Chapter 4
four
Hazel
The storm comes up over the ridge in the middle of the afternoon.
I watch it from the porch steps, bandaged thumb curled in my palm, coffee going cold against my knee.
A black wall of cloud slides in from the west with the rain-foot dragging under it like a curtain being pulled across the valley, and the temperature drops twenty degrees between when I first notice it and when it arrives.
The wind turns sharp. The spruces along the road start that deep flex, a long slow lean that makes them look as though they're all trying to agree on something and can't quite get there.
Rafe comes around the side of the cabin with an armload of split fir, drops it into the crib on the porch, looks at the sky.
"Inside."
It breaks twenty minutes later. A few fat drops on the tin roof, and then all at once it's a roar.
The windows streak. The cabin goes dim in the middle of the afternoon.
He has the oil lamp lit and the woodstove open, and the whole room smells like wet spruce and smoke and the specific ozone that precedes close lightning.
Three days we've been up here now.
Three days of him feeding me at careful intervals and pretending not to watch while I eat.
Three days of my hands slowly, gratefully, forgetting how to shake.
Three days of him not sleeping, as far as I can tell, except for a two-hour stretch yesterday on the couch while I sat in the chair and held a book I wasn't reading.
Rafe is interesting. He checks the road every forty minutes without appearing to.
He'll get up to add a log and his eyes will pass the front window on the way, and the check is folded inside the movement so neatly you'd miss it if you weren't paying attention.
He smells like pine and woodsmoke and a soap I've identified as olive oil and lye from the bar by the sink.
Yesterday at this table he held my hand in both of his to close the cut on my thumb with butterfly bandages, and when he was done he didn't let go, and I didn't pull away, and neither of us said anything about it.
I've never let a man hold my hand that long.
I've had three relationships. All appropriate, all tidy, all with men who would have let go the second the procedure was over and probably handed me a pamphlet about wound care.
None of them ever made the probability-assessment engine in my brain go quiet.
That's what happened yesterday at that table — not slowly, not gradually, but all at once, the way a spreadsheet resolves when the last formula locks in.
His thumb against the gauze on mine, and the whole machine just stopped.
I know what that means.
So here it is: I'm in love with him. It's not rational, it doesn't have clean columns, and I am not going to fight it, because I know the difference now between things I'm running from and things I'm running toward.
He is the first thing I have run toward.
I didn't realize I was doing it until I was already here.
I'm not saying any of it out loud yet. I have a small amount of dignity left and I intend to spend it wisely.
After dinner we end up on opposite sides of the woodstove.
He made elk stew from a jar his father put up the year before he died — told me that in one flat sentence and didn't expand, and I ate every bite without commenting because I understood that adding words would only make the next telling harder.
I'm on the floor in front of the stove, which has become my spot without either of us deciding it.
He's in the armchair. Rain on the roof. Lamp on the table throwing the middle of the room gold and the edges dark.
"Tell me about your grandmother's place," he says.
A gust hits the cabin. The stovepipe ticks against the flashing.
So I do. She bought the land in 1968, with her own money, because she was a nurse and she'd saved for it.
She built the cabin with her second husband in the seventies — he was decent, she told me once, not nice or kind, just decent, which was about as much as she ever said about him.
She came out from Montréal every summer, first with my mother, then with me when I was small enough to believe that everything worth seeing in the world was at the end of a long drive.
She taught me to clean a fish on that porch.
I hated it. I loved her more than I've ever loved anyone except possibly the man across from me, which is a thought I close the door on firmly.
"You spoke French with her."
"A little. She'd switch when she got frustrated with me."
"Say something."
"Mm?"
"In French."
"Il pleut comme vache qui pisse," I say, because it's raining and it's the first thing Grand-mère would have said.
He laughs."What does it mean?"
"It rains like a pissing cow."
"Montréal's a poetic place."
"Grand-mère was."
The rain keeps going. The fire moves. I'm cold in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature, the kind blankets don't fix. He notices, and he gets up to add a log.
He crosses behind me. The back of his hand brushes my shoulder on the way — not deliberate, just the consequence of the cabin being small and him being large — but my body doesn't process it as accidental. My body leans into it like it's been waiting.
I catch his wrist.
He stops. I stand up. I don't let go of his wrist, and I turn around, and he's close enough that I have to tilt my face up to see his properly. His eyes in this light are the colour of wet moss.
Rafe’s hand comes up to my jaw, warm and dry, the callus at the base of his thumb pressing against the soft place under my ear, and he tips my face up another inch. He kisses me.
It's slow and thorough and completely focused.
His beard is softer than I expected. His other hand settles at the small of my back, pressing me in, and I can feel exactly how much he wants this against my hip.
He's not concealing any of it, and the directness of that, the simple honesty of his body telling mine the truth, makes me whimper.
He brings me down onto the wool blanket and takes the flannel off me one button at a time, which should not be as unbearable as it is.
His eyes stay on my face the whole way and I want to tell him to hurry up and I don't, because the slowness is doing something to me, a tightening low in my belly that gets worse with every brush of his fingers against my skin through the open fabric.
When he pushes it off my shoulders he doesn't move to the next thing. He just looks at me. His eyes drop, come back up, and the weight of that look goes through me like something physical.
His hand traces my collarbone. One slow drag of his fingertips and my breath goes shallow.
The bra comes off and his mouth finds the base of my throat at the same time and I stop tracking anything except the heat of it.
He moves down and closes his mouth over my breast and I arch into him before I can think about it, a sound pulling out of me that I didn't choose.
His beard rasps against the underside and I grab his hair and he does it again, harder, and the hand he has spread flat on my ribs is the only anchor I have to anything.
My jeans. He pops the button and works them down with my underwear and I lift without being asked because I need them off, I need his hands on me, I have been thinking about his hands on me for two days and I am completely done waiting.
He is still dressed and the wanting is so sharp it almost hurts.
He settles between my thighs. His palms press my legs apart, wide and deliberate, and he looks at me, all of me, open and wanting and past pretending otherwise and my face goes hot.
Then his mouth is on my pussy and I stop knowing words.
He doesn't tease. He doesn't work up to it.
He goes straight to where I need him, tongue flat and slow and devastating, and when my hips push up he pins them with his forearm and doesn't change his pace — doesn't speed up, doesn't acknowledge the begging my body is doing — just holds me down and keeps going exactly as slowly as he wants to.
Two fingers push inside me and curl up and find a place that makes everything go white at the edges.
I can't move. Can't close my legs. Can only lie there with my hands in his hair and my back arching off the blanket while he takes me apart with the specific unhurried focus he brings to everything.
His beard rasps against my inner thighs.
His fingers work me open and his mouth works my clit and I am making sounds I have never made before in my life, sounds that the two-weeks-ago version of me would not have believed she was capable of, and I don't care, I can't care, there's no room for anything except the heat of his mouth and the curl of his fingers and the tight coiling pressure of an orgasm he keeps walking me right up to the edge of and then pulling back from.
When he does it the first time I actually whimper.
"Don't stop," I manage. "Please don't!"
His mouth brushes the inside of my thigh. "Tell me."
"I want to come. Please. I want —"
He goes back and I sob out loud with the relief of it.
His tongue works me in slow circles while his fingers press deeper and I'm shaking, both hands fisted in his hair, and just when I'm right there — right on the edge of it, desperate and trembling — he slows again.
Holds me at the crest and keeps me there and doesn't let me go over.
"Rafe."
"One more minute." His voice against my pussy is warm and unhurried. "You can give me that."
I cannot give him that. I am going to die. I tell him this.
And then he seals his mouth over my clit and sucks, and his fingers crook hard inside me, and I come so suddenly and completely that I cry out into the empty cabin and don't care at all that I do it.
He works me through it, gentling, until I pull at his hair. Then he kisses the inside of my thigh and comes up my body, and I'm still shaking when I get my hands on his shirt and shove it up.
"Off," I say. "Now."
He pulls it over his head. His chest is broader than I'd accounted for, because clothes are apparently doing serious structural work there, and the compass tattoo on his right bicep is right there and I trace it once with my finger because I've been wanting to and now seems exactly like the time.
He lets me. Then his hands go to his belt and I watch him strip the jeans off and he's bare underneath, and the sight of his cock, so hard and thick and flushed makes my mouth dry.
I reach for him. Wrap my hand around him and feel the weight of it, the heat, the way he goes very still when I stroke him once. His jaw works.
He's bracing over me with his forearms either side of my head and his forehead against mine.
He pushes in slow. First inch and he watches my face, and I breathe, and my body stretches around him and my mouth falls open, and he stops and watches me some more, and I tilt my hips and he takes that as the answer it is and pushes the rest of the way home.
Full. Deep. I can feel him everywhere.
He starts to move and I stop being a person and I become only this — his weight on me, the drag and push of him, the specific pressure of him hitting deep and the way he reads every sound I make and adjusts, always adjusting, always paying attention. His thumb finds my clit. His eyes stay on mine.
"Look at me," he says. Low and even. "Stay with me."
I look at him. I stay.
"Good girl."
Those two words in that voice do more damage than everything that came before them.
I come on his cock with his thumb working me and my nails in his shoulders and his name in my mouth, and he doesn't stop, just shifts his angle and hooks my knee up over his arm and goes deeper, and I feel that in my back teeth, and he works me up to a third one slow and thorough and merciless until I'm crying a little with how much I feel and he kisses the tears off my face without comment and keeps going.
Only then does he let himself go. He pulls out and finishes on my stomach, his forehead dropping to my collarbone, one long ragged breath out.
"Fuck," he says as his come spurts over my stomach.
We stay on the rug. He pulls the flannel over me and cleans me up and lies down beside me and I put my ear on his chest and listen to his heart rate come back down. Mine is doing the same thing, probably. I've lost the ability to monitor my own vitals.
"I didn't know I could be loud," I say. "That was new information."
His arm tightens around me. "Not going anywhere."
I fall asleep with the fire on my face and his heartbeat under my ear, and sometime later I half-wake to being lifted and carried and set down on the bed, blankets tucked around me. The chair by the window creaks.
At three in the morning I open my eyes. He's still there. Rifle across his lap. Eyes on the road.
I close mine again and sleep soundly for the first time in a long time. Safe.