Chapter 7 #4
"The man underneath all that discipline. The one who wants to put Falk through a wall and is too controlled to let it show." Her foot presses against my palm, deliberate. "I've been wondering when he'd come out."
"He's always there."
"I know. I just wanted to hear it."
She pulls her foot from my lap, unfolds from the chair, and crosses the space between us.
Her hands land on the arms of my chair and she leans down until her mouth is close to mine and her hair falls around both our faces and the world narrows to the scent of her and the look in her eyes that says she is not remotely finished with this conversation.
"Tell me about the hollow."
So I do. With her weight settled across my lap and her head against my shoulder and my arm locked across her thighs, I tell her about the hills that held the morning fog until ten.
The creek behind the house that froze in January and thawed in chunks that my sister and I threw at each other.
The mine whistle at shift change, three long blasts you could hear from anywhere in the valley.
The church on Sundays where my father sang bass in the choir before the coughing got too bad.
"You're a secret sentimentalist," she says against my collarbone.
"I'm an Appalachian with a memory."
"Those are the same thing, and I'm going to prove it."
I tell her about enlisting at eighteen, walking out of the hollow with a duffel bag and the certainty that my hands were meant for something the mountains couldn't give them.
About BUD/S, where the cold water and the sleep deprivation refined something that was already there, a steadiness under duress that my mother put in me the night she talked a twelve-year-old through a tourniquet over a crackling phone line.
Her fingers trace slow patterns on my forearm, following the lines of tendons and veins with a precision that is never entirely absent from how she touches me.
"You're doing assessments," I say.
"I'm always doing assessments." She lifts her head and looks at me, humor layered over heat. "Your forearms are a gift to the medical profession and I refuse to apologize for noticing."
"Noted."
"If you say 'noted' one more time, I'm going back to my chair."
"Acknowledged."
"Worse."
I pull her closer, and her laugh vibrates against my chest. For a moment the investigation and the anger and the names are just the background hum underneath the present tense of this woman against me, alive and sharp and unhesitating, making me want to write poems and then abandon the notebook and put my hands on her instead.
"The notebook," she says eventually, and the word is gentle and doesn't push.
"Not tonight." The deflection is different this time. Not a wall. A threshold, held open a crack, light coming through. "But soon."
She doesn't argue. She turns her face into my neck and presses her lips against my pulse point, and the trust in that, the willingness to stand at the edge of the thing I'm not ready to show her and wait, is worth more than pushing through the door would be.
It also sends a bolt of heat down my spine that makes my hand tighten on her thigh, and she feels it and hums against my skin in a way that is not helping my commitment to finishing this conversation on the deck.
"We should go in," she says.
"We should."
Neither of us moves. The water fills the dark.
The notebook in my pocket presses against her hip, and the poem that's been forming all day sits in my mind alongside the other one, the one about this woman's mouth on my pulse and the way soon tasted when I said it, like a door opening.
The anger about the rehab center is still there, coiled, waiting for the morning. The names are still there, the operators I carry, present and permanent in the tissue of who I am.
But tonight, on this deck, with the second chair empty because the woman who sits in it is in my lap instead, with her mouth against my neck and her hand on my arm, the weight has a place to rest, not a place to disappear but a place to set down long enough to pick back up and keep moving.
"Boone."
"Ireland."
"Take me inside."
I stand, pull her up with me, and before she can get her footing I bend and lift her over my shoulder in one smooth motion, my arm locked across the backs of her thighs.
"Boone." Her voice is half laughing, half breathless, her fists pressing against my lower back. "This is not what I had in mind."
"You said inside. You didn't specify the method."
"The method is caveman logistics. Put me down."
"When we get to the bed."
I carry her through the kitchen door, and her laughter fills the rooms that used to be quiet and mine, the way her flowers changed the table and her mug changed the counter, presence where there was absence, noise where there was none.
"You're enjoying this," she says, her fingers hooking into my belt loops.
"I'm transporting a civilian to a secure location. Standard operating procedure."
"Standard operating procedure does not involve throwing a woman over your shoulder like a rucksack."
"You weigh less than a rucksack. And complain more."
Her laugh sharpens into the precursor to something devastating, but I set her down on the bed before she can land it.
The look she gives me from the mattress, hair fanned across the orthopedic pillows she bought because my old one looked like a science experiment, her mouth curved and her eyes dark and my t-shirt riding up her thighs, is the look that's going to end up in the notebook tomorrow in handwriting so small she'd need a magnifying glass to read it.
The deck can wait. The notebook can wait. The door I'm opening is not the one made of paper and ink.
It's the one she's been standing on the other side of, sharp and unhesitating, since the first morning she told me my coffee was terrible and made me want to write a poem about how she holds a mug.
In the morning, Welling goes back on the machines and Falk goes back to work, and the hands pulling Ireland's shirt over her head will go back to doing the work and saving the opinions for after.
But tonight, the opinions don't exist. Tonight there is only this.