4. Walker
four
Walker
Festival day is finally here.
I open the store at eight, sell a hundred dollars' worth of rope and assorted hardware to the competition setup crew, close up at noon, then I go find Porter.
She's standing near the axe-throw lanes watching the early demonstrations.
She's got her notebook out, which means she's seen something architecturally interesting in the competition structure.
She does this every year. She's drawn about forty sketches of festival infrastructure over the years.
She's swears she’s going to make a book out of them someday.
I come up beside her, and she hands me her water bottle without looking away from the lane.
"The crossbeam on that throw station," she says. "The one on the left. Look at the joinery."
I look. Someone's done a mortise-and-tenon on a temp structure, which is unusual. Probably a woodworker showing off.
"Good joint," I say.
"It's beautiful. They didn't have to do that. Nobody's going to notice."
"You noticed."
"I always notice."
We stay like that for a while, side by side, passing the water bottle back and forth.
The grounds fill up around us. The smell of beaver tails and barbecue smoke gets thick in the afternoon heat. There's a group of kids running in front of the log-rolling pool, scattering the people watching.
We eat lunch at the vendor tent near the chainsaw carving ring — pulled pork on flatbread. The carver is working on something that looks like it's becoming a bear. Porter watches him for ten minutes straight, not sketching, only watching, which is how I know she's impressed.
"The control required for that," she says. "To take something away and leave exactly what you want."
"That's most of design, isn't it?"
She looks at me. "Yeah," she says. "It is." She doesn't look back at the carver right away.
We get beers from the festival tent and find a spot at the edge of the axe-throw viewing area, standing because the bleachers are full. She leans her shoulder into mine the way she does on the trail and leaves it there. Not moving.
The heat of the afternoon is everywhere. Something is different today. I don't know yet if that's in her or in me or if it's just the light. August light, going amber and long the way it does in the last weeks of summer, the kind of light that makes everything look like it's already a memory.
An axe hits the target down the lane. The crowd makes a sound. She doesn't turn to watch it.
"Walker."
"Yeah."
She starts to say something else, and I start to turn toward her at the same time, and she's already turning, looking up, and then she's just there.
Under my chin. Close enough that I can smell sunscreen and the specific smell of her hair, the one I could pick out of a hundred, and she's looking up at me with an expression I've never seen on her face before.
Or maybe I have. Maybe I've spent fifteen years refusing to let myself read it.
Her mouth is still open around whatever she was going to say. She doesn't finish it.
Fifteen years.
I close the distance.
It's not planned, and it's not smooth. My hand finds her jaw before I've decided to move it.
Her skin is warmer than I expected, or maybe that's me.
I feel her breath catch against my mouth, one small broken sound, and then her hands are fisted in the front of my shirt, and she's kissing me back like she's been waiting exactly as long as I have.
The crowd noise drops out. The whole festival drops out.
The only thing left in the world is her hands and her mouth and the specific way she tilts her head, like she already knows how this fits.
Fifteen years of not doing this ends in three seconds.
I feel her go still first. I'm already going still. We pull back by the same inch at the same time, like neither of us trusts what happens if we go one inch further in a public field with three hundred people forty feet away.
Her eyes are open. She's looking at me the way you look at something when you're reconsidering its dimensions — like she's recalculating fifteen years of measurements and none of them are coming out the way she thought.
"Walker," she says again. Different this time.
"Yeah."
"What was that?"
"I don't know what to call it that you'd believe."
She looks at me for a long moment. Long enough that my chest goes tight with it.
A man jostles past with a cooler, and she steps around him without breaking eye contact, and for one bad second I think she's going to use it as an excuse to walk.
To go back to being the version of us that fits in a friendship.
Then her hands are back on my shirt, and she says, quiet enough that I have to lean in to catch it:
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"I mean yes. Not okay-never-mind. Yes."
The crowd moves around us like a river around two rocks.
My hand is still at her jaw. I don't remember deciding to leave it there.
The world is different than it was two minutes ago and I don't know by how much yet — I don't know what we just broke open or what we just closed the door on for good.
I know that the most important relationship of my life just changed its shape in the middle of the Timber Festival axe-throw lanes, in front of God and half of Silver Ridge, and Porter Lane is holding onto my shirt like she doesn't plan on letting go of it.
"We should talk," I say.
"Yeah." Her thumb moves against my chest, absent, like she doesn't know she's doing it. "We probably should."
I look around. Bleachers full behind us, the beer tent line snaking past, a kid running by with a snow cone dripping down his wrist. Half the town within thirty feet. Somebody's going to say something to somebody, and by dinner Darlene at the diner will know before we do.
"Not here," I say. "Store's two minutes. Come with me."
She glances past me at the crowd and nods. "Lead the way."