Chapter 6
Kael
The week after the kitchen happens slowly.
She does not touch me for two days.
She also does not put up a wall. The wall and the touch are separate questions and she has answered the wall question — the wall is down on both sides, I think permanently — and the touch question is something else, and she is letting it answer itself.
So I let it. I am the man who waits. I sit on the porch in the evenings and she sits on the porch beside me and we drink coffee and she does not touch me and I do not touch her, and the not-touching is its own kind of weight, its own kind of acknowledgment that there is a thing we are not doing yet.
The wolf in me has feelings about this. He has been awake — fully awake, not the obedient horse-wolf he was for seventeen years — since the night in the kitchen, and he is being patient because patience is the family business, but he is also — he is aware.
He is aware of her. He is aware of where she is in the cabin at any given time and what room she is in and which direction her back is turned.
He tracks her without my permission. I do not stop him.
He has earned the right to do whatever he wants for a while.
On the third day she touches my arm.
It is nothing. It is — she is reaching across me at the table for the salt and her sleeve brushes against my wrist and her fingers, just for a second, settle on my forearm before they retreat with the salt shaker.
Two seconds. Maybe one. I do not look at her.
She does not look at me. Callum is across the table with his mouth full of pancake telling us about a thing one of the prospects did that he is not supposed to have witnessed, and neither of us is going to make him aware that something has just happened.
But something has just happened.
I feel the print of her fingers on my forearm for the rest of breakfast. I feel it like a brand.
The wolf in me sits up very straight inside my chest. He is paying attention.
He files the touch away with the precision of a man cataloguing inventory and he goes back to watching her, and I go on eating pancakes, and Callum finishes his story, and the salt is at the other end of the table when she next needs it and she gets up and walks down to it instead of asking me, and I — I do not know what to do with that.
On the fourth day she does it on the porch.
We are sitting on the porch step at our usual end-of-day positions — me on the left side, her on the right side, three feet of pine plank between us — and she stands up to go inside and then she sits back down, and she sits closer than she was.
By a foot. Maybe more. Our shoulders are not touching but they are close enough that I can feel the heat of her through her flannel and through my flannel and through the cold air between us.
She does not say anything. She drinks her coffee. She looks at the woods.
I do not move.
After a while she leans, and her shoulder comes against my shoulder, and she stays there.
The wolf in me makes a sound I am not going to describe.
I do not move my shoulder. I do not shift toward her.
I do not shift away from her. I hold the position exactly the way she has put me in it, the way you hold still when a wild thing has come close enough to investigate and one wrong twitch will send it back into the trees.
I let her decide how long. I let her decide whether more, or less, or the same.
She stays for ten minutes.
She gets up to go inside. She squeezes my shoulder once — just a quick press of her fingers, an I'm going inside, goodnight — and she goes.
I sit on the porch for another hour.
The wolf in me settles down with his head on his paws and stays there.
On the fifth day she touches the back of my neck.
I am at the stove. She has put me to work, in the small daily way she has started putting me to work, which is its own kind of message.
I am stirring something. She comes into the kitchen behind me and she puts her hand on the back of my neck — just for a second, just resting there, the cool side of her palm against the warm skin below my hairline — and she says, did you put the salt in this?
And I say, no, I forgot, and she says, I'll get it, and her hand lifts, and she goes around me to the cabinet, and the place on the back of my neck where her hand was stays warm for the rest of the night.
I am — there is a thing happening to me that I have not — I do not have the experience to know what is happening.
I am thirty-nine years old. I have had women.
I have had — three, maybe four, in seventeen years, quick uncomplicated arrangements with women at bars three states away who did not know my name and did not need to.
I have not been courted. I have not been the patient receiving end of a woman's slow careful daily touch, building, one small contact at a time, toward something neither of us has named.
I do not — I do not know how to be the recipient of this.
I know how to wait. I know how to not push.
The wolf in me knows how to lie still. We are doing all of those things to the best of our ability and the inside of my chest is — the inside of my chest is on fire and we are keeping it from showing on our face.
On the sixth day she falls asleep on the couch.
It is late. She has been doing the books for the boat business she is going to open — a notebook on her lap and a pen in her hand and three cups of coffee already sitting on the side table — and she has worked herself past her body's ability to hold itself up.
Callum is in bed. I am at the kitchen table, reading something for the club, with my glasses on.
I look up at one point because I have not heard her pen move in twenty minutes and she is — she is slumped sideways against the arm of the couch with her cheek on her own shoulder and the notebook closed on her lap and the pen still in her hand and her mouth slightly open, asleep.
I sit there for a minute.
I do not know what to do.
The right thing is probably to leave her on the couch.
To go home. To let her sleep where she sleeps.
The other thing is — the other thing is to carry her to the bed she actually sleeps in, which is twenty feet away, which would take me thirty seconds, and which is what I would do for Callum or for Della or for any other person I cared about who fell asleep at the wrong angle for their back.
I get up.
I take the notebook off her lap and the pen out of her hand and I set them on the side table.
I bend down. I slide one arm under her knees and one arm behind her shoulders and I lift her — and she weighs less than I expected, she weighs less than I would have thought, she has gone bony in the seventeen years since I last saw her — and I carry her across the cabin to the bed.
I set her down carefully on top of the quilt. I pull off her boots. I pull the quilt up over her. I straighten.
She catches my hand.
She is half-asleep. Her eyes are not really open. Her grip is loose but it is intentional. She has reached up with her hand without looking and she has caught my wrist, and she says, in a voice that is mostly asleep and entirely deliberate: stay.
I stand there.
The wolf in me stops breathing.
I say, "Willa —"
"Stay."
I look at her. Her eyes are still closed.
Her hand is on my wrist. She is not going to repeat herself a third time.
She has said the word twice, and she has said it the way she said it the first night on the porch when she did not get up to go inside, and I am — I am being asked, plainly, by a woman who has already done the work of asking, to lie down beside her on the bed she used to share with my brother.
I take off my boots.
I take off my belt.
I leave the rest of my clothes on. I lie down beside her on top of the quilt.
I am stiff as a fence post. I do not know what to do with my body.
I keep my hands flat against my chest because I do not trust my hands.
I keep my face turned toward the ceiling because I do not trust my face.
I lie there next to her like a man laid out for burial, and after a minute she — half-asleep, mostly-asleep — rolls over and presses her back against my side and goes the rest of the way under.
I do not move.
She sleeps.
She sleeps for two hours.
I lie beside her in the dark with the weight of her warm against my ribs and the slow even rhythm of her breathing pressing through my shirt and the wolf in me has gone — has gone, the wolf in me is gone, the wolf in me has lain down beside her wolf-mind in some other room and the two of them are sleeping together, and I am — I am alone in the bed for the first time in seventeen years with a woman against my side and the breath of her on my shirtsleeve and I do not, do not, do not move.
I do not sleep.
She does. She sleeps deeply, the way Callum slept after the first shift, the deep sleep of a body that has been working too hard for too long.
I lie awake and I count her breaths. I count to a hundred.
I count to two hundred. I count to a thousand.
I stop counting somewhere after that and I just listen.
At some point — around dawn, the gray coming through the window — she shifts in her sleep, and she turns toward me, and she presses her face into the side of my neck.
She does it in her sleep. She does it without knowing she is doing it.
Her hand comes up and lays itself flat against my chest, over my sternum, over the wolf inside me who has been sleeping beside her, and her breath warms my throat, and I stop being able to breathe properly.
I let her stay.
She wakes up at six.