6. Gideon
six
Gideon
It’s too damn early for this.
I've been up since four, running the numbers eleven different ways at that kitchen table, and every one of them says the same thing: I can't go higher without putting Roy's and Marco's jobs on the line to do it, and I won't.
Faye comes in with her hair up and a folder under her arm and an expression I can't read.
She puts the folder on the counter my grandfather built and opens it and turns it to face me. It's a purchase agreement. My number's at the top of it. The fair one. The one I said in this room two weeks ago with sawdust on my collar and no idea what was about to happen to me.
"I turned Northbend down," she says. "It's done. They're not coming back. I made sure the no was ugly enough. I had the yes sitting in my drafts, but I couldn’t do it. I want you to know that, because I'm not going to pretend I'm braver than I am."
I look at the paper. I look at her.
"Faye."
She's got both hands flat on the counter and she's holding herself very straight, and I can see her pulse going in her throat.
"The land was never the point. I've known that for about a week and I've been managing it very efficiently.
It's what I do. My grandmother died on the ninth of September and I have not stopped moving since, and I came here to close a file. "
"I know."
"You don't know all of it." She breathes out.
"She held that ground for thirty-one years after my grandfather died and I never asked her one question about it.
Not one. I had to stand in your mill and have you tell me she was born up there.
And I was going to sell it in a fortnight to a company that puts gates on things, and I'd have called that closure, and I'd have been forty before I understood what I did. "
I stand up.
"So it goes to you," she says. "At your number. Because you're the only person in this valley who was ever going to keep it whole."
Two years I've been trying to buy that parcel. Two years of letters to a lawyer in Victoria and phone calls that went nowhere, and I told myself it was about the landing and the expansion and the creek crossing, and it was, and that was never the whole of it.
"I wasn't trying to just buy a parcel," I say.
"When my grandfather put this building up there were four mills in this valley.
There's one. Everything that touches this ground gets sold to somebody who holds it and flips it and doesn't come here, and the ones who do come put a gate on it.
" I come around the counter. "I wasn't trying to get bigger.
I was trying to keep something whole so there's one left when Rue's thirty. "
“I get it now.”
I kiss her.
The folder goes on the floor. I get her up on my grandfather's counter; Rue's at school until three, the crew's out on the far landing till noon, and the office door locks from the inside. Light coming grey-gold through the window and the whole of a Friday morning in front of us.
I take her coat off. Then the sweater. She's in a thin white shirt underneath and I do the buttons one at a time again and she laughs at me for it.
"You do that so slowly."
"I've got all day."
Her breath catches on that. I get the shirt off her shoulders and put my mouth at the join of her neck, and her head goes back, and her hands come up into my hair.
I take my time. I've been taking her fast and hidden for two weeks — against doors, on counters, in the dark of my bedroom with one ear open for a kid down the hall — and I want this one slow enough to remember properly.
I get her jeans off. Her socks, which is undignified and makes her laugh again. Then I lay her back on my own coat spread on the counter and stand between her knees and look at her for long enough that she goes pink.
"Are you going to do something or are you appraising me?"
"Both."
"Gideon."
"Say it again."
"Gideon."
I put two fingers in her and my thumb on her clit and work her that way, slow and steady, watching her face the whole time. She's wet almost immediately. She reaches back and grips the edge of the counter and her hips start chasing my hand.
"You're going to make me — right there — don't change it —"
"I'm not changing it."
She laughs and it turns into a moan halfway, and she comes like that, on my hand, in the office where I do the payroll, with the low October sun across her stomach.
I get my belt off. She sits up and pulls my shirt over my head and puts her palms flat on my chest, and then she does the thing that takes the top of my head off — she leans in and kisses the scar on my forearm, the one from the head rig in '09, without asking about it.
"Faye."
"Mm."
"Come here."
I pull her to the edge and push into her standing, her legs around my waist, her arms locked behind my neck. She's warm and tight and she makes a sound against my shoulder that I want on a loop for the rest of my life.
I move slow. Deep and unhurried, all the way out and all the way back, and she holds on and takes it and doesn't tell me to go faster.
"I want you in my house," I say against her ear. "Not visiting. In it. Your boots by the door and your coffee cup in the sink and your name on the mail."
"Gideon —" She moans as if that’s the sexiest thing she’s ever heard.
"I'm not asking you to stay for me." My hand spreads over her back and I hold her against my chest and keep moving. "I'm telling you I want it. I've spent three years not wanting anything and I'm done doing that. You can do what you want with it."
She pulls back to look at me. Her eyes are wet and she's smiling anyway, and she puts both hands on my face.
"Seven o'clock I said no to Northbend," she says. "Seven-fifteen I called Victoria and gave notice."
I stop dead.
"You what."
"Four weeks, consulting through the spring on the campus job, my desk cleared by December." She's laughing and crying at the same time and it's a mess and it's the best thing I have ever seen. "I did it before I drove up here. So it would already be true when you tried to be noble at me."
I don't have anything to say to that.
So I don't say anything. I get her off the counter and I turn her and put her hands flat on my grandfather's counter and take her from behind with one arm banded across her ribs, holding her back against my chest.
"Oh.."
"This all right?"
"Yes."
I go slow again first, all the way in and all the way back, because I want to feel her take it that way. Her head drops between her shoulders. Her fingers go white on the edge of the wood.
"Look up."
She looks up. There's a window over the desk and the yard in it, timber stacked square to the world in the grey-gold light, and past it the bench, and I put my mouth against her ear.
"That's yours out there. Nobody's putting a gate on it." I get a hand between her legs and work her clit while I move in her. "You're not visiting anything. Say it."
"I'm not visiting."
"Again."
"I live here." Her voice breaks on the second word. "Gideon — I live here, ah!"
After that I stop being careful.
I take her hard enough that the counter moves, hand spread wide on her stomach to hold her where I want her, and she pushes back into every stroke and tells me exactly what she wants in language I would not have guessed at three weeks ago.
Her thighs start to shake. I feel it build in her before she says a word about it.
"You live here. With me. Mine."
She comes on that. Hard, loud, both palms flat on fifty-year-old fir, and the clutch of her drags me over right behind her.
We stay like that. My arms are shaking and I don't let go.
Then she starts laughing, still bent over the counter. “Isn’t this where you do payroll?”
"Yep," I say, and I kiss the top of her spine.
"Your grandfather's counter," she says eventually, into my neck.
"He'd have understood."
She laughs, and I feel it everywhere.
The next morning there's a new drawing on the fridge, held up with a magnet shaped like a pear.
Three stick figures under a triangle roof. One tall with a black rectangle of beard, one small with brown scribble hair, one in the middle with a blue coat.
Underneath, in pencil, pressed hard enough to emboss the page: DAD, ME, FAYE. HOUSE.
Rue's at the table eating cereal and does not look up. "I was waiting."