Chapter 8 #3
Slower, after the hard pace at the wall.
Long deep strokes, my forearms braced on either side of her head, my mouth finding hers between strokes.
She wraps around me. Her hands slide up my back and her nails drag down — not hard, gentler now, the second time, the way her body has gone soft and pliant under mine after the first. I bring my hand down between us.
I find the swollen knot at the top of her with my thumb again — wet from her, slick — and I press there in time with the long strokes, and her hips lift up off the rug to meet mine.
She gasps. Her head tilts back. The line of her throat is bare to me and I put my mouth on it and I work her with my thumb and my mouth and the long deep stroke of my hips and I feel her start to tighten around me a second time, and this time I do not hold back.
I do not need to. I follow her up. The rhythm climbs.
Her breath shortens. Her hand tightens in my hair. Her thighs go rigid.
She comes apart a second time.
She does it gasping, her body bowing up off the rug, her mouth open against my collarbone, my name — Kael, Kael, Kael — broken up into the long pulses of her release around me.
I follow her over. I follow her over with my face pressed into her hair and my hips driving deep one last time and the wolf in me, finally, finally, letting go of every last thing he has been carrying for seventeen years.
I spill into her with my whole body shaking and the amber light on the wall behind us and the storm howling against the windows and her arms locked around my back, and she holds me through it.
She holds me. She holds me, the way she has been holding me for a year of small daily touches that have all been leading to this.
I do not weep this time.
I do not weep because there is nothing left to weep.
There is — there is space, inside me, where the held thing was.
The space is empty. The space is light. The space is going to be filled, slowly, over a long time, by the small daily things — by her hand on the back of my neck at the stove, by my brother's son passing me the salt, by the laughter at the eastern clearing on a Saturday morning.
The space is going to be filled. I am not afraid of the space.
I lie on top of her on the rug for a long time before I can move. She does not push me off. She holds me there. Her hand is in my hair. Her other hand is flat against my back, over the long muscle, the one she dug her fingers into at the wall.
Eventually I roll off her. I pull a blanket off the couch — the wool one Della made me three winters ago — and I cover us with it.
We lie on the rag rug in front of the stove, wrapped in the blanket, with the storm howling against the windows and the fire crackling and the lamp on the table sputtering down low.
After a long time she says, very quietly: "I'm staying."
I say, "In Bone Hollow?"
She says, "In your life. In Callum's life here. In this."
I close my eyes.
I had — I had told myself I was not going to ask.
I had told myself I would let her go back to Maine in the spring if she wanted, with my brother's son, and I would not press, and I would not ask, and I would not — I would not stand in the way of whatever she wanted.
I had told myself I would do the patient thing. I had told myself I would wait.
She has saved me from the waiting.
She has saved me from it without my asking.
I pull her closer. I tuck her against my chest under the blanket, on the rug, in the firelight.
I press my face into the top of her head.
The wolf in me — the wolf in me lays his head down at the foot of the brother's grave and he stays there, but he is not — he is no longer the only wolf at the grave.
There is another wolf there now. Her wolf, the one she has, the one I have come to know in her sleeping body in three weeks of nights.
Her wolf is at the grave with mine. The two wolves are keeping vigil together.
It is — it is not bad, the watch we are keeping.
It is the right watch to keep. The brother is there in the ground and his wife and his brother are above him on the mountain and they are tending the grave together and it is — it is right, it is the right shape, my brother would not have asked us for anything less than this.
I think about that — I think about that thing Priest said, the thing about Ronan losing the right to dictate.
I think Priest was right. But I also think — lying here on the rug with the woman against my chest and the storm against the windows — I also think Ronan would not be asking us to.
I think Ronan, given the choice, would have said: yes, brother.
Yes. Take care of her. Take care of him.
Be the man at the table. I am at peace if you are at peace. Do not be cold, Willa. Do not be cold.
I think that is what he would say.
I will never know for sure. But I am — I am choosing to believe it.
I am choosing to believe my brother, who said I forgive you on a dirt road, would also say love her on a mountainside, and I am going to live the rest of my life inside that belief, and I am not going to ask whether the belief is justified, because the justification is the rest of my life and I am not afraid of building it.
I say, against the top of her head:
"Stay."
She says, "Yes."
She says it the way she said it the first night on the porch. The same word, the same way.
I close my eyes.
The storm howls.
The fire pops.
Maybe — maybe this is what forgiveness is, I think.
Maybe forgiveness is not — maybe forgiveness is not the absence of the wound.
Maybe forgiveness is the willingness to build something in the scar.
Maybe the wound is still going to be there in the morning and the next morning and the morning after that, and maybe I am going to wake up at three in the morning for the rest of my life thinking about a dirt road, and maybe the woman in my arms is going to wake up at three in the morning thinking about a kitchen in Maine and a porch in Bone Hollow and a husband she lost twice, once to a debt and once to me. Maybe none of that goes away.
But maybe — maybe we build something in the scar.
Maybe we eat eggs across a kitchen table every morning.
Maybe we walk to the grave together in the spring and plant wildflowers.
Maybe my brother's son calls me uncle and means it, eventually, after enough mornings.
Maybe Della grows old in the cabin south of ours and we look in on her every Sunday.
Maybe the boat shop opens and the brothers bring their bikes to my woman's hands and she fixes them and laughs at us when we try to help.
Maybe the years pass. Maybe the scar does not close, exactly, but the thing we build in it is real enough to be a life.
I think — I think that is what forgiveness is.
I think it is what Priest was trying to tell me. I think it is what Willa figured out before I did, sitting in a kitchen in Maine for seventeen years. I think it is what Callum is in the middle of learning, right now, in a cot in the clubhouse with the snow against the windows.
I think it is enough.
I do not know that it is enough. I have decided to believe it is enough.
The decision is — the decision is what makes it true.
The decision is the floor I am standing on.
The decision is the rug under my back and the woman in my arms and the storm against the cabin and the brother in the ground and the son in the clubhouse and the mountain holding all of it, the way the mountain has held everything for a long, long time.
The lamp on the table goes out.
The cabin goes to firelight only.
I do not get up.
I lie on the rug with the woman I have wanted without permission for half my life, and the wolf in me lies down at last, and I sleep.
Outside the storm howls. Inside the storm holds.
We sleep.