Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Eli
The thaw takes three days, and I spend them healing under the hands of a woman who refuses to let me do anything strenuous and refuses, also, to stop touching me.
A contradiction we both enjoy resolving, easy and unhurried, mindful of the wound and the ribs, learning each other again now that there's no storm and no killers and nothing forcing it.
Just two people, on solid ground, in the daylight, choosing.
It happens for the first time in daylight, which is its own kind of medicine.
The first morning I can stand without the room going gray, she catches me at the window with my coffee and the thaw dripping off the eaves, and she comes up behind me and slides her arms around me from the side, careful of the packed wound, and presses her mouth between my shoulder blades.
The sun's full on the snow. There's no storm to seal us in, no killers down the grade, no fever-dark cabin, nothing forcing it.
Just the light, and her, and the long ordinary morning I spent nine years believing I'd never be allowed.
"You're doing the thing again," she says into my back. "The bracing. I can feel it. You think the daylight's going to show me something I haven't already seen."
"It might." Old honesty. I give her the real number even now. "Everything's easier in the dark, Wren. The dark forgives a man his face."
She comes around in front of me and takes the coffee out of my hand and sets it on the sill, and her eyes are clear and certain and full of the morning.
"Then let's find out," she says. "In the worst possible light.
The way I find out everything." And she takes my hand and walks me back to the bed I bled on three days ago, into the full flat sun coming through the glass, and I let her, because I have learned to let this woman lead me into the places I'm afraid of.
"You don't do anything strenuous," she says, pushing me down onto the wool with a flat hand on my good shoulder, mock-stern and not mock at all.
"Doctor's orders. The structure's holding but it's new.
You lie still and you let me." She straddles me slow, mindful of her own healing ribs, mindful of the bandage at my side, settling her weight over my hips, and the sight of her up there in the daylight, bare to the sun, unhurried, in command, does something to me the wound never came close to.
"Yes?" she asks. "I need your number, Eli. Same as always."
"Yes." It's barely a word. "Christ, yes."
She undresses in the light without hiding any of it, and I get to watch, which she knows, which is the whole point.
She's giving me the daylight back one inch at a time, teaching me it's safe.
She takes my hands and sets them on her, my palms over her breasts, and leans into them, and I drag my thumbs across her nipples until she shivers and her breath goes ragged and the wry command in her face softens into want.
"There she is," I tell her, the way I told her the first night, and she laughs, low, and the laugh turns into a gasp when I sit up just enough to take her into my mouth.
"Careful," she warns, a hand splaying over my bandaged side. "Lie back. Let me."
So I lie back, and I let her, and it is the hardest discipline I've ever practiced and the sweetest. To hold still under her hands.
To be the one tended. To let her read me in the sunlight with nothing hidden.
She kisses down my sternum, over the old scar she's claimed, mindful and slow, and when her cold hand closes around my cock and strokes me to full hardness I groan up at the log ceiling and fist the wool to keep from grabbing her.
"You can touch me," she says, watching my hands clench.
"You're allowed to want it back, Eli. That's the part you keep forgetting.
" She guides my hand down between her thighs, slick and hot, and shows me the rhythm she likes, and I learn her the way she taught me.
Slow. Attentive. My thumb on her clit and two fingers working into her until she's rocking against my hand and saying my name like the sun came up just to hear it.
"I want you in me," she says against my mouth. "In the daylight. So you know I see all of you and I'm still here. Yes?"
"Yes." I cradle her hips. "Take what you want. I'm yours."
She rises up and sinks down onto me slow, taking me inch by inch with her head tipped back and the sun gold on her throat, and the wet heat of her pussy closing around me drags a sound out of the bottom of me that I don't have a word for.
She sets the pace, careful of us both, unhurried.
This isn't the storm-driven dark of the night before the slope.
This is its opposite, two people who lived choosing each other in the plain light with all the time in the world.
I plant my feet and meet her in slow deep strokes, my hands on her hips, hers braced on my chest, and we find the rhythm we always find, the one that's been there since the first silence we shared.
"Look at you," I tell her, and my voice is wrecked with more than the wound. "In the light. God, Wren, look at you."
"Look at us." She catches my hand off her hip and laces her cold fingers through mine. An anchor. A held line. "You were so scared of this. The daylight. And here it is and you're still the best thing I've ever stood on." She rolls her hips and we both groan. "Tell me the real number."
"The real number." I work my other hand between us, find her clit, start her climbing, and watch the wit dissolve off her face into pure want. "The real number is I'd live the whole nine years of cold again if they led here. To this. To you in the sun on a healing man's last good nerve."
She laughs and gasps at once and starts to come apart, going tight around me, and I hold off the storm of myself the way I always will, because I am always going to feel her go first. "That's it," I tell her. "There she is. Come for me in the daylight, brave girl. Let me see all of it."
She breaks over me with the sun full on her face, and there's no dark to hide a single second of it, and that, her undone and golden and unafraid, looking right at me while it takes her, is the thing that finishes me.
I push up into her and let go, my hand fisted with hers, her name torn out of me, the heat of it spilling through me and into her while the thaw drips off the eaves and the whole bright world holds still.
After, she eases down against me, careful of the bandage, careful of everything, and I get my arm around her and hold her in the impossible sunlight and my heart comes down off the slope one last time. Her mouth finds the scar. Her cold hand flattens over my heart.
"See?" she says, drowsy and certain and warm. "Daylight. Survived it."
"Survived it," I agree, rough, and press my lips to her hair, and for the first time in nine years I am not bracing against anything at all.
The light's just light. She's just here.
And I let her be the watch, and I let myself be held in the open, age and all, blood and all, every bit of what I am, in the plain warm morning with nothing left to hide.
I do the hard work too, the parts that aren't for telling, on the second day when I can stand.
The body in the mine. What's left on the slope.
The truth that has to go down to the right people in the right way.
There's a sheriff two valleys over who knew me, before, who'll believe a thing a stranger wouldn't, and there's a way to tell it that's true and complete and leaves out nothing I'm ashamed of, because I'm done being ashamed of keeping her alive.
I'll tell it straight. I always tell it straight now.
She taught me that the truth is the only thing you can stand on.
But that's the world's business, and it can wait for the road. The cabin's business is us.
On the third morning the sun comes up over the ridge and the snow's gone soft and gray and sliding off the spruce in heavy wet falls, and I stand at the window with my coffee, I drink it now, she made me, and I listen to the mountain loosen its hold, and the thing I've been dreading for nine years comes up in me and turns out not to be dread at all.
The road's opening. The world's coming back.
And she's not packing to leave it for. She's at the table with my one pencil and a torn-out notebook page, making a list, and when I ask what it is she says, "Logistics.
I have to defend a thesis in March and I'm not driving back up a death road every weekend, so.
Logistics." Like it's settled. Like the question was never whether but how.
Like a woman half my age looked at a hermit's cabin above the treeline and a forty-two-year-old man who kills the men who threaten her and decided, with her whole clear scientific certainty, that this is the fixed point she's building her life around.
"You'd come back up here," I say. I have to say it out loud to believe it. "To this. To me."
"I'd come back up here to this. To you." She doesn't even look up from the list. "And down off it with you when the thesis needs me down.
And up again. The mountain's not going anywhere and neither am I and neither, God help him, are you.
We'll work the logistics." Then she does look up, and her face is wry and warm and entirely sure.
"Unless you're about to be noble at me again.
Are you about to be noble at me, Eli? Because I've recovered enough to fight you and I have a splint I'm not afraid to use. "
I cross the room and I take the pencil out of her hand and I pull her up out of the chair into me, careful of her ribs and mine, and I kiss her in the daylight, in the ordinary unmiraculous morning light, the light I was so afraid of.
And it's easy, she was right, it's the easiest thing in the world, and when I pull back her eyes are bright and she says, "See?
Daylight. Survived it," and I laugh, the rough laugh she pulls out of me, and nine years of cold breaks all the way through.
"Marry me," I say.
It surprises us both. I hadn't planned it.
But it comes up out of me the way the truth always does now, plain and complete, and once it's out I know it's the realest number I've got.
"Not because of the mountain. Not because we almost died.
Because the storm's over and the road's open and you could walk down it and go back to the right-sized world, and I want you to know that I'm choosing the version where you don't have to, where it's not a question, where you're mine and I'm yours out loud and in writing and in the daylight, age and all, blood and all, every bit of what I am.
Marry me. Stand on the solid ground with me. Let me be the permanent thing."
She's quiet for one whole second, and then she's crying and laughing at once, my brave girl, and she takes my face in her two small hands the way she does, the way that lets me bend down to her, and she says: "I ran every test. The structure holds.
Yes. Yes, you difficult, gentle, lethal, impossible man. Clear day. Solid ground. Yes."
Down the mountain, faint, an engine. The sheriff's truck, fighting up the softening grade, the first soul to reach us in nine days, the world arriving at last. Juniper barks once and wags.
The eaves drip. The snow slides off the roof in a long soft roar and the slope holds, the way she said it would, the way it does when you stop waiting for it to bury you and start living on it instead.
I keep one arm around her as the truck climbs toward us.
The other I keep free, old habit, the habit that kept us both alive, because the mountain takes everyone eventually and I know it, deep time, human pain a rounding error, no promise can be made against the slope.
I can't promise to keep her forever. Nobody can.
But I can promise the rest of whatever I've got. I can promise the daylight and the cold nights and the logistics and the long fight to be a man who has something to lose again. I can promise to come back through the door. Every time.
And as the road opens and the world comes up the mountain to find us, I hold the woman who came down into the dark and brought me back, and I am not afraid of any of it. Not the men I was. Not the years between us. Not the love that costs me everything. Not the slope that will someday let go.
I'm not afraid. I'm just here. Warm, in the daylight, with her.
Finally, finally here.