Chapter 6
Jasper
I can’t work on the cherry chair.
My hands are on the wood and my head is in the cabin two hours ago. Her mouth against mine. The sound she made when I pulled her closer. I’ve been standing in my workshop staring at a half-finished joint for forty minutes.
The storm cleared. The property looks brand new, the way it always does after rain. She’s on the south trail. I can hear the shutter. She’s working. Or pretending to work the way I’m pretending to work on this chair. We’re both very committed to the pretense.
I put the chisel down. I go inside. I cook.
Cooking is a task. Tasks are safe. I brown elk in the cast iron. Onions, garlic, potatoes from the bin. The kitchen fills with the smell of food and I focus on the knife and the cutting board and not on the fact that I’m setting two plates on the table without hesitating.
She comes in when the light drops. Boots off at the door. Camera bag by the bed, on the wall side, the side that somehow became hers without either of us naming it. She washes her hands at the kitchen sink and sits down at the table across from me.
We eat.
“How’s the light on the south trail?”
“Good. The storm washed everything clean. The canyon wall had this color I’ve never seen before.”
“Storm damage?”
“One branch down near the creek.”
This is the conversation. Safe, practical, the kind of words that exist so silence doesn’t swallow us.
I watch her eat. I watch her mouth. I’ve been watching her mouth for days and I’ve kissed it once and once was not enough.
Not close to enough. She licks the corner of her lip where the broth caught and I look at the woodstove so she won’t catch me staring.
She wraps both hands around her coffee mug and tucks her hair behind her ear. It falls forward. She does it again. My hand tightens on my own mug because the alternative is reaching across the table and doing it for her.
She catches me looking. She doesn’t look away. Neither do I. The moment hangs between us like smoke and then she drops her eyes to the table, runs her thumb along the grain the way she did the first night, and something in my chest turns over.
The cabin gets smaller as the light fades. Or maybe it doesn’t get smaller. Maybe I’ve just become more aware of every square foot of it. The woodstove ticking. The bed against the west wall. The three feet between my chair and hers that feels like six inches.
She clears both plates before I can stand.
Washes them at the sink, quick and efficient, the way she does everything that isn’t photography.
She dries them and puts them back on the shelf without asking where they go.
She already knows where they go. She’s been in this cabin long enough to know where everything goes, and I watch her move through my kitchen like she belongs in it.
Then she goes to the workbench and looks at the cherry chair. Runs her finger along the joint I was failing to cut this afternoon. “You made progress.”
I get up and stand behind her, looking over her shoulder at the chair. “Yes.”
She’s right there. The back of her neck where her hair is pulled up. The curve of her shoulder. The smell of pine and soap and sun that has become the most familiar scent in my cabin and it didn’t exist here five days ago.
I reach out. I move her hair off the back of her neck. One slow brush of my fingers against her skin.
She goes still. Not tense. Still the way the air goes still before a storm, when everything is waiting.
She turns around.
We’re inches apart. Her chin tilted up. Her mouth right there, wide and full and the only thing I’ve thought about for hours.
Her eyes on mine and whatever she’s looking for, she finds it, because her hand comes up and rests flat on my chest and she doesn’t push me away and she doesn’t pull me closer. She just puts her hand on me and waits.
I’m done waiting.
I kiss her. Not like this afternoon. This afternoon was a decision.
This is a collapse. My hands in her hair, her back against the workbench edge, my mouth on hers and there’s no pulling back this time.
No forehead against forehead. No “that wasn’t in the rules.
” There are no rules. There haven’t been rules since she left coffee on my porch and I drank it.
She kisses me back with her whole body. Her hands fist in my flannel and pull and I feel the buttons strain and I don’t care.
Her hips press forward against mine and the contact sends a jolt through me that wipes out every thought I’ve had in the last six years.
Every thought about solitude and distance and the life I built to need nothing.
Gone. All of it. Replaced by the weight of her against me and the sound she makes when I grip her hips and pull her closer.
“Jasper.” My name in her mouth. Not a question. A statement. Like she’s confirming something she already decided.
I pick her up. My hands under her thighs and her legs wrap around me.
She’s not a woman who disappears in your arms. She fills them.
Her thighs against my hips, her arms around my neck, her mouth on my jaw, my throat.
I carry her to the bed because the workbench is not where this is happening. Not the first time.
I put her down on the bed. My bed. She pulls me down.
Her hands find the buttons of my flannel and this time she doesn’t just pull.
She undoes them. One at a time. Slow. Looking at me while she does it with an expression I’ve never had aimed at me before.
The focus. The attention. The way she looks at my chest the way she looked at the larch table: like the grain is worth studying.
I pull her shirt over her head. She lets me. Underneath she’s tan and warm and I put my mouth on her collarbone and she arches up and makes that sound again, the one from this afternoon, the one I stopped too soon. I’m not stopping.
My hands learn the curve of her waist. The swell of her hips.
She exhales. Long and slow. Her body relaxes under my hand. She lets me see her and touch her and that surrender, that small one, hits me harder than anything else.
I take my time. Not because I’m patient. Because I’ve been thinking about this for days. Every night on the porch, every morning watching her walk to the south trail. I’ve been cataloging what I wanted to do and now I’m doing it and I’m going to do it right.
My mouth moves down her body. Her throat, her chest, the space between her breasts. I unhook her bra and she arches up to let me and the sight of her bare underneath me, full and flushed and breathing fast, makes me stop. Just for a second. Just to look.
“Jasper.”
“I’m looking at you.”
“I noticed.”
My mouth finds her breast and she gasps and her hands are in my hair and her fingers grip and release and grip again.
I work my way down. Her ribs, her stomach (she doesn’t pull away this time), the line of her hip.
Lower. My mouth on her inner thigh and she says my name differently now. Rougher. Less controlled.
When my mouth finds her, her back arches off the bed.
Her hand grips my hair and her thigh tenses against my shoulder and the sounds she makes are the sounds I’ve been needing to hear since I stood in a doorway at 2am.
I learn what she likes. What makes her breath catch, what makes her hips lift, what makes her pull my hair hard enough that I feel it.
She comes apart against my mouth. Her whole body tightening and then releasing, a sound that’s half my name and half something wordless, and I feel it everywhere.
I stay with her through it, my hands on her hips holding her steady, until her breathing slows and her grip in my hair loosens and she’s looking at the ceiling with the dazed expression of a woman who just lost every thought she’s ever had.
Her hands find my belt. Direct, sure, fingers still unsteady.
She unbuckles it and pushes at my jeans and I help because I’m past the point of pretending I have any control over this situation.
My clothes come off and her hands are on me and the sound I make is not a sound I’ve made in years.
Low, rough, pulled from somewhere I forgot existed.
She wraps her hand around me and strokes and my forehead drops to her shoulder and I breathe through it because if I don’t breathe I’m going to lose this before it starts.
“Jenna.” Her name through gritted teeth. “If you keep doing that, this is going to be over before it begins.”
She laughs. The real laugh. The one that shakes her shoulders. She’s laughing naked in my bed and it’s the best sound I’ve ever heard and I’m going to spend the rest of whatever this is trying to cause it.
I lower myself over her. Skin to skin. Her body against mine and the contact, the full length of it, chest to hips to thighs, makes us both go quiet. Her breath catches. Mine stops. She’s warm and soft and she fits against me like she was made for me.
I push into her and she gasps and her nails dig into my shoulders and for a second neither of us moves.
The cabin is silent except for the woodstove and our breathing.
Her eyes are open. Looking at me. Not through a lens.
Not composing the shot. Just looking at me the way nobody has ever looked at me.
I move. She moves with me. Her hips rising to meet mine and the rhythm is something we find together, not gentle, not rough, somewhere in the space between where two people who’ve been fighting this for days stop fighting.
Her legs wrap around me. My hand grips her hip.
She says my name with every exhale and I feel each one in my spine.
I drop my forehead to her neck. Her fingers in my hair. The smell of her skin. The sound of her breathing going ragged. She’s close. I can feel it in the way her body tightens around me, the way her hands grip harder, the way her back arches.
“Jenna.” Her name. The only word left in me.