7. Grace
seven
Grace
My bag is packed. My flight is at eleven from Kelowna. I have a car booked. The whole exit is organized and waiting.
I sit on the edge of the bed in my mother's guest room and look at the bag.
The festival closes tonight with the bonfire. The whole town will go — fires built on the grounds, music, the particular end-of-summer feeling that this town does better than anywhere I've been, the collective exhale of a week that's over and was good.
My mother knocks at seven. She opens the door and looks at the bag and looks at me and sits down on the edge of the bed beside me.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
"I'm thinking."
"You've been thinking for two days."
"Mom."
"He's a good man," she says. Not he's the right man or you'd be crazy to leave. She doesn’t say that because we’re both thinking it. "He's been a good man for ten years in this town and he'll be a good man for the next ten whether you're here or not. The question isn't about him."
"What's the question."
She looks at me. My mother is not a subtle woman and she is also, when she chooses to be, deeply precise.
"The question," she says, "is whether you've been living in Vancouver because you want to be there, or because it was easier than coming back and finding out what you left."
I don't answer.
She stands up, smoothes the bedspread, and goes out.
I sit there for another fifteen minutes.
Then I unpack my bag and I call the car service and cancel.
I pull on my jacket and walk out into the Saturday morning, the festival grounds a few blocks over already carrying the sounds of final-day prep, and I walk the six blocks to his cabin.
He answers the door in work clothes, coffee in hand, clearly about to leave for the grounds.
He looks at me. Then at my empty hands. Then back at my face.
"You didn't go," he says.
"I didn't go."
He steps back and lets me in and sets his coffee on the counter and I have about thirty seconds to register the fact that I made a decision before he crosses the kitchen and gets his hands in my hair and his mouth on mine and I stop processing anything else.
We end up in his room.
This time I want to see him. I sit up on the edge of the bed and pull him closer by his belt, and I take my time with his shirt buttons the way he took his time with mine on Thursday.
He watches me work with his hands loose at his sides, which is clearly costing him something. I can hear it in his breathing.
When I get the shirt off I press my palms flat against his chest, down over the scar on his ribs, lower, until I've got his belt open and his jeans shoved down enough to get a hand around his cock.
He's already hard, and this time I don't rush it — slow strokes, root to tip, thumb dragging over the head on the way back down, until his stomach tightens and he catches my wrist.
"Not yet," he says. "My turn."
He undresses me slow, both hands, watching my face — my shirt, my bra, my jeans, until I'm bare in front of him and he just looks, like he's got nowhere else to be.
When we finally lie down together, the choice is in every second of it.
Not reunion. Not ten years compressed into one desperate night. This is chosen. Awake. Deliberate.
"What are you thinking?" he asks.
"That I missed this." I press my hand flat over his heart. "Specifically this. Not just the sex. The way you pay attention."
Something shifts in his face. Gentler.
He moves over me and takes his time — mouth at my jaw, my throat, down to my breast, tongue circling my nipple until I arch into his mouth.
He keeps going, unhurried, kissing down my stomach, and when he settles between my thighs he doesn't tease.
His mouth is on my clit in one long, slow stroke, and I grip the sheets.
"Please."
"Please what?"
"Owen." My voice does a specific thing. "You know what."
"Say it."
"I want your cock inside me. Right now."
He kisses his way back up and lines himself up, and this time there's no rush — he pushes in slow, watching my face the entire way, one long stroke until he's fully seated, and the sound we both make is not small and not quiet.
He stills, forehead against mine, buried deep, the two of us just there together in the middle of what we've chosen.
"Look at me," he says.
I look at him.
"You stayed," he says.
"I stayed."
"That matters. I need you to know that matters more than—" He rolls his hips, slow and deep, and whatever he was going to say disappears into a sound low in his throat.
I don't look away now. I let him see everything, because this time there's nowhere to go and nothing to manage — I'm exactly where I chose to be, and every drag of his cock inside me proves it.
"You feel the same," he says. "Ten years and you still feel exactly the same."
"Owen!"
"I know." He moves harder, deeper, and I grip his shoulder and say his name twice. "I've got you. Tell me what you need."
"More," I say. "Harder — right there!"
He gets a hand under my lower back, changes the angle so every thrust drags against the spot that makes my whole body clench around him, and I dig my nails in and say his name again.
"There," he says. "I know. I've got you. Stay with me."
Owen gets his thumb against my clit and works it in slow circles while he fucks me, deep and steady, and I come apart around his cock — hard, shaking, clenching down on him, his name breaking out of me.
His face when he watches it isn't triumph.
It's relief. The specific quiet of a man who wasn't sure he'd get this back.
I pull him down and get my mouth on his throat, and that's what breaks him. His control cracks, his rhythm goes rough and deep, and he groans my name into my hair as he comes, hips stuttering, buried deep, holding there until it's finished and I can feel every drop.
He doesn't move for a long moment. Just breathes, forehead in my hair.
Afterward he lies on his back and pulls me against his side. I put my hand on his chest again, over his heart.
The room is quiet. Outside it's fully morning, the festival grounds waking up for the last day, someone's music already going.
"I'm not going back the same way," I say.
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "What does that mean?"
"It means: I went to Vancouver at twenty-three because I wanted a career and a life and I wasn't wrong to want that.
But I think I also went because I was afraid of what staying would mean.
Being the girl from Silver Ridge. Being your person.
Like that would make me smaller somehow. " I pause. "It wouldn't have."
"No.”
"So I'm not going back the same way. I'm going back to figure out what needs to change. Work, living situation, whatever. I don't know what it looks like yet."
"Okay,” he nods.
"You're not going to ask what the timeline is?"
He tilts his head down to look at me. "And I've been waiting ten years. I can be patient."
I press my face against his shoulder.
The bonfire that night is enormous.
The art of stacking bonfires is one of the things Silver Ridge does without needing to discuss it, the institutional knowledge passing from one generation of volunteers to the next.
Three meters of cured hardwood, stacked with room for air, and when it goes up it goes clean and fast and lights the whole grounds amber.
The heat of it reaches thirty meters out.
Standing near it with the August night air still warm on your back is one of the better physical experiences available to a human being, and I'd forgotten that, the way you forget things when you spend ten years making yourself too busy to remember.
The crowd fills in around the fire as the sky goes fully dark.
Families with kids on their shoulders. Old couples with lawn chairs who were probably at the first one of these, sixty years back.
The log-rolling competitors still loud from the day's events, someone passing around a bottle near the equipment shed.
The vendors are doing their last hour of business and the smell coming off the stalls is woodsmoke and pulled pork and fresh-ground coffee and something sweet from a pie table near the north fence.
Owen stands beside me with his shoulder against mine.
His arm is warm against my arm and when someone comes up to congratulate him on the axe-throwing he introduces me.
The man he introduces me to nods like something has just been confirmed, which is how Silver Ridge works: the town was already holding a version of this outcome, and the confirmation is not a surprise so much as a relief.
The old man running the cider stand catches my eye across the fire and nods at us and I catch him smiling at his cups.
The town knows.
The town has always known, probably. That's the thing about Silver Ridge — it's been holding this unfinished story for a decade and it's been patient about it in the way that old places are patient. The mountains have been here longer than any of us. They are not in a hurry.