Chapter Five #3
He followed me over. His hips stuttered. His grip on my thigh went bruising-tight. He came with my name on his mouth, raw and unhidden, and I held him while his body shook and the waterfall kept falling and the world carried on around two people who had forgotten it existed.
We lay tangled on the rock. His head was on my chest, my fingers moving through his wet hair.
The sky was deeply, impossibly blue above us.
A bird I couldn't name was calling from the cedars.
My body was humming with a satisfaction so complete it felt structural, as if something had shifted at the load-bearing level.
A bug landed on my stomach. I flinched.
"That's nature," he said, his head still on my chest. "It comes with the ambiance."
"The ambiance is excellent. The entomology is unwelcome."
He brushed the bug away and kissed my sternum. "Noted."
We swam again, the cold less shocking. He held me in the shallows and I pressed my face into his neck and breathed in cedar and clean water and the warmth of his skin, and I thought: I do not want to leave this.
I do not want to leave him. I do not want the plan I made in an office in San Francisco.
I did not say any of it. But I held on tighter.
WE WALKED BACK IN LATE afternoon light, his hand finding mine on the narrow parts of the trail. I was wearing his pullover over my damp clothes and thinking about how it smelled like him when the cabin appeared below us.
"I'm going to shower," I said. "You should call Jeannie about that Thursday group." Jeannie Hauck ran Moose's, and Cliff used her lot to meet his Thursday groups. I knew things like this now.
"Already confirmed." He kissed my forehead. "I'll start dinner."
I went through the main room, down the short hallway, and into the bathroom. Turned on the water. Was pulling the pullover over my head when I heard his voice through the wall.
Not talking to me. Talking on the phone.
"— yeah, I left the voicemail last week. Masterson. M-A-S-T-E-R-S-O-N."
A pause.
"Right. The vasectomy reversal consultation. I need to schedule — yeah."
The pullover was over my head, half off, my arms caught in the sleeves. I stood there.
Vasectomy.
Reversal.
"Whatever you've got in the next two weeks. I know it's a process: the consultation first, then the procedure. I just need to get it started."
The water was running. The bathroom was filling with steam. My arms were still caught in the sleeves and the word vasectomy was repeating in my head on a loop that sounded nothing like my usual analysis and everything like the high-pitched tone of a system going offline.
He had a vasectomy. My husband had a vasectomy.
The man I had married for the express purpose of getting pregnant was physically incapable of getting me pregnant.
Every night I'd lain in that bed thinking about timing and cycles and a baby that was the entire reason I was standing on this mountain, and none of it was possible. It had never been possible.
I pulled the pullover off. My hands were shaking.
But. Reversal. He was scheduling a reversal.
He'd called last week: the voicemail was from the night we'd first slept together, the night he'd gotten out of bed after I'd fallen asleep and left a message I never knew about.
He was trying to undo it. For me. Because he had changed the same way I had changed, and his version of change was not words or plans or spreadsheets but a phone call to a doctor's office in the middle of the night.
I turned off the shower. I stood in the steam with my heart slamming into my ribs. The two facts collided: he had lied, and he was fixing it. Neither canceled the other. My brain could not make them resolve into a single coherent conclusion.
I opened the bathroom door.
He was in the hallway. Phone still in hand. He saw my face and the color left his.
"Nell —"
"You have a vasectomy."
He didn't deny it. He closed his eyes for one second, and when he opened them he wore the expression of a man who had been carrying something heavy and had just felt it slip.
"Yes."
"How long."
"Three years."
The hallway was five feet long. I was at one end. He was at the other.
"You knew I wanted a baby. I told you on the video call. I put it in the manual. Conception timeline." My voice was steady. I was not steady. "You married me knowing you couldn't give me that."
"I married you for the money." The words fell out of him.
"I lost fifty thousand dollars to Drew in a poker game.
It was my down payment on this property.
He felt bad about it, so he made me a bet.
Marry someone through his app in thirty days and the debt's forgiven.
Stay married a year, another fifty on top.
I needed it for the land." He stopped. His hand with the phone dropped to his side.
"That's why I signed up for Mountain Mates. "
"So none of it was real."
"All of it was real." His voice cracked.
"The bet was real. The vasectomy was real.
And you — what happened with you — that was the part I didn't plan for.
" He took a breath. "I called the doctor that night.
After you fell asleep. Because I looked at you and I knew I wanted to give you what you came here for, and I couldn't, and that felt worse than anything I've done. "
"You should go." His voice was flat. "Back to San Francisco.
I'll sign whatever you need." He looked at the floor.
"I gambled away my future at a card table and then I lied to you to get it back.
That's who I am. That's who I've always been.
I had the right idea coming up here. Staying alone. Not dragging anyone else into it."
I was crying. I didn't decide to cry. The tears came without authorization, hot and sudden, blurring his face in the dim hallway.
I hated them because I could not think clearly through tears, and I needed to think clearly.
The man I was falling in love with had lied to me about the one thing I'd come here to get.
But he was trying to fix it. That was the part my anger couldn't overwrite.
He'd called a doctor in the middle of the night because he wanted to give me a baby.
That wasn't a con. Neither was telling me to go.
That was a man whose feelings had outrun his plan, and I knew exactly what that felt like because mine had done the same thing.
"I need a minute," I said.
He nodded. He stepped aside. I walked past him, down the hallway, through the main room, and onto the porch. The evening air was cold on my wet face. The river was running. The mountains were going pink with the last light, the way they did every night, whether I was watching or not.
I sat in the porch chair and pressed my palms flat on my thighs and breathed.
He'd lied. The vasectomy, the bet, the arrangement. He'd been faking a marriage for money while I'd been faking one for a baby, and we'd both ended up wrecked by feelings neither of us had planned for.
Except mine was still intact. He didn't know about Marcy. He didn't know about the exit timeline or the divorce plan or the fact that I'd come here with an expiration date on this marriage.
He'd given me all of his secrets. I was sitting on all of mine.
The river kept running. The sky darkened. I sat with his truth, my lie, the wild asymmetry of knowing everything while he knew nothing. The weight of it settled on me with a pressure I could not plan my way out of.
Inside, through the window, I could see him standing at the kitchen counter. Not moving. Not cooking. Just standing there with his head bowed and his hands braced on the edge, and the sight of him gutted me.
I didn't go inside. Not yet. I sat in the cold and let the tears dry and listened to the river that never stopped running, and I did not know what to do next.