EPILOGUE – SAWYER
The Viking Windfarm’s project director had an alarming enthusiasm for lenticular clouds.
This had become apparent approximately three minutes into Sawyer’s site tour when he’d stopped the jeep at the base of turbine forty-seven, pointed at the sky with a reverence usually reserved for religious experiences, and delivered a four-minute oration on the phenomenon.
Sawyer had listened with the patience she’d been steadily cultivating over three years of meetings in which scientists said beautiful things that were technically tangential to the budget line under discussion.
The clouds were, admittedly, extraordinary—flat and layered and hovering over the ridge like enormous gray lenses—but the renewable energy investment case she was building for Alburn Systems depended more on capacity factors than atmospheric aesthetics.
She’d gotten what she needed, in the end. She always did. The numbers on wave energy conversion were good. Potentially excellent. The Shetland Islands were not a mild location, which turned out to be precisely the point.
The wind had tried to remove her twice on the walk back to the jeep.
She was prepared to call the day a success, provided her rental car started.
It did. Sawyer pointed it south and drove the single-track road with the careful attention it demanded.
It was hedgeless, sheer-dropped on one side, the North Atlantic pressing itself gray and immense against the cliff faces below.
The light was extraordinary, even at three in the afternoon.
The sky here had a quality she’d been unable to name until yesterday, when she’d spent a long time looking at it and concluded, finally, that it was simply very far from anything.
Old light. Light that had not been obligated to bounce off buildings before reaching her.
She pulled up to the rental cottage at half past three and pushed her way through the creaking door, shivering a little as she pushed off her boots.
She was focused on filling up the kettle when the kitchen window stole her attention.
Not the window itself, exactly, but what was framed in it.
Or rather, what was happening outside it, visible through the wavery old glass.
The beach here was a narrow strip of dark sand backed by rough grass, and on it, in the horizontal wind, Nellie was throwing a ball.
Their German Shepherd, Norman, caught it before it hit the ground.
Actually, he didn’t. He missed it completely, overshot by two feet, corrected mid-stride with a scrambling loss of dignity, and then retrieved it from the sand triumphantly.
He galloped back toward Nellie with the ball in his mouth, enormous and golden-eyed and shedding his coat in tufts that the wind ripped sideways.
Nellie dropped to her knees to greet him, soaking her sweatpants in the wet sand.
Smiling at her own good fortune, Sawyer watched them, utterly transfixed.
Nellie was now sprinting down the beach in the wrong direction.
Norman had apparently decided that the point of fetch was to determine which of them could run faster, rather than to return the ball, and he had set off at full speed parallel to the waterline.
His ears were flat with velocity. He appeared to be having the time of his life.
Sawyer cracked the window.
“Nellie!”
The wind ate most of it. She tried again, louder.
Nellie pulled up short, nearly lost her footing on the wet sand, and turned. She shielded her eyes against nothing in particular—the sky was overcast—and squinted at the cottage.
“Do you want tea?” Sawyer called.
“Yes, please!” Nellie bellowed back.
The back door soon opened to a gust of cold air and the yapping of a dog who had opinions about transitioning from outside to inside and wanted those opinions acknowledged.
Norman’s claws skittered across the stone floor.
He made three full circuits of the kitchen before determining nothing catastrophic had occurred in his absence, then pressed his enormous head against Sawyer’s hip.
“You need wiping down, young man,” she scolded him gently.
He blinked at her with soulful eyes.
She grabbed a towel and wiped him down.
Nellie kicked her boots off against the wall and crossed the kitchen in her damp socks.
She looked—there was no diplomatic way to approach this—comprehensively windswept.
Her cheeks were a raw, vivid pink, her braid had loose strands flying everywhere, and her sweatpants were soaked dark to the thigh.
Cold radiated off her in an assaulting wave as she reached past Sawyer for her mug.
“Thank you,” she said, wrapping both hands around the chamomile infusion and planting her frigid lips on Sawyer’s.
Flinching violently, Sawyer groaned as Nellie’s mouth, then her nose, then both cheeks found Sawyer’s face like she was trying to defrost herself from a heat source.
“Your face!” Sawyer yelped, pulling back.
“Mm?” Nellie’s eyes were still closed. She was leaning in.
“It’ss freezing cold!”
“Well, yes, dear, that’s because I’ve been outside,” Nellie explained, with perfect patience, “in the wind.”
Sawyer narrowed her eyes and then looked pointedly down at Nellie’s pants. “You waded.”
“There was a rock. I wanted to look at it.”
“You waded into the North Atlantic in December to look at a rock?”
“It was a tidal rock,” Nellie clarified, as though the specificity resolved the matter. “You could see the colonization patterns on the base very clearly from the water.”
“It’s still December.”
“You’re very grumpy for someone who’s been talking to engineers all day.” Nellie reached up and patted Sawyer’s cheek with a hand that was still criminally cold. “Come here.”
Sawyer kissed her back this time and would have continued doing so for significantly longer had the sweatpants not been actively transferring cold water to her own leg.
“Those,” she announced, stepping back and looking at the offending fabric, “need to come off.”
“Ahead of you.” Nellie set her mug on the counter, took Sawyer’s wrist, and walked toward the bathroom.
“I was going to suggest we put them in the dryer.”
“We don’t have a dryer.”
“The radiator, then.”
“The radiator is also perfectly valid.” Nellie was already peeling her cable-knit sweater off over her head with one hand, still towing Sawyer by the other. “We can do this and then the radiator.”
Sawyer chuckled and let herself be towed.
The bathroom in the cottage was small and old-fashioned, its fixtures original to the nineteen-sixties and its mirror slightly foxed at the corners. Sawyer reached into the shower and turned the dial to hot while Nellie shed the soaked sweatpants and flung them over the towel rail.
“How was the windfarm?” she asked, reaching for the hem of Sawyer’s fleece.
“Interesting.” Sawyer lifted her arms cooperatively. “The offshore potential is significant. The project director was less useful than his slides, but his slides were good.”
“Did you like him?”
“He talked for four minutes about clouds.”
Nellie’s face appeared from beneath the fleece’s neck, already arranging itself into the expression that meant she found this funnier than she intended to show. “What kind of clouds?”
“Lenticular?”
“Oh, those are gorgeous.” She caught Sawyer’s look and bit down hard on her bottom lip. “Which was obviously not the point.”
“The point was the tidal current modeling, which I had to ask about specifically because he was still going on about the clouds.”
“But the numbers are good?”
“The numbers,” Sawyer confirmed, working the buttons of her own shirt, “are promising.”
Steam had started filling the small room, and Nellie stepped under the spray. “Come on,” she said. “You can debrief me in here.”
The shower was narrow by the standards of any bathroom Sawyer had inhabited in the last twenty years, and the hot water was the aggressive, slightly astonishing temperature of a boiler that had only two settings: cold and infernal.
The contrast with the coastal chill outside hit immediately; Sawyer felt her shoulders drop the full inch they’d been maintaining since approximately the second wind gust of the morning.
Groaning with relief, Nellie pressed the full length of her body into Sawyer’s, and the gasp that came out of her was not entirely voluntary.
“Still cold,” Sawyer pointed out.
“Getting warmer.” Nellie tilted her head back to let the water hit her face and closed her eyes. Sawyer took the opportunity to kiss her neck, running her hands over her hips until she could sink her fingertips into Nellie’s delicious asscheeks.
When Nellie opened her eyes again, the look she returned was direct and very clear about what it wanted, the same look she’d been giving Sawyer in one form or another for three years without ever appearing to tire of it.
Sawyer kissed her, slowly this time, with no wind and no cold water to interrupt it.
Nellie’s hands found her waist. She made a low, contented sound against Sawyer’s mouth that said “welcome home” and “I want you” all at the same time.
The shower was narrow enough that maneuvering was less an easy decision than a careful negotiation.
Sawyer found herself pressed against the tile, warm now, the steam close and dense around them, and Nellie’s mouth had moved to her jaw, her throat, the top of her shoulder.
Already panting in the thick air, Sawyer was thoroughly occupied with getting her hand between Nellie’s thighs, which was proving geometrically complicated.
“Wait a sec.” Nellie giggled and shifted her knee so that Sawyer could gain the access she was desperately seeking.
Finally, she stroked her fingertips over Nellie’s clit, and she sucked a sharp hiss through her teeth when Sawyer immediately plunged two fingers into her wet heat.
“Good?” Sawyer asked, reflexively.
“Do I sound bad?” Nellie demanded, teeth grazing Sawyer’s neck.