Chapter 19
ISAAK
There's a lake an hour up the mountain that I own without anyone knowing I own it.
I take her up there because she's been wound tight for days, since the pool, since I said the words tidy, like the books at the ranch and watched something go behind her eyes she didn't explain.
She's been sleeping badly. I know the sound of her not sleeping now, the way her breathing stays even on purpose.
It's the same trick I run myself. So I do the only thing I know how to do with a problem I can't name.
I remove her from the place that holds it.
"Where are we going?" she says, in the truck, watching the houses thin out and the pines close in.
"Up."
"A direction isn't an answer, Isaak."
"It's the only answer you're getting until we're there." I take the fire road slow, the truck rocking over the ruts. "You've been somewhere else all week. I'm taking you somewhere with no signal, so wherever you went, it can't follow."
She's quiet a moment. "You can't just drive a person away from a thing in their head."
"I can try. I have a truck and nothing better to do with my evening."
"That's not how heads work."
"It's how mine works. There's a list of things I can't fix from where I'm sitting, so I drive somewhere I can't see them, and for an hour they aren't my problem." I downshift for a switchback. "I'm extending you the courtesy. You can return it by telling me what's on yours."
"Nothing's on mine."
"You've checked the door three times tonight.
You did it at dinner. You think I don't see you do it, but I built this house so I'd always see the door, and now I watch you watch it instead.
" She goes still beside me, caught, and I keep my eyes on the road so she doesn't have to perform a face.
"You don't have to tell me. But don't tell me it's nothing.
Nothing doesn't make a person check a door. "
"You're very annoying for a man who claims not to talk about feelings."
"I don't talk about mine. Yours are fair game."
The lake sits in a bowl of granite at the top of the road, black and still under a sky going purple to dark, the first stars out, the cold coming off the water before we're even out of the truck.
No house. No dock. A flat shelf of rock running down to the edge.
I cut the engine. The quiet is enormous, the kind of quiet that has a sound, water and wind, nothing made by men.
The smell of granite and cold water comes in when she opens the door.
Pine resin further back, wood smoke from a fire somewhere we can't see.
The sky up here is a different color from what passes for sky in the valley, actual dark, the stars at full count.
She tips her head back for a second before she says anything.
"Okay," Nora says, getting out, turning a slow circle. "Okay, this is obscene. You can't just have a lake."
"I don't have it. There's no paper that says I have it."
"You and your no paper." She walks down to the edge, crouches, puts a hand in. "Cold. That's snowmelt cold. That's the kind of cold that stops your heart and ruins your obituary."
"Then don't fall in."
She looks back at me over her shoulder, and there's a thing starting in her face I've learned to be afraid of, the particular light she gets right before she does something that takes ten years off my life.
"You brought me to a lake," she says.
"I did."
"At night. A private lake. With no one around for an hour in any direction." She stands up, already working the buttons of her shirt, slow, watching me the whole time. "And you thought we'd what, look at it?"
"Nora."
"It's medicinal. You said it yourself. Get the thing out of my head.
" She strips down to her skin in the starlight, unhurried, December air raising gooseflesh all down her arms, her hair loose, the moon doing what it does to the curve of her shoulder, the soft of her stomach, the full weight of her where the cold's drawn everything tight.
"You coming, or are you going to stand there being the responsible one for once in your life? "
She takes everything off without looking at me. Every part of her is in the starlight. My cock has drawn its own conclusions about the situation. I have killed men with less provocation than this woman undressing on a rock.
I take in all of it because she's letting me.
She stands there in the cold with her chin up and lets me look, no shrinking, no apology.
Everyone else in my life is performing something.
She isn't. The line of her, the give and the strength of her both, the goosebumps tracking down from her collarbone, her breath already short with cold, with wanting that has nothing to do with cold.
I have seen this woman naked. I am not prepared for this woman naked on a granite shelf at six thousand feet, daring me into freezing water like the danger is the point.
"You'll freeze," I tell her, already pulling my shirt over my head.
"So warm me up after."
She goes in with a shriek that echoes off the whole bowl of the mountain, swearing at the cold in a way that would peel paint.
I go in after her because there is no version of my life now where she's in cold black water and I'm not.
The cold hits like going through a windshield.
It drives the breath clean out of me, every nerve screaming.
Then she's there, gasping, laughing, her arms around my neck, her legs around me because the water's too cold to do anything but cling to the nearest warm thing, and the nearest warm thing is me.
Her whole body is against mine. We're both naked and the water temperature is the only thing keeping this from going somewhere it can't go right now.
"This was a terrible idea," she says into my neck, shaking.
"It was your idea."
"My ideas are like that. Big, bold, immediately regretted." She's got me in a death grip, all of her wrapped around all of me, neither of us making any move toward the shore. "I can't feel my legs. I want that on the record. If I lose toes to this lake I'm naming each one after you in the lawsuit."
"You'd sue me at my own lake."
"I'd sue you at your own funeral if you had it coming.
" Her teeth are chattering. She pulls back enough to look at me.
We're both breathing hard, treading water, her skin slick and freezing against mine.
The laughing goes out of it slow, gets replaced by the other thing, the thing that's been building since a round pen in September. "Isaak."
"I know," I say.
She pulls back an inch, water streaming off her chin. "You don't know what I was going to say."
"I know that voice." I get a hand in her wet hair, hold her there, our faces close enough that her breath is the only warm thing in the world. "It's the voice from the barn. The one you stopped yourself on."
She's shaking in my arms in freezing water, the whole black mountain around us, her mouth an inch from mine. My mouth is already opening on the shape of it before I've decided a thing. I love you. Three words, her name a breath behind them, the first one halfway up my throat.
I hold it behind my teeth, swallowed, unsaid.
The last man I knew who needed a person this much was my father, and I watched what the world did to him for it.
I have a list of rules I've never broken.
That one is the first rule, the one all the others grew out of.
I don't say it. I make myself say the thing I have words for instead, the safe thing, the thing that keeps her warm without costing me the wall.
"You're turning blue," I tell her. "We're getting out before this lake makes a widow out of one of us."
"Coward," she says, but soft, her hand flattening once against my chest like she felt the word stall behind my teeth and decided not to go digging for it. She gives me the retreat without making me ask. No one in my life has ever handed me a way out of a corner I walked into myself.
We're three strokes from the rock, close enough that I'm already reaching for the shelf to haul her out, when the night lights up.
A flashlight. Then four. Then a voice I know, young, cracking with horror, from the tree line.
"BOSS. Boss, we got movement on the south side, we. Oh. Oh, no. Oh, God."
It's Yuri. It's Yuri and three of my men, who have come up the fire road in the dark with rifles to sweep the perimeter the second the system flagged a breach, exactly what I pay them to do. They have instead found their pakhan and his wife naked in a lake.
Nora makes a sound that is pure joy, the laugh tearing out of her, and dunks herself to the chin.
"Turn around," I say, in the voice that has ended careers. "All of you. Now."
Four flashlights swing skyward at once. Four young men become extremely interested in the tops of the pines.
"We're so sorry," Yuri says, to the sky, his voice climbing an octave. "We didn't, the sensor on the north fence went off again, the same one, the one that keeps, we thought, we were doing the, we'll be at the truck. We'll be very far at the truck."
"Yuri."
"Yes, boss." He says it to a pine tree, rigid, a soldier at attention with his eyes nailed to the canopy.
"Did the north sensor flag a person, or did it flag nothing again?"
A pause while the boy drags his brain back from the trauma. "Nothing we found, boss. Tripped, we came up hot, swept the creek line, no tracks, no, nothing. Third time it's done that." His voice cracks. "Sir, I want to die. I want you to know that I am ready to die."
"Noted. Go stand by the truck before you faint into the lake." I keep my voice flat, because if I let one inch of what's under it through, the boy will combust. "And Yuri. Nobody hears about this. Not Grigor, not the kitchen, nobody."
"Hears about what, boss?" He's already retreating. "I didn't see anything. I have no eyes. I've never had eyes."
They crash back into the dark. I can hear them not making it to the truck before one of them loses it, somebody's helpless laughter rolling back down through the trees. Nora is no use to anyone, treading water and howling, so undone by it she nearly does drown.
"They have guns," she wheezes, hanging off my neck, no help to anyone. "They came to save us with guns. From a lake. Your terrifying army, Isaak. Mobilized against a body of water."
"They came because the north fence sensor went off.
" I haul her up onto the rock, wrap her in the first thing I grab, my own shirt, useless and huge on her.
The thing she said is already going cold in me, under the comedy, because the north fence sensor has gone off three times in two weeks now, the same panel, the one down by the creek. "The same one. It keeps tripping."
"Maybe it's broken," she says, still grinning, her teeth going again.
I get her to the truck, crank the heater to a setting designed for thawing meat. We sit in the cab in our wet skin under whatever dry clothes we scrounged, watching the windshield fog, listening to four grown men try and fail to be quiet a hundred yards away.
"Yuri is never going to recover," she says, hands wrapped around a thermos of coffee gone lukewarm from the morning. "That boy worships you. He just saw your bare ass in a lake. His whole religion is in crisis."
"He'll live. He's seen worse on the job."
"He hasn't seen worse than that and you know it." She's quiet a second, then she leans her wet head on my shoulder, and the weight of it does something to me a bullet never has. "Thank you. For the lake. The dumb, freezing, perfect lake."
"Did it work?" I keep my eyes on the fogged glass. "Whatever was in your head. Is it gone?"
She doesn't answer right away, and when she does it's guarded, the same held-back thing she's worn all week. "For an hour it was."
"That's all I had tonight." I put the truck in gear, the heater roaring between us. "One hour. I'll get you more of them when I figure out how."
"You can't fix everything by driving me up a mountain, Isaak."
"I'm aware. It hasn't stopped me trying anything yet." I ease us back onto the fire road, the headlights swinging across the trees. "You'd tell me. If it were the kind of thing I could stand between you and. You'd tell me that."
It's the closest I'll come to asking her straight, and she knows it. She puts her hand on my knee and doesn't answer. Her silence tells me plenty. I let it be, because tonight I want the version of us that's wet and laughing more than I want the truth.
Maybe it's a broken sensor, she said, back on the rock.
Maybe it is. But I've had three different men check that panel, and not one of them found a thing wrong with it.
A sensor that trips for no reason three times isn't a broken sensor.
It's something at the edge of my property, down by the creek where the dark comes right up to the wire, testing whether I'm watching.
I set that thought down hard, somewhere behind the warm evening, to pick back up when she's asleep.
I drive my freezing, laughing, half-drowned wife back down the mountain with the heater roaring, and I don't tell her the lake didn't get the thing out of either of our heads.
It just gave us one good hour before the dark came back up the road behind us.