CHAPTER 11
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A quarter to six, the whiskey on the porch rail was sweating in the heat.
The Bulleit rye waited for Luke. I had set it there because he might want a finger at dusk, and because knowing where his hand would reach had become one of the small domestic facts I carried without admitting I carried them.
Ninety-six degrees at four. A south-southwest wind too dry to cool anything.
Beyond the ridge, thunderheads built white over purple while dry lightning walked the far Sula line and kept its rain.
I counted sixty-six seconds from flash to thunder: thirteen miles, close enough to watch and too far to help.
Luke came out with coffee in one hand and the county-band radio in the other. He set both beside the bottle and watched the anvils.
“They aren't crossing.”
“No.”
“Wind's wrong.”
“How wrong.”
“Enough.”
His thumb turned the signet once. I followed the worn silver because I had been following it since Hamilton.
By half past seven, the great room had gone blue. Luke stood at the west window. I sat nine feet behind him with Angle of Repose open to the same paragraph for the fourth time.
Susan Ward kept writing around what she meant. I had begun to understand the method.
(Nine feet. Nonconforming under any code I would draft.)
The pressure in the room had become physical. I walked to the door and back, sat again, and kept my hands flat so my thumb would not tap.
Luke never turned. He knew every move anyway.
At eight, the ridge blew a fuse.
The lights did not flicker. They just went.
The cabin dropped into itself the way a house drops when its wiring gives up, and for one long second the only sound in the great room was the propane fridge sighing at the seal and adjusting to its own opinion about the temperature.
Down the hall the utility-hall generator did not kick.
Luke had told me on Day 6 that the generator ran on a separate circuit and required a manual start and that if the ridge coil blew he would not run it up unless we needed it. We did not need it. He wanted the mountain to keep its noises for the mountain.
He crossed to the shelf.
He did not need light to find the kerosene lamp because he had put it there and he never moved anything from where he had put it.
His hand went up. It came down with the lamp — cast-iron base, glass chimney, a wick trimmed the last time by him at a quarter past six in the morning on a morning I had watched him do it with the coffee ungiven in my mug.
Match from the tin on the shelf. Strike. Catch.
The wick took.
The whole ceiling moved.
It was a black-and-yellow tide. That was what it was.
The flame threw itself up the glass chimney and threw a long black shadow of him against the pine boards overhead, and when he lifted the lamp the shadow slid along the ceiling like water going out on a beach, and when he set it down on the pine table it slid back.
He turned to close the woodstove flue — which was already closed; he was giving his hands something to do — and the ceiling flexed with him. If I looked away for a breath and then looked back, the tide had come in again.
I stood up.
“I'm going to shower.”
He nodded once. He did not look at me. He turned back to the west window. The not-looking touched the small of my back exactly as if he had put a palm there and pushed.
I went.
The bathroom was warm. The clawfoot tub had been serving most of the summer as a shower — Luke had rigged a length of copper pipe and a ring at the ceiling for the curtain, and the mirror over the cast-iron sink had a chip in the upper-right corner that I clocked every morning and had begun to like — and I stood under the water at the temperature that had been in the well for five weeks and let it run down my hair and my back and did not think about anything at all until I finished thinking about not thinking about it and turned the tap off.
I took a long time drying my hair.
I put on his blue flannel from the top two drawers of the dresser — the two drawers that had been his and were now mine in the small unarticulated agreement that had gone into effect Day 8 without either of us saying so; the flannel his still, and mine since Day 11 when I had taken it off the drying-line and never given it back — and boyshort underwear from the bottom four and no bra.
My skin was warm from the water and the flannel smelled like the cedar block I had put in the drawer the day I unpacked. My hair was heavy at my neck. I did not put it up.
I opened the door.
He was in the kitchen.
He had his back to the counter and his hands on the counter behind him and the lamp behind him on the pine table casting him half in gold and half in his own outline, and he had not moved from the exact position he had chosen after crossing the great room.
His T-shirt was gray. His jeans were dark.
His feet were bare. The signet ring on his pinky caught the flame and threw a small hard star at me.
I crossed the great room barefoot on the Navajo rug.
Red and cream. Warm under my heels.
I stopped three feet from him.
I had rehearsed a sentence in the shower.
Not the one I had been carrying since Sunday morning.
A different one. A better one. I opened my mouth to say the better one, and my voice came out in the register I had grown up in — flat, planning-room, the voice I had used to explain to a city council why their setback code was not going to survive the water table.
“I need to know if you'll say no.”
He set the mug down on the counter behind him without turning.
“Ask me.”
“Take me to bed. Do the whole thing. I'm on the pill and I want you to use a condom anyway.”
He did not look away from my mouth. Then he did. Then he looked at my eyes. He took the two steps I had left between us in one.
“Yes.”
His hand came up to the back of my neck.
It was warm. It was heavier than I had built a hand in my head to be. He held me there and did not kiss me for the length of one breath, one and a half breaths, and then he did.
Slow.
I had thought about this kiss for four weeks.
I had built it in my head every night on the couch and then every night in the bed.
I had built it wrong. It was not the courthouse kiss doubled or the near-kiss in the flannel scene made whole.
It was slower. He was not in a hurry and was not going to be.
His mouth was a decision he had already made and was now executing without wasted motion.
I opened my mouth against his, and he made a sound low in his chest I had never heard from him and would learn to hear at seven different pitches over the next hour.
His hand moved down to the small of my back.
He walked me backward into the kitchen doorframe.
Pine against my spine. Warm from the day. He put his other hand on my hip through the flannel and slid it up under it, palm flat, along my ribs, and stopped there. He was asking with his hand. I answered by pressing forward into it.
“Can I.”
“Yes.”
His fingers went to the top button of the flannel.
He undid it and kissed me under the ear.
He undid the next and kissed the jaw. The next — the point of my collarbone.
The next — the sternum. The next — the small dark hollow between my breasts.
The last — the ribs. Slower than a memo. Slower than a survey.
Slower than any tempo my body had been keeping since I got to the mountain, until the flannel hung open at the front and he pushed it off my shoulders one at a time without hurrying and set it on the kitchen counter without looking.
His eyes went down my body once, slow, and back up, and the second time his gaze came up he was smiling with the corner of his mouth the way I had watched him smile at Copper the first time I had seen him in the barn.
“Sh,” he said, though I had not spoken.
I pulled the gray T-shirt off him from the hem.
Ash-brown hair a fraction too long. Jaw scar white in the lamplight. The pinky ring against my ribs where his hand was.
“Bed,” I said.
“Yes.”
He did not pick me up. He kept his mouth on mine and walked me sideways through the great room to the bedroom door, and the tide moved on the ceiling behind us as the lamp went with our shadows, and when the bed hit the back of my knees I sat and he came down with me.
He braced on his forearms above me.
He watched my face.
Attention replaced the smile. I had watched him give the same absolute focus to the ridge alarm net at dawn, Copper's off hoof on Day 12, and the county-band static on Day 15 when the well pressure first slipped. He intended to hear everything.
“Can I.”
“Yes.”
He kissed my mouth. My throat. The hollow at the base of it. My sternum. My breast. He put his mouth on my nipple, and I made a sound I did not know I had in me, and his hand covered my other breast, thumb and forefinger, and he was in no hurry to be done there.
(This is what he does when he is not on a clock.)
Then I stopped thinking in complete sentences for a long time.
He went down.
He kissed the underside of my breast, and my ribs, and the plane between my hipbones, and pulled the boyshorts off me in one slow motion and set them somewhere I did not see or care about.
He kissed my hip. He kissed the crease of my thigh.
He put one hand flat on my belly, wide, and held me there. Then his mouth found me.
He knew what he was doing.
He knew my body with the patience he gave a horse he had ridden for eleven years.
He was not showy about it. His tongue was patient.
His mouth was warm and open and steady, and when he found the place that made my hips lift he stayed with it, and when I lifted off the bed the hand on my belly kept me where he wanted me to be.
The very small part of me still thinking understood this was a man who intended to give me the first orgasm before I had to ask for it, and had known that from the moment I said yes.
I came fast.