25. Freya
Freya
My body kept better time than any kitchen clock I ever worked to.
By Friday morning I could feel it. The way you feel bread coming ready under a cloth.
A warmth low down that didn't belong to the range.
A softness in my own skin, as if somebody had turned me down from a boil to the gentlest simmer and meant to leave me there till I was wanted.
Ten years I'd read every signal my body sent as a fault report. This one arrived like a season.
So I did what I do. I cooked.
Not for the café. For the flat. For the days ahead, and the three men who would be in them.
I made the bread I make when my hands want comfort.
A pot of the soup that fed a whole hillside.
The small lemon things Miles pretends not to count.
By noon the cold shelf was stocked like a woman expecting weather.
Which, in every way that mattered, I was.
The town stocked me right back.
It had started on the Thursday. The old quiet conspiracy, running again as if it had never stopped.
A crate of kindling on the step. Split small.
Stacked the way a careful man stacks it.
Two jars of honey with no note. A dish of Dilys's saffron buns under a cloth.
Still warm. The cloth was one of her good ones. That meant I was expected to keep it.
Nobody knocked. Nobody said a word about why an unbonded omega with her heat coming up might want her wood split and her shelves full. The whole hill simply leaned in an inch, the way it does, and looked out to sea, and whistled.
In March that would have gutted me. I'd have stood on the step doing sums. On the Thursday I stood on the step with the honey in my hands and laughed. Once, out loud, at the sheer cheek of being loved like this. Then I took it all inside, and did no sums at all.
Dr Pryce came up at noon, on the flimsiest pretext I have ever heard a medical professional construct.
Something about returning a cake tin. She has never borrowed a cake tin in her life.
She checked nothing. Prescribed nothing.
She drank one cup of tea and told me my colour was the best she'd seen on me since March.
At the door she paused, and out came the voice she keeps for blood pressure.
A first heat after a long quiet could run strong, she said.
A body only lets go like this when it finally trusts the ground it's standing on.
Then she said the pack of them were good men, which was not a medical opinion, and that she'd known each of them since they were in short trousers, which was.
She left her number on the slate and a wink I will treasure into old age.
The afternoon I gave to the nest.
It had been growing all spring, that corner.
A heap. Then a habit. Now I finished it the way you finish a dish you mean to serve.
Clean sheets under the soft old things. The wool wall built up, the loudest thread in it set where I could see it.
Rhys's jumper where my cheek would find it in the dark.
The cedar-and-linen one folded at the head, because some scents are for wrapping in and some are for steering by, and Hudson's has been true north since the night it came off his back.
My grandmother's blanket over the whole of it. Last. Always last.
I stood back and looked at it, and my eyes went hot for no reason a clock could explain.
Because here is the thing I'd want a frightened woman on a bus to know, if I could reach her ten years back.
I built that nest with my own hands, out of things that were given freely.
Not one thread of it was owed. Not one thread of it was a debt.
It was a bed a whole town had made, one kindness at a time, for a woman it wanted warm.
They came up at dusk, at my word.
I'd sent it that morning, and I'd kept it in my own voice.
Tonight, I think. Come for supper and stay for the duration.
Bring nothing. I've cooked. Miles replied within the minute, a single line about having kept his diary clear for this since approximately childhood.
Hudson replied that the boat was seen to and so was the market stall, which answered two questions I hadn't asked.
Which is Hudson, in one line. Rhys didn't reply at all.
At four I looked out and his lamp was already lit in the workshop, hours early.
A lighthouse doesn't answer letters either.
Supper was easy and strange and lovely. The four of us round my small table.
Soup and bread. The gold coming down over the harbour.
My body simmered away under the talk like a pan I'd stopped needing to watch.
They could scent it on me, of course. It filled the flat, they told me later, like something coming out of an oven.
And all three of them sat there and ate their soup and made me laugh and let it be mine.
It was Miles who asked, in the end. Somebody had to, and the other two would have sat vigil till dawn. He set his spoon down. The act came off him like a coat, and underneath he was careful and bright and entirely serious.
"How do you want this, love? Tell us the shape of it, and that's the shape it'll have."
So I told them. Plainly, in my own kitchen, with the last of the light on the water.
I wanted all three of them, through the whole of it.
I wanted the bond at the end, at dawn or wherever the far side turned out to be, when I could ask with my head clear and mean it.
I'd say what I needed as it came, and they were to believe me the first time.
And if a moment came when I couldn't find words, they knew my scent by now better than any words I owned.
"We do," Rhys said. Quiet. The rumble already under it.
"Then that's the shape."
Hudson stood and started clearing the table, because in any weather Hudson will find the next useful thing and do it. On his way past he stopped behind my chair. His hand settled on my shoulder, once. I leaned my cheek to his knuckles and felt him go still the whole way through.
We washed up. That's the part I'd tell the woman on the bus, actually.
Not what came after, which is ours. The washing up.
Four people in a small warm kitchen with the tide coming in, drying my grandmother's bowls, while my body rose like proving dough.
Nobody hurried me. Miles sang half of something rude.
Rhys dried the same bowl for five minutes, watching me the way he watches weather.
And the fear I'd carried all my adult life sat outside on the step like a cat I'd finally stopped feeding.
The first wave came for me around nine, while I was laughing.
It didn't announce itself the way I'd braced for all my life.
Not a fault. Not a failure of scheduling.
It came up through me the way the spring had come up the valley.
Warm. Total. Unhurried, and sure of its welcome.
My knees went soft. The laugh turned over into something lower.
Three heads came round as one, and the whole room changed weather.
"Now," I said.
Or my body said it through me. There was no seam anymore between me and the body. That was the last thing I understood clearly, and it was enough. Ten years of white knuckles, and when the wave finally took me, I went the way you go into water you trust.
Willing. Wanted. Home.