7. Nyla
seven
Nyla
The walk to the cabin takes twenty minutes through town and up the forestry road, which I now know the way I know the trail — by its sounds and its particular quality of light through the trees and the way the air changes as the road climbs.
Dawson’s cat Cashew appears from nowhere about two hundred metres out, as he always does, materialising from the treeline like he's been tracking my approach and has decided it's time to escort me in.
He's carrying a pinecone in his mouth, which he drops at my feet with the solemn offering energy of a Labrador who has brought you the ball.
I pick it up. He looks extremely satisfied.
We walk the rest of the way together, him at my heel, the pine cone now apparently my responsibility.
Dawson's truck is in the yard.
He opens the door before I knock. He looks at me in the doorway and then at Cashew, who walks past both of us into the cabin with the confidence of an animal who has already decided this is his home and is merely tolerating our presence in it.
"He walked me," I say. "I had no say in the direction."
"He does that. I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s a guide dog." Dawson steps back to let me in.
The cabin settles around me. That's the only way I can describe it — the way a good fit settles, the way camp felt on the second morning when the soreness was real and the air was cold and I didn't care about any of it.
Small and solid and built by someone who knew what he wanted.
Maps above the door. The bench with its half-repaired strap, something always waiting.
The south window with the valley behind it.
The smell of woodsmoke and coffee and pine resin that I have already, without meaning to, come to associate with safety.
I look at him in his own space and something shifts and settles in me too.
"I deleted all of the apps this morning," I say.
He takes that in the way he takes things — giving it proper weight, not minimising it, not performing a reaction. "How does it feel?"
"Light." I think about it. "Like the first morning at camp. When I realised I didn't care about the mirror."
"Good," he says.
"I don't know what I'm doing next," I say. "For work. For — any of it. I have no plan. I'm figuring it out." I look at him. "But I know I want to be here while I'm figuring. Here in Silver Ridge."
"Okay," he says.
"Here in this cabin," I say. "Specifically."
Dawson crosses the room and frames my face in both hands and kisses me, and I put my palms flat on his chest and feel his heartbeat steady under them, and then he walks me backward through the bedroom doorway and stops.
He looks at me for a moment. Then his hands go to the buttons of my shirt and he undoes them one by one, unhurried, his eyes on his hands.
Pushes it off my shoulders. Reaches around and unhooks my bra and takes that too.
Steps back and looks at me in the lamplight with the full weight of his attention and I feel it everywhere.
He turns me around without a word.
His mouth finds the back of my neck. My shoulder.
He gets his hands on my breasts from behind and I lean back into him and feel exactly how much he wants this pressed hard against me.
He works my nipples until I'm shifting against him, until my breathing has changed, and then he turns me back around and sits me on the edge of the bed and kneels in front of me and takes my jeans off, then my underwear, and looks up at me from the floor with that dark patient attention.
Then he puts his mouth on my inner thigh and I grip the sheets.
He takes his time. Works his way in slow, mouth on my thigh, the crease of my hip, everywhere except where I need him until I make a sound that is not patient at all.
He finally gets his mouth on me and I stop thinking.
I sink my fingers into his hair. He stays.
He eases off and I make a frustrated sound and he comes back and does it again, slower, and I am going to lose my mind.
He slides two fingers inside me and works them in a slow curl while his tongue stays steady on my clit and I come so hard my thighs clamp around his head and I have to turn my face into the pillow.
He stands. Strips his shirt off, the rest, and I watch him and don't pretend otherwise and he lets me look, unhurried, and then he comes down over me and I reach between us and get my hand around his cock. Stroke once. His arms lock.
I do it again, slower, watching his face lose its composure piece by piece, and he lets me work him until his hips push forward and then he wraps his fingers around my wrist and pins it to the mattress and the feeling goes through me like a current.
He pushes my thighs apart and lines up and pushes inside me in one long stroke and I exhale hard at the fullness of it. He stops there, forehead dropped to my temple, both of us just breathing.
Then he starts to move.
Deep and slow. His weight on his forearms. Face close to mine, eyes open, on me.
The lamp makes everything warm and gold and I can see all of him and he can see all of me and there is nothing between us — no dark, no pretending, just this room and this light and his eyes on my face like I'm the most interesting thing in the entire mountain range.
He finds the angle that undoes me and stays there. I dig my fingers into his back and he drops his head and works, steady and patient, and I feel everything winding tighter and faster than I expect.
"Harder," I say.
He gives me harder. Gets a hand under my hips and tilts me and goes deeper and I stop being able to form words.
His thumb finds my clit and he keeps moving and I come apart underneath him — thighs locked around him, back arching, his name the only thing left in my mouth — and he pushes deep and goes still and follows me, his face buried in my hair.
We lie there in the quiet afterward. His hand settles on my stomach, warm and certain. The woodstove ticks. Outside the bedroom door, something small and deliberate lands on a shelf and considers it.
Then knocks something off.
A pause. Then something off a different shelf. Slower this time. Making a point.
Dawson exhales through his nose.
"Cashew," he says.
"I figured."
"He does that when he thinks he's being ignored."
I stare at the ceiling. "Honestly fair."
I start laughing and I can't stop and Dawson makes a sound that is unambiguously a laugh, low and real, and I turn toward him and he pulls me in and the cabin holds us, the woodstove ticks, and outside the mountains are doing their patient, enormous thing, indifferent to everything and present for all of it.
His hand presses against my stomach once. Warm. Certain.