design that requires both mathematical precision and an artist's instinct for when to break the rules the math establishes.
Abstract forms in natural fibers, some of them large enough to fill a wall, all of them communicating a specific visual intelligence that I recognize immediately as the same intelligence she applies to the orchard, the same gift for understanding how systems hold together.
"These are genuinely extraordinary," I say, and I mean it without any of the social cushioning people add to compliments when they're not completely certain.
"They're from before." She takes the phone back. "A long time ago."
"Art made with real skill doesn't develop an expiration date."
"Tell that to the loom." She turns her glass by the stem. "It's been in the basement for eight years. The heddles are probably rusted and the warp beam needs replacing."
"Why didn't you keep going with it?"
The pause that follows is the kind that contains a decision. I watch it happen, the visible internal negotiation between what she is willing to say and what she has been not-saying for long enough that the border between them has shifted.
"Jamie thought it was impractical," she says finally.
"Not aggressively. Not cruelly. Just consistently, in the way that consistent minor doubts become the ambient noise of your life after a while.
" She looks at the candle rather than at me.
"Eventually you stop doing the impractical things.
Then you stop wanting them. Then you forget you used to want them, which is the most efficient outcome because at least then it doesn't hurt. "
I put my glass down. The controlled burn of anger toward Jamie that I have been managing for weeks flares with a new clarifying heat, the specific fury of watching someone's vocabulary get quietly, steadily reduced by the person who was supposed to expand it.
"You should touch it again," I say.
"The heddles are genuinely probably rusted—"
"The loom." I lean forward slightly. "Or whatever the thing is that you stopped reaching for. You should reach for it."
She looks at me across the table in the warm kitchen light, and something in the careful architecture of her expression shifts in the way it has been shifting incrementally for three weeks, the way glaciers move, imperceptibly and then all at once.
She reaches across the table and takes my hand.
Not a grab, not an accident, not the involuntary contact of two people working in close quarters. A deliberate, conscious choice, her calloused fingers wrapping around mine with the specific weight of a decision that has been made and is now being enacted.
I do not move. I do not speak. I am operating on the instinct that any sudden motion will cause her to re-calibrate.
"This is the moment," she says, "where I would normally deploy something sarcastic to make the situation feel less exposed."
"Go ahead. The space is available."
"Your hands are abnormally warm." She examines our joined hands with the evaluative expression she applies to irrigation systems and apple varietals. "It's a suspicious level of warmth. Potentially concerning from a medical standpoint."
"Does that help?"
"Marginally." She does not let go. "I'm still operating at a fairly elevated anxiety level."
"Same," I tell her, and this is the most honest thing I have said to her, possibly because honesty is easier when someone is holding your hand across a kitchen table by candlelight and the night is quiet outside and the orchard is waiting patiently in the dark.
"At minimum," she says, "we're consistent."
"Consistently terrified," I agree. "Very on-brand for both of us."
She looks at our hands again, and I look at her face in the candlelight, at the braid that has loosened over the course of the evening into something softer, at the dark eyes that are warmer than she intends them to be and always have been, at the specific quality of a person who has been bracing against something for so long that she has forgotten what it felt like before the bracing.
We sit like that while the candle burns down, holding hands across the kitchen table like two people testing weight limits on a bridge that neither of us built and both of us need to cross.
The farmhouse settles around us with its old-house sounds, the creak of beams and the whisper of October wind finding the gaps in the window frames.
When she lets go, she does it gradually, fingers releasing one at a time, and stands up from the table with the collected energy of someone who has made a decision and is going to sleep before she unmakes it.
She does not say goodnight.
"Same time tomorrow," she says instead, at the kitchen door, and it is not a question and not a directive and is in fact the closest thing to an open door that Sloane Mackenzie has issued since I arrived in her driveway three weeks ago with a manila folder and a smile she decided to hate on sight.
I nod. I keep my expression at the level of calm, professional acknowledgment and away from the level of a man whose heart is currently conducting itself at a pace that would concern a cardiologist.