Chapter 5
five
Rafe
The burner phone buzzes at seven AM.
I take the call on the porch. The intermediary. Boilerplate man, paid by the hour, no idea what he is part of. He asks for status. I give him a lie. Subject broke east after Kamloops. I've rolled with her. Peace River tonight. Friday for delivery. He buys it and hangs up.
That buys me thirty-six hours. Voclain will verify inside twelve. I will spend the rest of today getting her statement and the laptop into the right hands. I have a call to make to Beauchamp at noon to arrange the waypoint.
All of that is true. None of it is what today is for.
I come back inside. She is at the table in my flannel, barefoot, her bandaged hand wrapped around a mug. Her hair is sleep-crooked. The light through the east window is doing something to her face that I am going to remember.
"The client called," I say. I sit down across from her. "We have about a day. I'll call Beauchamp at noon. He'll set a waypoint. Tomorrow morning we drive you down. You give your statement. The laptop goes into an evidence hold. You go into protective custody for a while."
She puts the mug down. Breathes in. Breathes out.
"When do I see you again?"
I make myself look at her. "Months. Maybe longer. Depends on the trial."
"Okay."
She does not cry. She does not argue. She nods, once. Then, smaller: "Tonight, though."
"Tonight."
"And today."
"And today."
The call to Beauchamp at noon goes the way it's supposed to. I come back inside and she's on the couch with her book and she looks up at me and I can tell from her face that she's been watching the window.
I sit across from her. I'm going to tell her most of it, not all of it.
"Beauchamp confirmed the waypoint. We're set for tomorrow at ten.
" I set the burner on the table. "The intermediary called this morning.
I told him you were heading northeast, bought us time.
But Voclain has people who are better than intermediaries.
He'll have burned through the false trail by tonight. "
She doesn't react visibly. She closes the book on her thumb. "He knows where we are?"
"He knows I went north out of Silver Ridge. He doesn't know this road. But he'll be looking, and he has money, and money moves fast." I look at her. "Tomorrow morning we drive out early and we drive fast and we don't stop. That's the plan."
She nods once. She opens the book again but just stares blankly at it.
"Come outside with me."
"Where?"
"The woodshed. I want to show you something."
She follows me.
I teach her to split kindling.
Not because she needs to know. Because it is a thing I can do with my hands for an hour that keeps me inside the same ten feet of porch as her. Because the small satisfaction of wood coming apart along a grain under a good hatchet is something I want her to have before tomorrow.
I show her the hatchet. The block. How to set the cedar. One end on the block, the other end steady in your off hand. How to start the blade with a light tap so the split runs true, then let the weight of the hatchet do the work. I show her how to stand. Feet shoulder-width. Weight centered.
The first one she tries, the hatchet skids sideways off the cedar and buries in the block. She jumps.
"You'll hit your hand like that. Again. Slow. Tap, then swing."
She tries again. The cedar splits along the grain with a sound like tearing fabric.
She looks up at me with her mouth open. "That was so satisfying."
"Yeah."
"Can I do another one?"
"Do the whole pile."
She does six. By the fourth she has found the rhythm.
By the sixth she is grinning. Her face is pink from the cold and the work.
A smudge of cedar dust on her cheek. I am standing three feet from her with my arms crossed.
I am absolutely gone for her, which I already was, but I am gone for her in a quieter way now.
The way you are gone for a person you are going to know for a long time, if you are lucky.
If nothing comes out of those woods tomorrow that you did not see coming.
She looks up from the seventh piece. "What?"
"Nothing."
"Rafe."
"You have something." I point to my own cheek.
She wipes at her face. Wrong side.
I step in and brush the cedar dust off her cheek with my thumb. My hand stays for a second longer than it needs to. Her eyes on mine.
"There."
She doesn't step back.
We make lunch together. Grilled cheese on the woodstove, a can of tomato soup. She stands at the counter and butters bread. I stand beside her at the stove. We do not say much. It feels like a thing we have been doing for years.
The afternoon goes quiet. I do the things I need to do.
Move the truck to face the gate. Fill the jerrycans.
Clean the rifle. Put the laptop in the drybag.
I do them slowly. In between, I come inside and sit with her for ten minutes and then go out again.
She has stopped asking what I am doing. She trusts me to come back inside.
At four o'clock I come in and she is asleep on the couch.
Her book has fallen shut on her chest. Her bandaged hand is curled up near her face.
I sit in the armchair across from her and watch her sleep for a while.
She snores, very lightly. I did not know that about her.
I am going to have to hold on to it, because I will not be able to check again for a long time.
Dusk. She wakes. She makes us food. Eggs, toast, the last of the potatoes fried in the cast iron. She is not a cook. She has told me. She has cooked tonight anyway.
We eat at the table. She tells me a story about a professor she had in grad school who pronounced amortization three different ways in the same lecture. She is funny when she is safe. I have not heard her be funny very often. I suddenly know I am going to miss it.
When we are done she stands up from the table. She does not clear the dishes. She holds out her hand.
"Bed."
I take her hand. I follow her.
She's pulling her shirt off before I've closed the bedroom door.
I stop and watch her. She doesn't perform it — just reaches back and pulls it over her head and drops it on the chair, then unclasps her bra and sets it on top, and turns around, and the lamp is on the low setting and it catches the line of her shoulders and the curve of her waist and the way she's looking at me, direct and patient, waiting for me to stop standing in the doorway like an idiot.
I have seen a lot in my life. I have not seen anything that looked like her in this light, in this room, looking at me like that.
I cross the room.
I get my hands on her face and kiss her and she makes a sound against my mouth that goes straight through me, her fingers curling in my shirt, pulling.
I walk her back to the bed and she sits on the edge and gets her hands on my belt without being asked, working it loose with that small focused frown she gets when she's solving something, and I stand there and let her because watching her take me apart with the same concentration she gives everything else is something I want to look at for as long as she'll let me.
Belt. Button. She pushes my jeans down and looks up at me and her eyes are dark in the lamplight and I am a dead man.
I push her back onto the bed.
She goes easily, arms over her head, and I get her jeans off and my hand between her thighs and she's already wet and hot and I feel the groan building in my chest and swallow it. I work two fingers into her and her hips come up off the mattress.
"God," she breathes. "Yes."
I know where. I learned her last night. I crook my fingers and stay exactly there and work her until her thighs are shaking and she's making noise she doesn't bother to muffle, and then I put my mouth on her pussy and she grabs my hair with both hands and holds on.
She tastes like something I want more of.
I take my time with my tongue, slow and deliberate, fingers still working inside her, and she's rocking against my face and saying my name in pieces and I could stay here all night but I want to be inside her, so I take her apart fast — seal my mouth over her clit and suck and feel her come hard, her whole body locking up, my name coming out of her broken and loud in the small room.
I don't let her come down.
I'm moving up her body before she's finished and she reaches for me immediately, getting her hand around my cock and stroking once, and my jaw goes tight.
"Now," she says. Her voice is wrecked. "I mean it, Rafe. Now."
I line up and push in.
The sound she makes when I fill her is something I am going to carry for the rest of my life.
Soft and low and completely unguarded, her mouth open, her head back, her nails going into my shoulders.
I hold still for a second with my forehead against hers just to feel it — the heat of her, how tight she is, how her body adjusts around mine like we were designed for exactly this specific geometry.
I fuck her the way I've been wanting to since I stopped pretending I didn't want to. Deep and hard and steady, my hand under her lower back tilting her up to take more of me, and she takes it, all of it, pushing back with her hips to meet every thrust, her legs locked around my waist.
I go harder.
She gets louder.
Her nails drag down my back and I don't mind. I get a hand between us and find her clit and her whole body jolts.
"There," she says, urgent. "Right there!"
"I've got you." I work her with my fingers and my cock and I feel her building again, feel her getting close, the way she tightens around me and her breathing changes and her voice goes high. "Look at me."
She looks at me.
Her eyes are wet at the corners. Not crying — just overwhelmed, just full, just here, and she is looking at me like I am the only solid thing in the world and something in my chest cracks open along a seam I didn't know was there.
This woman.
I have been alone a long time. I have not minded it. I mind it now, looking back at it from here, from this bed, from inside the specific gravity of this woman underneath me.
I am not going to be alone again.
I don't say any of it. Not yet. She knows some of it already and the rest I will tell her when we are on the other side of tomorrow and there is time. What I do is keep my eyes on hers and keep moving and get my mouth to her ear.
"You're mine," I say. Low and even, not a question. "You know that."
She makes a sound that is almost a sob. "Yeah," she says. "I know."
"After tomorrow. You and me. Whatever that looks like."
"Yes." Her arms come around my neck and pull me down closer and she says it again against my jaw: "Yes. Rafe. Yes!"
I get a hand in her hair and turn her face up and kiss her while I work her clit and she comes on my cock with her mouth open against mine, shaking, saying my name into my mouth, and I feel it everywhere not just in my body but in the part of me that has been locked shut for eleven years and has apparently decided, without consulting me, that it's done being locked.
I let go. Finish deep inside her this time, my forehead down against her shoulder, her hands in my hair, both of us breathing hard into the quiet of the room.
Neither of us moves for a long time.
Her fingers trace slow up and down my spine. The lamp throws gold across the ceiling. Outside the owl is going, two notes and a pause, two notes and a pause.
Eventually she says, quietly. "You and me."
"Yeah."
"After tomorrow."
"After tomorrow."
She shifts under me, turning onto her side, and I pull her back against my chest with my arm around her waist and my face in her hair. Her hand comes down and covers mine.
“Thinking you were going to kill me,” She laughs, soft. "That's a terrible meet-cute."
"Yeah. But it's ours."
She goes quiet after that. Her breathing slows. I stay awake and hold her and listen to the owl and watch the window go from black to deep blue to the first grey edge of dawn.
I am going to get her through tomorrow and then I am going to keep her.