Chapter 5 #3
"I am not asking for anything," I say. "I am asking you to lie down."
He lies down. I lie down beside him. We are fully dressed. We are on top of the quilt. The lamp is low. He turns onto his side, and I turn onto mine, and we face each other in the soft half-light of the cottage.
He reaches across the small space between us and brushes a piece of hair from my forehead.
"Rue."
"Yes."
"I am not going to do this halfway."
I look at him.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that I have not been with anyone in fourteen years. I mean that I did not expect to be. I mean that you have, in six weeks, woken me up in ways I had not thought a person could be woken up at my age, and I am not going to be careless with you. If we do this, I am doing it all the way."
"What is all the way?"
He considers it.
"All the way is everything," he says. "All the way is the cottage and the workshop and the cemetery on the hill, and my hand in yours when the next one dies, and your hand in mine when the one after that does.
All the way is the cherry medallion on your bedside table forever.
All the way is me being yours for as long as you will have me. "
I look at him.
I do not, in this moment, have any of the items from the list in my notebook. The list is in the other room. The list is on a page. The list does not, when I try to summon it, exist.
"All the way," I say.
"All the way."
"Okay."
"Okay."
We do not kiss tonight either. He pulls me into him, careful, gentle, and I tuck my face against his shoulder, and his hand moves into my hair, and I fall asleep again with the warmth of his body against mine and the cherry medallion warm against my breastbone and the smell of cedar and wax and clean cotton in my nose.
The burial is in the morning. Wyatt goes into the ground.
Beth weeps openly for the first time. The pack carries the weight together, the way it has carried it for Edwin and the way it has carried it for the others before, and I stand beside Thaddeus at the graveside with my hand in his and his thumb moving in a slow circle across my knuckles.
After, when the pack disperses, we do not go down the hill.
We go up to the workshop.
He lights the lamp. I sit in the chair by the stove. He stands across from me with his back against the workbench and his arms crossed, and the morning light is coming through the skylight, and the workshop is full of the warm wax-and-wood smell I have grown to love.
He says, "Rue."
"Yes."
I stand. I cross to him.
I do not lift up to him. He bends down to me.
His hand cups my jaw the way I cupped his that night three weeks ago, the way I cupped his face in the doorway and held it for a long moment without kissing him.
He bends. He brushes his nose against mine.
He is patient. He is so patient that I almost lose my mind with it.
I close the last inch.
He kisses me.
His mouth is warm and slow and careful. He tastes of the coffee he had at dawn and the mint of the toothpaste he keeps in the workshop because he sometimes forgets to go down to the cabin.
His hand stays on my jaw. His other hand finds the small of my back, light and deliberate, and pulls me a fraction closer.
The kiss does not, the way some first kisses do, escalate.
He does not deepen it. He kisses me with the same attention he uses for everything—the small clean precise line of a chisel, the careful turn of a plane—and the kiss is whole and complete and unhurried, and when he lifts his head he is, I see, almost smiling.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi."
"That took a while."
"It did."
"Was it worth waiting for?"
"Rue."
"What?"
"It was worth waiting fourteen years for."
I look at him.
I do not have anything to say to that. I lean my forehead against his chest. His arms come around me.
The wolf in him, I have learned to feel by now—not as a separate creature but as a kind of second presence inside the man, an additional density to the warmth—is awake and steady and aware of me, and the man at the front is aware of me too, and I am held, completely, by both.
The workshop is quiet.
The light is full.
The cemetery is on the hill behind us, and the new grave is in it, and the old graves are in it, and we are at the threshold of something that has been six weeks coming and feels much older than that.
I take his hand. I lead him to the door.
"Where are we going?" he says.
"The cottage."
"For?"
"Sleep."
He looks at me.
"Sleep," I say. "Real sleep. You have not slept in three days. I have not slept in two. We are going to my cottage, and we are going to lie down together, and we are going to sleep. The rest can wait."
He almost smiles.
"All right," he says.
We walk down the hill, hand in hand, in the bright cold morning, and the men of the compound see us, and the women see us, and Della sees us from the window of the main hall and lifts her hand in a small salute, and Jo sees us and nods, and no one says anything because no one needs to.
The whole compound has known for two weeks.
We just caught up.