Chapter 15 #3
They knew each other. That was the whole of it.
Eleven years of a body is not something you get back from — he knew what her hip liked and she knew the exact spot at the base of his skull that made his rhythm break, and every single one of those pieces of knowledge had been sitting in her for fourteen months being a weapon, and now they were what they had always been, which was two people who fit.
She used the one at the base of his skull. She was not proud of the timing and she did it anyway, two fingers up into the short hair there, and Blake said something into her shoulder that was not a word and lost his rhythm entirely for four strokes.
"There it is," Kristin said.
"You are a—"
"I know what I am."
He got a hand under her and changed the angle and it was her turn to lose the thread of the sentence she had been building, and after that neither of them was in charge of anything.
And it was not the body either of them had before.
That was there too, in all of it: his hand going under her left arm and holding the forearm carefully against his chest, out of the way, without being asked and without making a thing of it.
The gray in his hair under her fingers. The fifteen pounds he had lost that she did not like.
Her own shoulders, which were twice what they used to be, from a year of gates and chains.
"Look at me," she said.
He did.
"Say it again."
"I love you," Blake said, wrecked, going, "I love you, Kristin, I never once—"
"I know."
"I'm sorry I stopped—"
"Not now," she said. "Say the other thing."
"I love you."
"That's it," she said. "That's the one."
And she came again with her heels in the small of his back and her ruined hand open against his cheek, and he went about four strokes after that and said her name once and came apart entirely, and lay on her with his face in her neck like something felled.
Afterward they lay in a rented room with a lamp on and the window open and June coming in.
Kristin was on her back with her left arm across his chest, deliberately, in the open, where it was.
For a long time neither of them said anything, and it was not the careful silence of the Thursdays.
It was the other kind. Somebody two houses down was running a table saw at ten o'clock at night, which is a thing people do in June in Minnesota because there are only about nine weeks in which you can.
"I want to tell you something," Blake said, "and it's not a heavy one."
"Go ahead."
"I've been sleeping about four hours a night since April of last year." His hand was moving slowly on her shoulder. "Not as a punishment. I wasn't lying awake being noble about it. I just stopped being able to."
"And?"
"And I'm going to sleep tonight," he said. "I can feel it coming. I haven't felt that in fourteen months and I wanted to say it out loud to you instead of you finding out in the morning."
Kristin turned her head on the pillow and looked at the side of his face.
"That's the whole assignment," she said. "That right there. That's the entire thing I asked you for on the steps and you did it in ninety minutes."
"I'm a fast learner."
"You are the slowest learner I have ever met in my life," said Kristin, "and I've worked with cattle," and he laughed — the real one, low and surprised, the one that had gotten her under the ribs at twenty-four and had gone on doing it every year since — and she put her hand flat on his chest and felt it happen from the inside.
That was the moment. Not the doorstep and not the bed.
A man laughing in a rented house at ten at night with her hand on his ribs, and Kristin lying there thinking, with perfect calm: there you are.
"I have to be at Sundstrom's at five," she said.
"Okay."
"I mean five. I'll be up at four."
"Okay," Blake said.
"You're going to have to get used to that."
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her.
"Can I come?"
Kristin blinked.
"To Ray Sundstrom's?"
"I'd hold the light," he said. "I'm told I'm all right at holding a light. I'm not going to touch anything and I'll stay out of the way and if you'd rather I didn't I won't ask twice."
And Kristin Hovde lay on her back in a rented house in Mound at midnight on the twenty-first of June, three weeks past a closing and fourteen months past a floor, and started to laugh, and could not stop for some time.
"Yeah," she said, finally, wiping her face. "Yeah. Come hold the light."
He was up at four. He made the coffee wrong and she drank it.
At five o'clock in the morning on the twenty-second of June, Ray Sundstrom came out of his house and found a large gray man in a canvas coat standing in his yard next to Dr. Hovde's truck, holding a flashlight and looking like he had been told to wait there.
"Ray," Kristin said, "this is my husband."
"Ya," said Ray Sundstrom, who had been reading the paper for a year. "Heard he sold the point."
"He did."
"Huh." Ray looked Blake over, once, the way he would look over a bull somebody was trying to sell him. "You any good with a light?"
"I'm told I am," said Blake.
"We'll see," said Ray, and turned and went into the barn, and Kristin picked up her bag and followed him, and did not look back, because she did not have to.