CHAPTER 28 – SAWYER
Sawyer’s heart was pounding so hard, she was sure Nellie would feel it.
Not the frantic sprint it had been doing a few hours ago, when the whole narrow world of Dolores had condensed itself into Nellie’s mouth and the unceremonious soundtrack of two grown women trying to be sensual in a space built for hobbits.
That pounding had resolved itself alongside the toe-curling orgasm.
This one was the lingering, low kind. The kind that just kept tapping at her sternum with a persistent insistence, reminding her that this was all new and overwhelming and extraordinary.
If she felt it, Nellie didn’t comment. In fact, Sawyer wasn’t sure if she had dozed off completely.
Her arms were wound tightly around Sawyer’s rib cage as though she wanted to keep her as close as possible—something that wasn’t entirely necessary in this space where Sawyer couldn’t physically move away—and her legs had threaded themselves so thoroughly between both of Sawyer’s that untangling them would require either a formal negotiation or scissors, no lesbian pun intended there.
Sawyer did not mind. She lay there, studying the curve of the van ceiling, and let herself be held.
The strangeness of it landed slowly. She was accustomed to being the one who did the holding, if she could even claim to be accustomed to any form of holding at all.
The architecture of her romantic history, such as it was, had always arranged itself that way: Sawyer with her arms around someone, Sawyer with her chin resting on a head, Sawyer providing the structure.
She had never examined this. It had simply been the configuration that made sense for her body and her temperament and probably, if she was honest, for the particular story she’d always told about what kind of person she was.
With a faint sigh, Nellie nuzzled her temple. Sawyer exhaled.
It turned out that being held was exceptional.
It was warm and it was heavy and she could feel the steady comfort of Nellie’s breathing where their bodies pressed together.
The net result of all of these inputs was that Sawyer Alburn, who had not once in her adult life experienced difficulty knowing exactly what she wanted, found she did not want to be anywhere else on the planet.
Which was, she thought, looking at the ceiling of a converted van, a slightly alarming realization for a woman who owned a penthouse.
“You’re doing some serious thinking,” Nellie said drowsily.
Sawyer looked up. Nellie had not, apparently, been asleep. One eye was cracked open at her, bleary but watchful.
“What makes you say that?”
“I can tell.” Nellie shifted, wriggling lower in the bed so that they were eye to eye. “Your jaw does a thing, I could feel it.”
“My jaw does not do a thing.”
“It absolutely does.” Nellie reached up and pressed two fingers to the hinge of Sawyer’s jaw. She pressed until she felt the tension Sawyer had not noticed she was holding. “There. That.”
Sawyer unclenched. She hadn’t meant to clench in the first place. “How do you notice such tiny details?” she marveled before Nellie could enumerate any other involuntary physical tells she’d apparently catalogued. “It hasn’t even been three months since we met.”
Nellie’s tired eyes snapped open completely.
“Did you mark the date?” Nellie’s mouth curved up at the corner. “Like on your official calendar?”
“Of course, I know what date it was. I entered into a legal agreement on a damn livestream.”
“That’s the most Sawyer Alburn way to say ‘I was counting the days since we met’ I have ever—”
“The point,” Sawyer said, “is that less than three months ago, I drove out here to deal with a trespassing situation involving a woman who had chained herself to a tree.” The patchwork quilt rustled as Nellie burrowed into Sawyer’s neck and shook with suppressed laughter.
“I genuinely thought it was going to take forty-five minutes for you to bow out, possibly an hour if you were particularly litigious. I had a particularly grumpy lunch at one.”
“What did you have?” Nellie asked, into Sawyer’s sternum.
“That’s not relevant.”
“I’m getting a picture of the whole day. Context is important.”
“A salad.” Sawyer rolled her eyes. “An extremely functional salad, eaten at my desk, after which I returned to a normal and orderly afternoon.” She looked at the ceiling again. “Or that was the plan.”
Nellie had gone quiet. Not the half-asleep quiet, but the full-attention quiet that Sawyer had learned to distinguish from all its cousins. Sawyer found, as she always did when Nellie went quiet like this, that she had more to say than she’d anticipated.
“I can’t quite make it compute,” she admitted. “That this is what three months looks like, from that starting point. You, chained to a tree. Me, furious about it. And now—” She let the gesture substitute for the sentence, tracing her fingertips down Nellie’s bare arm.
“It’s a crazy story.” Nellie nodded and chuckled. “I mean, objectively. If I were to tell it all to someone and hear it out loud, it would sound completely unhinged. Activist chains herself to tree, billionaire CEO shows up looking incredibly hot and incredibly furious—”
“I wasn’t—”
“—and the whole thing just snowballs from there in a direction that no one could have predicted.” Nellie’s voice had gone soft at the edges, the laugh in it settling into something more awed. “It’s a mad story. But I’m very glad about how it ended up. Extremely. Unreservedly glad.”
Sawyer pressed her mouth to the corner of Nellie’s lips.
“So am I.”
The forest creaked and shifted outside the thin walls of the van: small sounds, branches, the distant low commentary of whatever birds conducted business at this hour.
Sawyer had not grown up with forests. She had grown up with parking lots and bus routes and the ambient noise of a city that was alive without being kind about it.
She had spent a long time believing that the absence of that noise would be silence and silence would be unsettling.
It wasn’t. The forest was not silent. It was just a completely different conversation, and she was beginning, with Nellie’s heartbeat as her guide, to pick out the words.
“I want to make another deal,” she said.
Nellie lifted her head, eyebrows raised. “Another deal?”
“It seems appropriate.” Sawyer grinned. “Now that we’ve thoroughly celebrated you winning the last one.”
Nellie blushed. They had, indeed, celebrated very thoroughly. “Alright, what are the terms?”
Sawyer shifted slightly, resettling their tangled arrangement until she had a clearer line of sight to Nellie’s face.
“You stay with me and help me fight for a better future for our planet. And on my side, I will protect the forest. This forest and all the forests I can. Not just in the Alburn Systems corporate documentation sense, though the legal protections will be properly filed and you’ll have copies of everything.
I mean, I promise that Eleanor will stay standing, always.
Whatever I have to do to make that happen, whatever agreements need drafting and whatever conversations need having and whatever ungodly regulatory frameworks need navigating, Eleanor stands.
” She held Nellie’s gaze. “She was here four hundred years before either of us. I’d like her to be here four hundred years after. ”
“Four hundred years is a very long time,” Nellie argued, but gently, without the barb it might have had three months ago.
“Threats we can’t predict. Disease, drought.
” She glanced toward the back window, toward whatever patch of dark beyond it was Nellie’s personal compass point.
“Wildfire season gets longer every year.” She looked back.
“What if a wildfire takes the whole area? What if there’s nothing left?
You can’t make a blanket promise for four centuries, that’s—”
“All right.” Sawyer nodded. She thought about it for approximately two seconds. “Then we’ll add a wildfire clause.”
“A clause…?”
“Standard practice in any robust agreement. Force majeure provisions, unforeseen circumstances.”
“We’re doing this verbally. At midnight. In a van.”
“The venue doesn’t affect the enforceability.” Sawyer fought to keep her face entirely composed. “In the event of catastrophic wildfire—or comparable disaster of sufficient scale to compromise the standing of Eleanor and the surrounding protected area—I will invent a time machine.”
Nellie was shaking with laughter now.
“Or,” Sawyer continued, pantomiming the same register she used for amendments to quarterly reports, “discover the secret to immortality. I haven’t settled on the mechanism; there are trade-offs to both.
But the objective in either case is this: I will take you to the moment, four hundred years from now, when the forest has grown back.
Taller. Just as immovable.” She planted a gentle kiss on the tip of Nellie’s nose.
“We will park Dolores. Right here. And we will lie here, exactly like this.”
Nellie gaped at her for a moment, then blushed, then ducked her head beneath Sawyer’s chin. Presumably to hide said blush.
“You are,” Nellie said, muffled and laughing, “absolutely ridiculous.”
“It’s a reasonable clause,” Sawyer maintained.
“It’s insane.” But Nellie pulled back slightly to look at her, still grinning. “You know that, right? You’re proposing a wildfire clause in a verbal contract that is contingent on either time travel or immortality, and you’re doing it completely seriously?”
“I do most things completely seriously. It’s a consistent personal characteristic.”
“You strange woman.” Nellie rolled her eyes, then announced, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, deal. I accept the terms. Including the wildfire clause. Specifically the wildfire clause.” She settled her head back down against Sawyer’s chest. “I’m going to hold you to the immortality option if it comes to that.
I’m morally opposed to time travel on a number of scientific and philosophical grounds and I’d like that noted for the record. ”
“Noted,” Sawyer said mock-gravely.
Mere minutes passed in comfortable silence before Sawyer was running an internal calculation about whether she could subtly rearrange the quilt without disturbing its current architect. She could not. Nellie’s left arm was pinning it.
“I want to add another clause,” she said.
Nellie made a drowsy sound of inquiry.
“Blankets.” Sawyer moved her feet, or tried to, since the movement largely confirmed what her circulatory system had been suggesting for the last twenty minutes. “Specifically, more of them for the future of our planet. My toes are freezing.”
Nellie lifted her head from Sawyer’s chest. She took a single, withering look at Sawyer’s face. Then she took a single, equally withering look at the foot of the bed.
“You,” she said, “are wearing none of the socks.”
“I don’t own socks appropriate for this environment.”
“There is no specific ‘in the forest in a van’ category of sock.”
“There are wool socks, which I don’t own, and there are the socks I own, which are currently failing significantly.”
“You packed fleece pajamas with a monogram,” Nellie said, in a tone of magnificent disbelief, “and no wool socks.”
“The pajama situation was addressed. The sock situation was an oversight.”
Shaking her head, Nellie untangled herself from the arrangement—which was no minor operation given the thoroughness with which they had been assembled—and went rummaging in the storage box under the bed.
She came back with a pair of socks. Thick, cream, bobbled slightly from countless wash cycles.
Then she sat at the foot of the bed, took Sawyer’s right foot in both hands as though this were an entirely ordinary thing to do, and pulled the sock on with a brisk, capable motion that Sawyer found unexpectedly moving.
“There,” Nellie said, starting on the left.
“Thank you.” The glow of the fairy lights caught in the dark mess of Nellie’s hair and lit the concentration on her face as she smoothed the sock over Sawyer’s heel.
“These are mine,” Nellie informed her, giving the finished sock a final pat. “So, I’ll need them back.”
“I’ll add it to the terms.” Sawyer chuckled.
Nellie climbed back up the narrow bed and reinstated the previous arrangement without discussion, her arms going back around Sawyer’s rib cage with the ease of something resumed rather than started.