Chapter Fourteen
A PIECE OF FORWARDED mail arrives the last week of August, redirected from the lodge in Cody’s handwriting. A dental appointment card from an office in Stanley. The return address on the redirect label is a Boise apartment number.
I drop it in the recycling and go back to rigging the drift boat for Noah’s morning float. He’s extended his weekly booking for the season.
Dale told me last week that Cody took a front-of-house job at a farm-to-table restaurant in Sun Valley. He’ll be good at it. Managing a room is what Cody does best, and a restaurant is a place where charm is the product instead of a layer on top of someone else’s competence.
I think about that for ten seconds. Then the river pulls my attention back, and Cody becomes what he should have been a long time ago, someone I used to know.
Noah is on the dock when I push the boat in, notebook in hand, and thermometer in the water. His study wraps up in September, and every float now carries a slightly different quality, less pure research and more of something neither of us has named out loud.
“Water’s at thirty-one hundred,” I say. “Lowest it’s been all season.”
“Good for the upper spawning sites,” he says. “Bad for the fish in the lower pools. They’re going to compress.”
“They always do in late August. They find the cold pockets and hold.”
“The ones who know where to look,” he says, and he’s watching me, not the river, and neither of us pretends that sentence was about fish.
We push off. The float is quiet and focused.
Noah collects his last round of substrate samples from the upper reach while I hold the boat and hand him containers he label in the handwriting I’ve stopped pretending I can read.
We’ve been working together all summer, and the rhythm of it, the passing of tools and the reading of water and the stretches of productive silence, has become the part of my week I look forward to most.
After we tie off at the dock, Noah helps me clean the boat. We’re stowing gear in the shed when he says, without turning around, “You’re different since he left.”
“Different how?”
“Lighter. Like something got removed.”
I sit on the edge of the equipment shelf. “Cody and I are getting divorced.”
“I figured.”
“He was having an affair with Gigi Fleming, Jim’s wife. You met them.”
He nods. “How long?”
“Three years.”
Noah turns around and leans against the workbench. He doesn’t look shocked. He looks like he’s been waiting for me to say this when I was ready.
“He was also trying to sell the lodge to an investor without my knowledge. Presenting himself as the owner.”
“That’s why Devlin stopped calling.”
I look at him. “You knew about Devlin?”
“Small valley. Rick Trainor mentioned it. I asked if it was real. He said not a chance.” Noah pauses. “I figured you were handling it.”
“I was handling it.”
“I know.” He watches me. “Is there more?”
There is more. The vasectomy. That belongs to me though, and I’m not ready to hand it to anyone else tonight. Maybe later. Maybe when the divorce is final, and the wound has closed enough that I can say the words without my voice changing.
“There’s more,” I say. “I’ll tell you when I’m ready.”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t pressure me, ask follow-up questions, or make a dramatic offer to fix things on my behalf. Just “Okay,” and then he goes back to stowing the sampling gear as if I’d told him the weather forecast instead of the wreckage of my marriage.
We sit on the dock for a while after the gear is stowed. He doesn’t bring up Cody, Gigi, or the divorce again, and neither do I.
Instead, he tells me about a paper he’s drafting on thermal refuge sites, and I tell him about a problem with the anchor rigging on the sixteen-footer, and we pass twenty minutes talking about work the way we’ve been talking about work all summer, except now there’s nothing between us that I’m hiding.
It’s the lightest I’ve felt on this dock since June.
That evening, the lodge is empty. The last guests of the week checked out this morning, and new arrivals don’t come until Friday.
I cook salmon, asparagus, and rice for Noah in the lodge kitchen because there’s no one else to cook for and because I want to.
He brings a bottle of wine from somewhere, and I don’t ask where.
We eat at the kitchen island where I sat across from Cody weeks ago and ended my marriage. The island is the same. Everything around it is different.
After dinner, Noah dries while I wash. We stand side by side at the sink, and his arm brushes mine when he reaches for a plate. I don’t move away, he doesn’t move away, and the dishes take a long time.
“Mac,” he says.
I turn toward him.
He’s holding a dishtowel and looking at me with an expression I’ve been trying not to see all summer, direct and warm and patient and entirely certain.
“If you don’t want this—” he starts.
“I want this,” I say.
He kisses me in the kitchen. His mouth is warm and he tastes like the wine and he cups my face in both hands, and for a second I stand there and let it register, the reality of being wanted by someone who has earned the right.
Then I kiss him back, and the dishtowel drops, and my hands are on his chest and his are in my hair.
The kiss deepens and slows into something deliberate.
“My cabin,” I say against his mouth.
The walk across the dark gravel lot takes twice as long as it should because he keeps stopping to kiss me against the side of the main lodge, the corner of the equipment shed, and the cabin door while I fumble with the key.
Inside, the cabin is dark and cold and smells like wood and the river.
I leave the light off. The late-August moon through the window is enough.
He pulls my shirt over my head and then pauses. “Yes?”
“Yes,” I say. “Stop asking.”
He laughs, a low surprised sound against my throat, and then his mouth is on my collarbone and he slides his hands down my sides and I’m pulling at his belt because I’m done waiting.
I’ve been waiting all summer. Longer than that.
I’ve been waiting since the last time wanting someone didn’t come tangled up in obligation and grief, and I can’t remember when that was.
His body is lean and warm under my hands, and when I wrap my fingers around him, he makes a sound against my neck that I want to hear again. He touches me and I’m already wet, and I make a sound I haven’t made in years, rough and surprised and entirely real.
“There,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“There.”
He takes his time. He moves down my body, slowly and precisely, and his tongue is warm and thorough, and I think about how he measures water temperature and almost laugh, except then he does something that makes laughing impossible, and my hands are in his hair and I stop thinking about anything except this.
When he slides into me, I’m ready. He fills me slowly, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer. He says my name once, quietly, like he’s confirming something he already knew.
We move together, and it’s not polished or trying to prove anything. He reads my body and follows where it leads. When I get close he knows, and he adjusts. I come with his mouth against my neck and his hand gripping my hip with the river running past the window in the dark.
He follows a few minutes later, his forehead pressed against mine, his breathing uneven, and his body warm against me in the cold cabin.
After, we lie tangled together on the cot that was never built for two people, and I put my head against his chest and listen to his heartbeat settle.
“That cot is too small,” he says.
“I know.”
“We should probably address that.”
“Probably.”
He pulls me closer instead of getting up, and the cold air from the window presses against my back while his body warms my front. I lie there in the specific pleasure of being held by someone who doesn’t need me to be anything other than exactly who I am.
“I’m staying through September,” he says. “For the fieldwork.”
“I know.”
“After that, I’m staying for a different reason.”
“I know that too,” I say.
The cabin is quiet. The river runs past outside, low and steady. His field boots sit next to my wading boots by the cabin door, muddy and worn and both pointing toward the river.