Chapter 8
Eight
Mick
The gravel of the ridge road clicks under the truck as my headlights cut through the pines on the last climb to my property, and beside me Vera is quiet, her profile lit green by the dash.
Neither of us said a word about where we were going when I put her in this truck at the end of the day, because we both already knew.
Three hours ago she was on the edge of a laminate desk in that trailer with my hands in her hair and the presses running under us.
Then we straightened the papers, she fixed her blouse, I walked out first so nobody would count us leaving together, and we got through the rest of the afternoon like two people who hadn’t.
I reach over and cup her knee with my hand, just leaving it there, a weight, letting her feel the calluses through the fabric.
“You bought a place all the way out on the ridge?” she says. “You used to want to be in the middle of things.”
“Town gets small when you’re the one everybody comes to when something breaks.” I move my hand from her knee to drop a gear. “Down there, there’s always a set of eyes on you. Up here the only thing watching is the trees.”
We come over the crest, the high beams washing across the cabin, and kill the engine. The ticking of it is the only sound on the ridge, and Vera goes still.
It isn’t a prefab kit and it isn’t a hunting shack. It’s two stories of hand-hewn pine on a foundation of river stone, the porch running the length of the front, the timber pillars squared with an adze over three months of evenings, to a tolerance that outlives a century of Colorado winters.
“You built this,” she whispers.
“Every log. Come on. Let’s get you out of the cold.”
Inside, the soapstone stove has kept the chill off. I flip a switch and low amber light comes up over the pine floors, the stone fireplace, the shelves of mechanical manuals and old valley blueprints and a few paperbacks we read together as kids.
Vera walks into the middle of the room, and without her blazer, with her hair down, she looks like she has always been standing there.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I didn’t want a house that creaked every time the wind changed.”
There’s a pot on the back burner that’s been going since before I drove down to get her.
I started it this morning, low and slow, the way it has to be done: the oxtail first, hours of it, then the ground peanuts and the annatto until the sauce went that deep, stubborn orange. The whole cabin smells of it.
She stops, her head turning toward the stove, and her eyes fill before she can get in front of it.
“Mick,” she says. Just that.
“Kare-kare,” I say, like it’s nothing. Kah-reh kah-reh, just the way she taught me to pronounce it.
But it’s not nothing.
I don’t tell her about the four hours of highway it took to find oxtail and banana blossom and a jar of shrimp paste I had to ask a stranger in the Denver market how to use.
I don’t tell her I copied the recipe off the stained card in the tin in Nana Warden’s pantry, Vera’s mother’s handwriting starting to fade, while Nana ran the tap and pretended not to watch.
I lift the lid and let the steam roll up between us. “Figured you hadn’t had it in a while.”
She presses the back of her hand to her mouth and looks at the floor, and I let her have the minute.
Some things I can’t say out loud, so I cooked it.
Then I put her to work on the eggplant and green beans.
She needs something for her hands, and for twenty minutes the cabin fills with the sounds of a routine we used to have.
The thump of her knife on the board. Elk steaks searing in butter.
We move around each other in the small kitchen with a choreography that scares me more than anything in this valley, because it would be so easy to get used to it.
Her phone goes off on the slate counter.
It’s faceup and I’m three feet away with a knife in my hand, and I read it before I can stop myself.
ROLAND KELLER. 9:47 p.m.
Vera stops with the salt cellar in her hand.
She doesn’t jump. She doesn’t explain, and she doesn’t look at me. The phone gets two seconds and a look I have only ever seen her use on the plant floor, and then she turns it facedown on the slate and goes back to the vegetables.
The phone buzzes once more against the stone. Then it stops.
“He works Sundays,” she says.
“Does he?”
“He works every day. He’ll have sent an email too.” She’s cutting the eggplant in neat slices. “It’ll keep till morning.”
I could ask. The question is right there, and she’s standing in my kitchen with her sleeves pushed up and her hair down, and out the black window is a valley with four hundred men asleep in it.
But if I ask what he wants, this stops being the best night of my life.
So I don’t ask.
Whatever this turns into, she never lied to me tonight.
I just didn’t ask.
We eat at the oak table, and Vera eats like she has been hungry for a year, all the corporate elegance gone. She goes back for the kare-kare twice, and the second time catches me watching and doesn’t bother to fix her face.
She looks happy.
When the plates are in the sink, I stand with my hands on the edge of the counter and my back to her. I hear her chair go back as she crosses the floor and stops behind my right shoulder, not touching me but close enough to be warm on the back of my neck.
“Mick,” she says. “Stop hiding from me.”
I turn around. “I’m not hiding,” I say. “I’m trying to take my time with you because if I act like I did in that office, I’m going to break you.”
“You’re not going to break me.” She rests her hands flat against my chest. “I don’t want the frantic version of you tonight. I don’t want the one driven by anger and everything you’ve been carrying either. I want you, all of you. Take your time.”
“I’m not hiding,” I say. “I’m trying to take my time with you. Because if I act like I did in that office, I’m going to break you.”
I cradle her face in my hands, my thumbs at her temples and kiss her. It’s slow and deep, and partway through it, Vera makes a sound against my mouth I haven’t heard in three year and my chest tightens.
How I’ve missed that sound.
How I’ve missed her.
On the way to the bedroom she stops me.
“I’m on the pill,” she says, quiet and steady, her eyes on mine. “Have been for three years. In the office I didn’t want that conversation. Tonight I do. I don’t want anything between us.”
It takes me a second to get my voice to work. “You sure?”
“I’ve been sure since Tuesday.”
The bedroom is the last room I finished and the plainest one in the house. Bare pine, one window with the whole black valley in it, a lamp I wired myself. I’ve walked in here every night since I hung the door and turned that lamp off without looking at anything.
She stops in the doorway and takes all of it in, then she puts her hand out behind her and finds mine.
I get her onto the bed I built.
I’ve slept in it alone every night since I put it together and never once let myself picture her in it. On purpose. The way you don’t load a beam you haven’t sized.
She’s in the middle of it now with her hair spread out on my pillow, and the beam holds.
I take the rest of her clothes off the way I said I would, and this time there’s nothing in my way and nothing to rush for.
The blouse first, one button at a time, with her watching me do it.
There’s a shadow of carbon at the hip of it where I put my hands on her over a laminate desk this afternoon, and she’s walked around my plant all evening wearing it.
I get it off her and fold it once over the footboard before coming back to her.
The rest goes slower than it needs to. I get the trousers down and off and set them on the chair, and she lifts her hips for me without being asked, and that alone nearly takes the top of my head off.
The last of it I do sitting on the edge of my own bed with her half in my lap, neither of us saying a word.
Then she gets her hands under my shirt and pulls it off me. Staying up on her knees in front of me, her thumb goes straight to the stripe across my knuckles where a wrench slipped on Line Three.
I catch my breath as she puts her mouth on it, my chest tightening.
“You first,” I murmur as I lay her back down and put my mouth on the freckle over her left collarbone, on the soft underside of her jaw, on the flat of her stomach that jumps under my beard, loving the sounds she makes.
“Mick, we should probably talk about how this looks on Monday.”
“No.”
“I’m only saying there’s a phone call waiting for me in the morning, and if we’re going to be smart about it—”
“Vera.” I stop where I am and wait until she looks at me. “You’ve been managing something every minute since you crossed the county line. Not in this room.”
Her mouth opens. Then it closes. I watch her set down whatever she was holding, and it takes her a second. It’s the bravest thing I’ve seen her do all week.
She’s still wearing the faint scent of the shop floor—engine oil and cold metal—mixed with that warm, sweet skin scent that’s belonged only to her since we were kids. It hits me straight in the chest, so thick it nearly makes my knees weak.
There’s a faint, dark smudge on the inside of her thigh from this afternoon where my hand rested while the presses ran beneath us. I drop my mouth to it, feeling the electric shudder that ripples straight through her. Her hands come down into my hair, her fingers tangling tight, anchoring herself.
When I settle between her thighs and open her with my mouth, any last trace of my composure just burns away.
She tastes like home—warm, salt-sweet, and intoxicatingly familiar.
It’s a taste I’ve craved on every cold, quiet night in this cabin, a memory I tried for three years to starve out of my blood.
The second my tongue finds her, she goes rigid, her hips hitching off the mattress as she catches a fistful of my hair.
“Mick—”