Chapter 6 #2
She comes apart. Underneath me, around me, her whole body shaking, and the sound she makes is the sound I’ve been needing to hear since I stood in a doorway at 2am watching her sleep.
It’s the sound of a woman who stopped hiding.
I follow her. My face against her neck, my hand on her hip, the wave crashing through me and leaving me empty of everything except her.
The cabin is quiet. She’s against my chest. My arm around her. Her hair on my shoulder. No quilt barrier. No flannel. Her heartbeat against my ribs and mine against hers and the two of them not quite synced, overlapping, finding each other.
“Does this mean I can talk to you before eight?” she says against my chest.
“No.”
“I just want to be clear about which rules still apply.”
“None of them.” I can feel her grin.
“For the record,” she says, “that was better than any photograph I’ve ever taken.”
I don’t say anything for a second. Because she means it. And because the woman who has shot glaciers and volcanoes and canyons on four continents just said what happened in this cabin was better than all of it.
“Good,” I say.
“Good? That’s your response?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something with more than one syllable.”
I flip her over.
She gasps. Face down, my hand on the small of her back, and before she can say anything I’m over her and my mouth is at her ear. “How about ‘it’s about to get better.’”
I pull her hips up and push into her from behind and the sound she makes is not a complaint. It’s a cry that fills the cabin and my hands grip her hips hard enough to leave marks and I don’t care and she doesn’t care and the headboard knocks the wall.
This is not the slow version. This is the version I’ve been holding back.
The days of fence posts and spark plugs and porch railings and the distance and the quilt between us and every minute of restraint I’ve exercised since she climbed through my fence.
All of it goes into the way I move and she takes every bit of it, pushing back against me, meeting me stroke for stroke, her fingers twisted in the sheets so tight her knuckles go white.
I watch where we’re joined as sweat glides down my back. I watch her hands grip the sheets. I listen to the sounds she makes, each one louder than the last, and they’re the best thing I’ve ever heard and I built a cabin by hand and listened to it settle and that doesn’t compare.
I press her shoulders down. Her back arches, her hips angle up higher, and when I thrust into her at this angle the contact hits her exactly right.
She screams. Not my name. Not a word. A raw sound that comes from somewhere past language.
I keep the pace. Hard, steady, relentless, and every thrust pushes her into the place where we’re just two bodies that fit together with a precision I’ve never achieved with wood or iron or anything I’ve built with my hands.
She comes again. Harder than the first time. Her whole body shaking, clenching around me, and the feel of her is more than I can hold. I bury myself in her one last time and let go and the release rips through me like a crack in dry timber, sudden and complete.
I fall to the side. Pull her against me. We’re both breathing like we just ran the ridge trail and her back is against my chest and my arm is around her waist and neither of us speaks because speaking requires oxygen and a functioning brain and I don’t have either.
“Okay,” she says when she can talk. “That had several syllables.”
“We’re growing,” I say.
I stare at the ceiling I built. Same ceiling. Same beams. Same joints I cut by hand. But the man looking at it is not the man who built it. That man needed nothing. This man needs the woman breathing against his chest and he knows it and the knowing doesn’t scare him the way he thought it would.
I run my hand down her back. Slow. Her skin is warm and smooth and I trace the line of her spine from her shoulders to the small of her back and she hums against my chest. A small, satisfied sound. The sound of a woman who is exactly where she wants to be.
I could stay here. In this exact moment, in this exact configuration. Her weight against me, her breathing on my skin, the cabin dark and warm and full of a silence that has two heartbeats in it. I could stay here and nothing in the world would need to change.
Her breathing slows. Evens out. She’s falling asleep. Her hand on my chest, her leg over mine, her weight settled against me like she belongs there. Like this bed was always supposed to have two people in it and I just didn’t know.
I close my eyes.
Her phone buzzes.
Not mine. I don’t have a phone that buzzes. I have a radio and that’s it. Her phone is on the floor by the bed, charging from the battery pack, and the screen lights up and the blue glow cuts across the dark cabin like a blade.
She stirs. Reaches down. Squints at the screen.
I don’t read it. I see the glow on her face and the way her eyes move across the text and the way something shifts behind them. A small recalculation. The photographer brain coming back online, pulling her out of the cabin and into the world that exists beyond forty acres and a fence line.
“My editor,” she says. Quiet. “The photo series deadline. And she wants to talk about the next assignment.”
“When?”
“The deadline is in two weeks. The assignment is next month.”
Next month. Next month she’ll be somewhere else.
Behind a camera on a glacier or a canyon or a mountain that isn’t mine.
Next month this bed will be one person again and the coffee will be one mug.
The silence will be the old kind. The kind I chose.
The kind that used to feel like freedom and now feels like the thing that will be left when she’s gone.
I don’t say this. I don’t say anything. I’m not a man who asks people to stay.
I don’t know how. I’ve never had to because I’ve never wanted anyone to stay.
I built this life to be complete on its own.
Forty acres, a workshop, a cabin, a bed that fits one person fine and two people better.
The bed that fits two people better is a problem I didn’t have a week ago.
She puts the phone down. Face-down on the floor. She presses her face into my chest and her arm tightens around me and I feel her breathe in deep like she’s storing the smell of me the way she stores a composition.
I hold her tighter. I don’t mean to. My arm pulls her closer and my hand spreads against her back and I hold her the way you hold something you know you’re about to lose.
The phone is face-down. The screen still glows through the dark.
I keep my eyes on the ceiling.
She keeps her face against my chest.
Neither of us says the word that’s in the room.
The word is “leave.” It’s been here since she climbed through the fence.
It was always going to arrive. I just didn’t think it would arrive while she was still warm against me and the cabin still smelled like us and my hand was still on her back and the silence still had two heartbeats in it.
I don’t sleep. She does. I hold her and I watch the ceiling and I listen to her breathe and I think about the larch table.
About the twisted grain I spent two weeks working with instead of against. About how the best things I’ve ever built required patience and attention and the willingness to follow the grain where it wanted to go, even when it wasn’t the direction I planned.
The grain is telling me something. I’m not ready to hear it.
Outside, the mountain is dark and quiet. Mine. The way it’s always been. Inside, the woman in my bed breathes against my chest. Hers. The way she doesn’t know yet.
She is going to leave this mountain with her camera and her frames and an editor waiting on the other side, and every part of me rejects it. Not because she belongs here. She belongs wherever she chooses. I just want her choosing here. Choosing me.