31. Erin
ERIN
The offers start arriving on Thursday, and by the following Wednesday there are five of them.
They come in through Amelia, because my own email address has been dead since somebody wiped my laptop in April and I've never had the heart to rebuild it. She reads them down the phone to me while I'm sitting on Owen's porch steps with a mug of tea going cold in my hand.
Great Lakes still wants me, and they've moved.
Deputy lead has become lead, five years instead of three, with a hiring line of my own.
There's a research professorship at a university I applied to twice in my twenties and never heard back from.
There's a federal appointment that would have made twenty-eight-year-old me weep into a sink.
And there's one from a foundation that wants me to run a national program on industrial impacts to freshwater systems, and the salary attached to it is genuinely absurd.
"You understand what's happened," Amelia says.
"Six weeks ago you were the woman whose grant blew up.
Today you're the person who put a defense contractor in front of a grand jury with their own ecological assessment.
Erin, there is no version of the next thirty years where you get this window again. "
"I know."
"Then say something other than 'I know.'"
"I'm going to say no to all of them."
There's a silence long enough that I check the phone hasn't died.
"Explain it to me," Amelia says, "and if the explanation is good I'll stop shouting."
So I explain it, sitting on a step with everyone's noise going on behind me.
"There's a lake here that's been under industrial extraction for eighteen months and nobody has a baseline for it except me.
I've got three weeks of pre-collapse data and six weeks of during.
Amy, that's a longitudinal dataset that doesn't exist anywhere else and it will take fifteen years to be worth anything. "
"Somebody else can hold the clipboard."
"Nobody else knows where the transects are.
" I watch Wyatt cross the yard with a bucket.
"And I'll tell you the honest part, because you've earned it.
I'm not turning these down out of scientific duty.
I'm turning them down because I've got people here, and I've never had that anywhere, and I've worked out that I would trade every one of those five envelopes for the ability to walk into a kitchen and have somebody hand me a plate without asking who I am. "
Amelia doesn't say anything for a while.
"You want the monitoring station," she says at last.
"I want the monitoring station. Permanent, state-funded, based on-site. I'll write the proposal tonight."
"Don't write it tonight, write it properly, and put a five-year staffing request in it because the department's about to be embarrassed into generosity.
" Her voice changes. "For the record, I think you're throwing away a career.
I also think I've never heard you sound like this. I'll sign it Monday."
The permanent role comes through on Friday and it's better than I asked for.
Stillwater Basin Long-Term Ecological Monitoring, five years renewable, principal investigator, with a budget line for two field technicians and a laboratory allowance.
Amelia strong-arms the department, and the department is currently very interested in being seen to care about Stillwater Lake, and I'm not above using that.
The rest of the job isn't in the paperwork, and we all know it.
I take that half to the elders on Saturday, because it isn't mine to assume. Hazel has her tenth notebook out. Owen leans in the doorway.
"Here's what I'd actually be doing," I tell them.
"Officially, water chemistry, fish counts, and a wetland survey.
Unofficially, I'd be the person who sees the state's data before the state does.
Every survey, every permit application, every mineral claim, every aerial contract crosses my desk first, and I'd know what a magnetotelluric survey looks like before anybody else in this valley did. "
"You'd be the fence," Owen says.
"I'd be the early-warning system, and to be very clear, I'd also be a scientist with real data going into real journals, because the second I stop publishing I stop being credible and stop being useful to you."
Hazel taps her pen twice on the notebook. "And when the two conflict?"
"Then I come to this room and we argue about it, and sometimes I'll lose." I meet her eyes. "I won't promise you I'd never publish something inconvenient. I'll promise you'd hear it from me first, in this room, before anyone else on earth."
Owen looks at Hazel. Hazel writes something down and doesn't show me.
"That'll do," she says.
Grace does a supper, not a ceremony, just Sunday, thirty people in the long hall and too much food. Then she stands up with a wooden box in her hands, and the room goes quiet in a manner that tells me this isn't spontaneous.
"This is my mother's and her mother's before her," she says, and opens it. Inside is a set of small brass balance weights, worn smooth, in a fitted case. "The healer's scale. Every generation it goes to whoever in this family measures things and gets them right."
"Grace—"
"It should have gone to Nash and he'd lose it inside a fortnight.
" A laugh goes round the hall. She comes down and puts the box in my hands and closes my fingers over it.
"Erin Lawson. You've been in this valley for six weeks.
You've set a deer's leg, gone under a lake twice, and told us the truth about ourselves without once making it prettier.
My family has a scale and now you've got it, and that means you're in it. Not welcome in it. In it."
I have absolutely nothing. I stand there holding a box of brass weights and cry in front of thirty people, and Wyatt shouts something appalling from the back, and Isla throws a roll at him.
Later, washing up beside Grace with my hands in the water, I finally get a sentence out.
"I spent eleven years thinking the point was to be the best in the room."
"And now?"
"Now I want to be one of the people who's in the room." I pass her a plate. "That's the whole thing I got wrong, and it took a defense contractor to teach me."
Nash takes me up to the empty house at nine, and he's carrying a lamp and a bottle and pretending to be casual about neither.
It's got a bad roof over the porch and forty years of dust and a woodstove somebody clearly loved. The south room has four windows and the last light coming through all of them.
"Bench along that wall," he says. "Sink under the window. My father says the wiring's a criminal offense."
"Your father is correct and I'll be dealing with it before I put anything expensive in here." I turn in a slow circle. "Nash. Are you asking me to move in with you or are you giving me a laboratory?"
"Yes."
I laugh and it goes wrong somewhere in the middle and turns into something else, because six months ago I was living out of a duffel in a rented room in Albany with a career on fire and no one to tell about it. He puts the lamp down on the windowsill.
"Come here," he says.
I do, and he gets his hands in my hair and I get mine under his shirt, careful of the shoulder and then rapidly less careful, and we end up on a bedroll he has very obviously carried up here in advance.
I finish dragging his shirt off, then go for his belt, pants, everything, while he does the same to me, hands less careful now, peeling fabric away until there's nothing left between us but skin and the cool night air.
I push him onto his back and swing a leg over so I'm straddling his thighs, not sinking down yet.
My hands map the hard lines of his chest, while he reaches up and cups my breasts, thumbs brushing the peaks until they tighten.
I shift lower, and his cock, thick against my palm when I wrap my fingers around it, is already flushed.
I stroke him once, slow, then lean down and take him into my mouth.
The taste of him floods my tongue, salt and heat.
I sink as far as I can, hollowing my cheeks, one hand working the base while the other braces on his hip.
He groans, low and rough, and his fingers slide into my hair, not pushing, just holding.
I suck him steadily, tongue swirling under the head on every upstroke, until his breathing turns uneven.
Then I pull off and crawl back up his body.
He doesn't let me settle. In one smooth motion he rolls us so I'm on my back and he's between my thighs.
His mouth is on me before I can speak, hot and open, tongue dragging through my pussy in one long, deliberate lick.
He spreads me wider with his hands and seals his lips around my clit, sucking in soft pulses while two fingers push inside me.
The stretch and the suction pull a sharp sound from my throat.
I fist the edge and rock against his mouth.
He doesn't tease. He works me with steady pressure, fingers curling, tongue relentless, until the pleasure coils tight and breaks.
My thighs clamp around his head as I come, pulsing hard around his fingers, the orgasm rolling through me in deep waves.
He stays with me until the last tremor fades, then crawls up and kisses me, deep and wet, so I taste myself on his tongue. I feel his cock pushing against my stomach, and I reach down and guide him, but he catches my wrist and changes the angle entirely.
He sits up, legs stretched out, and pulls me astride him facing away, my back to his chest. I feel the head of his cock nudge against my pussy, and I sink down onto him in one slow, continuous slide.
The stretch is different like this, deeper, fuller.
A low sound leaves us both as I bounce. His hands grip my hips.
I start to move faster, rising and falling, the angle letting him drag along every sensitive place inside me.
He thrusts up to meet me, steady and controlled at first, then harder as I lean forward and brace my hands on his thighs.
The wet sound of his cock moving in and out of my pussy fills the quiet.
One of his hands slides around to rub my clit in tight circles.
The dual sensation builds fast. I ride him harder, taking him to the root on every downstroke, until another climax rips through me and my pussy clamps down around him.
He groans against my shoulder and keeps moving, fucking me through it, not letting the pleasure crest and vanish.
Before I fully come down he shifts us again.
He tips me forward onto my hands and knees, stays buried inside me the whole time, then rises and starts thrusting.
Each snap of his hips drives him against that spot that makes my arms threaten to give out.
I drop to my forearms and push back to meet him.
His hand fists in my hair, arching my neck.
The other stays on my hip, holding me steady while he fucks me with long, powerful strokes.
He reaches under me again, finds my clit, and rubs in time with his thrusts. The third orgasm hits harder than the others, sharp and full-body, my walls fluttering and squeezing around him.
"Fuck Eri…" My name partially breaks from his throat.
He lasts only a few more strokes after that.
He drives in deep and holds, cock pulsing as he comes inside me.
He falls onto my back, still inside me, breathing hard against me, and then eases out, pulling me into the curve of his body.
I feel the cool air on the sweat cooling on my skin.
His arm settles across my waist, heavy and warm.
Our breathing gradually slows to the same rhythm.
I close my eyes and let the quiet settle around us, the only movement the rise and fall of his chest against my spine.
"Tuesday in November," I say into his ribs.
"Soup," Nash agrees.