Chapter 8 #2
"Good wolf," he says.
"Good brothers," I say.
We go down the ridge.
The fire is bad but not catastrophic. The breaks are holding.
With the source secured and Creed in cuffs the fire has nothing behind it — no second ignition, no third — and Isolde's crews are working it down to a containment line that they will mop up by nightfall and walk for hot spots through tomorrow.
She is on the radio when I come into the incident command point on the granite shelf.
She has soot on her face. She has her radio in one hand and a map in the other.
Her hair is pulled back and her jaw is set and her eyes find me across the shelf the way they have been finding me for a week now, and she gives me one nod, which is the nod of a commander acknowledging that the operation has shifted from offensive to defensive.
She does not stop working until two hours later, when the line is held.
I do not stop working either. I take a shovel. I take a position on the southern break next to Casket. We dig. We watch. We dig some more.
By two in the afternoon, the fire is contained.
By four in the afternoon, the wind has died and reversed.
By six in the afternoon, the bowl smells like wet ash and pine and the chemistry of a fire that was set with my own compound and stopped by the people I have lived with for nineteen years.
By eight, we walk back to the compound together — me and Isolde and Conrad and Savage and Hex, in a loose line, in silence, the way men walk back from a thing they were not certain they would walk back from.
Conrad has Creed in the holding shed already.
The brothers are working the question of him in shifts.
He is not going to be a problem anymore.
The compound is dark and tired and alive.
Isolde and I do not speak on the walk back from the southern break to my cabin.
There is nothing left in either of us for speaking.
She is moving on the autopilot of someone who has been awake for thirty-eight hours and has just commanded a fire she was supposed to be afraid of.
I am moving on the autopilot of someone who has just been a wolf for the first time in two years and has just put his teeth in the back of the neck of the man who burned his world.
We reach the cabin.
I open the door.
We go inside.
The cabin is dark. I turn on the lamp by the bed, the small one, the warm one.
The bigger overhead is too much for either of us right now.
The wood stove has burned down to coals.
I crouch and feed it three pieces of cedar and a piece of pitch pine and it catches with a small huff of flame, and the cabin warms by degrees while Isolde stands in the middle of the floor with her arms hanging at her sides like she has forgotten what her body is for.
I look at her.
She is filthy. Her face is streaked with ash so black it looks painted on.
Her hair has come out of the braid. Her flannel shirt is gray with smoke and there is a tear at the elbow I don't remember being there.
Her hands are black to the wrists. Her left hand — the scarred one — is the worst, the burn-pucker collecting soot in its valleys.
I am the same. I look at myself in the small mirror over the basin and I see a man whose face is more ash than skin, whose hair has gone gray with it, whose mouth is the only un-blackened thing on him, and even that only because I've licked my lips a hundred times in the last two hours.
I run the water in the basin.
It comes hot. The cabin's water heater is small but reliable. I let it run until it steams.
"Come here," I say.
She comes. She doesn't speak. She crosses the cabin like a person sleepwalking.
I pull her shirt off her — the flannel, then the tank top under it — and her bra, gently, because she's so tired she's swaying.
I unbutton her jeans and crouch and pull them down her legs and she steps out of them.
I take off my own cut and shirt and jeans and we are both standing in nothing but skin in front of the wood stove and the small warm lamp, and the heat is on us, and the cabin is small enough that we are not cold.
I wet the cloth.
I start with her face.
I press the warm cloth to her forehead first, then down her cheek, then under her jaw, and the ash comes off in long gray streaks onto the cloth.
She closes her eyes. Her mouth softens. I rinse the cloth.
I do the other side of her face. I do her neck.
I do the hollow of her throat where the sweat and the ash have made a paste.
I work slow. I work the way you work when you're handling something fragile, which I learned the year I came out of the fire and Della helped me wash my own back because I could not reach.
"Sit," I say.
She sits on the wooden chair I've turned to face the basin.
I do her shoulders. I do her arms. I do her hands, both of them, last — and I do the scarred one the longest, working the cloth into the ridges of the burn the way I would work it into my own scars, with patience, with no hurry, with the kind of attention that says this part of you matters to me specifically.
The water in the basin goes black. I empty it. I refill it.
She opens her eyes when I'm doing her hand.
"Ezra."
"Yes."
"Switch."
"What."
"You. I do you. Switch."
So we switch. She stands. I sit on the chair.
She wets the cloth. She starts with my face.
Her hands on me are cool — they have always been cool, against my furnace skin, the contrast that is the entire shape of us — and the cool cloth on my hot ash-blackened forehead is almost more than I can hold.
She goes slow. She does my face the way I did hers, with a patience I have not seen anyone show me since I was sixteen and Della was teaching me how to live in a body that ran ten degrees hot.
She does my neck. She does my shoulders. She does my chest.
She gets to the worst of the scars on my left side — the long ropy ones that run from my hip up to my ribs, the place where the fire took the most of me — and she stops.
She presses the warm cloth to them.
She lays her cool scarred palm flat against the cloth, against the scars, against me.
She says, "Hi."
I say, "Hi."
She says, "We did it."
I say, "We did."
She says, "I'm so tired I can't see."
I say, "I know. Me too."
She washes the rest of me. She does my arms. She does my hands.
She kneels in front of the chair to do my feet, which is a kind of tenderness I am not equipped for, and I make some kind of sound in my throat that the wolf would make if the wolf had a throat for it, and she looks up at me with the cloth in her hand and her hair coming loose around her face and the ash gone from her cheeks and her eyes very, very steady.
"Bed," she says.
"Bed."
We go.
The bed is the same bed she slept in two hours of last night.
The sheets are clean — Della comes through the cabins on Sundays whether I want her to or not and the sheets are crisp and the blanket smells like cedar smoke.
I peel them back. Isolde climbs in. I climb in beside her.
The cabin is warm now. The lamp is warm.
The stove is warm. Her skin is clean and cool and damp at the hairline and she smells, for the first time since I met her a week ago, like nothing but herself — no ash, no smoke, no accelerant signature, no fire on her at all.
I touch her face.
She turns her face into my palm.
I lean in and I kiss her. It is the slowest kiss I have ever given anyone.
It is a kiss that has been emptied of all its hurry by thirty-eight hours of waiting for fire to come, and it is the kiss of a man who is too tired to do anything fast and a woman who is too tired to want anything fast, and it is better slow than fast, the slowness is the entire point.
Her hand slides up my chest and finds the side of my neck, the unburned side, and she pulls me down to her.
I go.
She is warm under me. She is warm in a way that is hers, not mine — not my furnace heat, but the smaller human warmth of a tired body in a warm bed, and I lower my weight onto her carefully, the way I have learned to lower my weight, with my forearms on either side of her head and my mouth on hers and my hips finding hers the way they want to find hers.
Her arms come up around my back. Her cool palms flat against my shoulder blades.
The scarred one and the unscarred one, both of them, on me.
"Slow," she breathes against my mouth.
"Slow."
"All night if it takes all night."
"It will take all night."
She laughs. It is a small, broken, exhausted, delighted laugh that I am going to carry in my chest for the rest of my life.
She kisses me again. Her tongue is slow against mine.
Her hips come up to meet me of their own accord, a small lift, a small pressure, and I am hard against her belly and she is wet against my thigh and neither of us has hurried any part of this and I do not intend to start hurrying it now.
I touch her. I do it the way I washed her, slow, careful, attentive, the kind of touch that says I have all night and you have all night and nothing is on fire anymore.
I move my hand down her side, over her hip, between her thighs.
She opens for me with a small soft sound that is more breath than voice.
She is slick under my fingers. I work her there, slowly, with two fingers, then with my palm, then with two fingers again, and her hips rise to my hand and her breath catches and her hand comes up to grip the back of my neck and she says my name once, low, against my mouth.
"Ezra."
"I'm here."
"Don't stop."
"I won't."
I don't. I keep going. I keep slow. I watch her face in the lamplight — the way her brow draws together, the way her mouth parts, the way the tendon in her neck goes taut — and when she comes it's a long slow rolling thing, not the sharp spike of the workshop wall four nights ago, but a deep tired exhausted body releasing the thirty-eight hours of held breath, and she makes a sound that is half laugh half sob and her hand comes up to cover her face and I move it away gently because I want to see her.
"There you are," I say.
"There I am."
"Stay."
"I'm staying."
I move over her. I settle between her thighs.
She wraps her legs around the small of my back and her hands come up to my face and she pulls me down to her again, and I push into her slowly, slowly, slowly, all the way home, and she makes a small oh against my mouth that is the sound of a body recognizing another body, of a tired woman finding a tired man and not having to do any more searching tonight.
I move.
I move the way the night requires, which is slow and deep and steady.
She matches me. Her hips meet mine on every stroke.
Her cool palm — the scarred one — is on my back, flat against the worst of my scars, and the warmth of her body and the cool of her palm and the slow rhythm of us together is everything I have ever wanted and did not know how to ask for.
The lamp throws a low warm circle on the ceiling.
The stove ticks. The cedar pops once, softly.
She finds my mouth again. I kiss her through the rest of it.
When she comes the second time her arms tighten around me and her thighs tighten around me and she whispers something into the side of my throat that I do not quite hear, and when she's done shaking I let myself go too, finally, into her, against her, with my forehead pressed to her forehead and my breath stuttering and her cool scarred palm still flat on the worst of my back.
We don't move for a long time.
I am too heavy on her. I move eventually, slowly, off of her, onto my side, and I pull her against me.
She tucks her head under my jaw. Her cool palm — the scarred one — settles on my chest, over my heart.
My heart slows under it. Her breathing slows.
The cabin is warm and the stove is ticking and somewhere outside in the bowl the compound is sleeping the long deep sleep of a family that did not lose anyone today.
"Ezra."
"Yes."
"I'm staying."
"I know."
"I mean — I'm staying. Here. In Bone Hollow. I'm not going back."
"I know."
"You knew?"
"I knew the night you said their names on the firebreak."
She is quiet for a long time. Her thumb moves once, slowly, against my chest. Her palm is cool. My skin is hot. The contrast is the whole thing.
"They would have liked you," she says, eventually. "Holt would have liked you the most. He'd have given you so much shit for the wolf."
"I'd have taken it."
"I know you would have."
The stove ticks.
"Sleep," I tell her.
"Sleep," she agrees.
She does. Her breathing goes long and easy against my throat.
I lie awake for another five minutes, with her cool scarred palm on my chest and the lamp throwing warm light on the ceiling and the cabin smelling like cedar smoke and clean skin and nothing on fire, and I think the thought I have been working my way toward for nineteen years without knowing I was working toward it, which is this:
The wolf and the man and the burned half of me and the unburned half of me all agree about her.
We all agree.
It's the first thing the four of us have agreed on in my entire life.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.
Outside the cabin, the bowl is dark and quiet and the wind is at zero knots and there is no fire anywhere in the world that I cannot put out.