Chapter 4 Flint
four
Flint
The chisel knows where to go now.
That's the thing about starting — once you start, the stone tells you.
The Jamie stone has been giving itself to me in the mornings, an hour at a time, before the crew arrives.
It's gray-green granite with a quartz vein that runs diagonally across the upper face and I've been working around it, incorporating it, because Jamie had that streak of silver in his dark hair by the time he was thirty-five and found it funny rather than alarming.
The stone is giving me that. I hadn't planned it.
You don't always plan. Sometimes you just follow what the stone offers.
We fall into a rhythm on the site.
She's up there most mornings taking soil readings, mapping drainage, photographing the meadow plants already there so she can reference the native seed mix she's sourcing.
I'm on-site three afternoons a week for the hardscape planning: path placement, the low stone edging, the central installation platform that has to be set before anything else goes in.
At noon we eat lunch on the hill. This isn't planned. It's just what happens.
Wren brings something from the bakery on Main Street and I bring coffee in the thermos and we sit on the slope above the work zone and look at the valley. She doesn't use conversation as background noise.
She asks me once, between bites of a pastry she's trying to identify by ingredients, what stone I'd use for something that wasn't meant to last.
I think about it. "Sandstone," I say. "Soapstone. Anything soft. It weathers back to the ground eventually."
"Is that harder to work with? Knowing it won't stay?"
"No. Sometimes it's easier. Nothing has to be perfect if it's going to go anyway."
She's quiet. Then: "I've always worked with things that change. Trees, perennials, ground covers. Everything I plant is going to look different in five years than it does the day I install it. That used to bother me. Now it's the part I like."
I understand what she's describing — that point in your relationship with materials where you've made peace with what they are and stopped wanting them to be something else. I don't say that. I say:
"The Jamie stone is different. I want it to outlast everything. I want it there in two hundred years when no one knows his name anymore. Just the stone, still there, telling the hill that something happened."
She puts her hand over mine on the thermos. Stays there without pressing, just the weight of it. We don't say anything else.
On Thursday of the third week she stays late at the workshop, cross-referencing species against soil sample results.
I'm working the inscription geometry — the lettering is the last thing I'll do, and I want the cuts right before I commit them to the face.
The overhead fluorescent stays off. Task lighting, warm and direct.
In that light the stone dust in the air catches and drifts and the whole space has a quality I don't notice unless someone else is in it.
She looks up. "Can I see it?"
The Jamie stone is still in the corner, partly revealed. I've been protective of it in a way I'm not usually protective of works in progress — showing it too early would be giving something away that it hasn't finished becoming. But I take the drop cloth off.
She stands in front of it without speaking.
The quartz vein catches the light and the grain of the stone is visible now, the direction it grows, the place where it decides to be what it is.
I've done forty percent of the surface and the shape is beginning to emerge — not a symbol, not a human form, something between those things.
Something that has weight without being heavy.
She reaches out and puts her hand flat against the unworked face.
I put my hand over hers.
Her hand against the stone. My hand over hers.
The stone cold under both of us. I can feel the grain through her hand, or something like it — the same reading I do with my fingertips every morning, but different now because she's between me and the stone and the stone is between her and three years of not being able to look at a chisel without feeling the absence.
She turns her hand over under mine. Her fingers close around two of mine.
She looks up at me.
"Ivy," I say.
"I know," she says.
I take her face in both hands. She's slight enough that I'm aware of my own size.
She turns into my hands. Her eyes stay open.
I know she wants to see me — keeps them on mine the whole time I'm learning the shape of her jaw, the line of her cheekbone, the specific soft skin just in front of her ear.
"I'm going to take your hair down," I tell her. Low and direct, the way I'd tell a stone where I'm going to make the next cut. "And then I'm going to take everything else."
She reaches back for the edge of the worktable without looking away from me.
I take the tie from her hair and it falls and then I take her mouth properly, thorough and unhurried.
My hands find the hem of her shirt and she lifts her arms for me without being asked.
She's wearing a plain bra, linen-coloured, and I think she'd laugh if I told her she matches the stone dust in the air, so I don't.
"You too," she says, already at my buttons.
I let her get two undone and then I take over because I'm not a patient man and we've been circling this for three weeks. She pulls my shirt off my shoulders and puts both hands flat on my chest and looks at me the way she looks at a site she's already decided on — not deciding, just confirming.
I reach behind her and undo the bra clasp in one move.
She makes a small sound when the cool air hits her and I bring her in against my chest because I want her warm and I want to feel her against me before anything else.
She's small enough that my hands span most of her back.
She smells like soil and cedar. I'll know that forever.
Then she gets her hands between us and goes for my belt. I decide I've been patient long enough.
I lift her onto the worktable. She hooks her legs around me and I push her skirt up and get my hand between her thighs and she's already wet.
The feeling awakens my inner caveman. I work her with two fingers and she grips the edge of the table and stops pretending she's composed.
I watch her face the whole time. She keeps her eyes on mine — stubborn about it, like eye contact is something she's decided to hold — and I keep my fingers moving until she's rolling her hips against my hand and her breath is gone and she comes with a sharp sound and her thighs clamped hard around my wrist.
I hold her through it. Her forehead drops to my shoulder and she breathes.
I get the rest of her clothes off and mine and then I'm between her thighs with her sitting at the edge of the table and she reaches down and wraps her hand around my cock and guides me.
I push in slow because she's small and I'm not and I want to do this right. Her head goes back. I hold her hips and give her a moment before pushing in even deeper, moving with hard deep jerks.
I fuck her against the worktable with my hands gripping her hips and she is considerably louder than she's been in three weeks of professional conversation. I'm glad the workshop is fifty meters from the road because someone driving by might have heard us.
“Fuck, Ivy,” I groan.
She tells me what she wants with her hands — pulling me closer, adjusting the angle, her nails in my shoulders.
I give her all of it. She gets there with her legs locked around me and her face buried in my neck and a sound that goes straight through me, and I follow two strokes behind her with my forehead against hers and both hands flat on the table taking my weight.
Wren pulls the large drop cloth from the stack on the floor and spreads it without asking, which is practical and also makes me want to tell her something I'm not ready to say yet. We move to the floor together. The stone is cold through the cloth.
I pull her close when she shivers.
We stay like that for a while. Long enough that her breathing evens out and the workshop settles back into its usual quiet — the tick of the task light, the distant sound of the road, nothing else.
I pull my shirt over and put it across her shoulders without discussion.
She works one arm through a sleeve and leaves the other loose and doesn't thank me, which I prefer.
At some point, she sits up and finds the rest of her clothes. Doesn't put them all on, just gets to a point where she's comfortable, and then stays sitting with her knees pulled up, looking at the Jamie stone in the corner. The cloth is folded back. The quartz vein catches the light.
"What will the inscription say?" she asks.
"Haven't decided. Something short." I sit up beside her. "He wasn't a man for speeches."
She nods. Keeps looking at it.
I get up and pour water from the thermos into the lid and hand it to her. She drinks. Hands it back. I drink. We sit on the drop cloth on the cold stone floor and neither of us is in a hurry to be somewhere else.
Then she lies back and looks at the ceiling, and I lie down beside her, and after a long moment:
"I've been designing memorial gardens for six years.
" To the ceiling, not to me. "My brother died when I was twenty-four.
He was nineteen. Cancer — four months from diagnosis.
" A pause. "After he died I didn't know what to do with it.
So I started designing spaces for other people's grief because it turned out to be the only thing that made mine feel useful.
" "My brother died when I was twenty-four.
He was nineteen. Cancer — four months from diagnosis. "
A pause. I wait. She needs to get this out.
"After he died I didn't know what to do with it. So I started designing spaces for other people's grief because it turned out to be the only thing that made mine feel useful."
I don't say anything. She's not telling me this because she needs a response. She's telling me because she's decided to.
"He was funny," she says. "He laughed at everything. He used to send me voice messages instead of texts because he said texts didn't capture tone, and he was worried I'd think he was serious when he wasn't."
"What was his name?" I ask.
"Daniel."
I nod.
She turns back to the ceiling. After a moment: "He would have liked you. He liked people who meant what they said."
The workshop is very quiet. Outside the window the quarry is dark and the stone face of the hillside is invisible, just mass and weight and the feeling of a thing that's been there longer than any of us.
Daniel. I'll carve that. I don't know when, and I don't tell her. But I'll carve that.