3. Nadia
three
Nadia
"Have we—"
I hear how much of it is already out, and I turn the sentence in the air like a truck on ice.
"—got the 'seventy-eight aerials? The originals. I want the north end at full size."
Creed doesn't look up from the stove. He's crouched there feeding in split fir, and the light is doing something to the side of his face that I'm going to have to stop looking at.
"Roll behind the door," he says. "Bottom one."
It's Saturday. The rain that started Wednesday never properly stopped, and at four the fire road ran two inches of water and he said the thing he says instead of asking — you're not driving that tonight — and I said okay before I'd decided to.
So now there's a stew that came out of a can and got improved with an onion, one lamp, the 1978 aerials unrolled under the wrench and the rock and the compass, and the specific quiet of a place forty kilometres from anything.
We talk about my thesis. We talk about his award year, sideways.
"There's a year I can't tell you much about," he says.
"Five, six back. I signed an easement survey that went to court — a boundary I'd got right and couldn't prove I'd got right, because the original monument was in a river by then.
Two years of litigation, my licence under review the whole time.
" He squares the aerial to the table edge.
"I worked straight through it. I had to.
And there's a stretch in there where I went to things — meetings, ceremonies — and I couldn't tell you now who was in the room. "
I look very hard at the North Ridge at 1:20,000.
It was me. I was in the room.
Twelve words. I have them lined up and ready and I don't spend them, and the not-spending has a taste to it now, metallic, like biting a spoon.
"That sounds lonely," I say instead.
"It was fine." He glances up. Corrects himself. "It was lonely."
I tell him about the rooms. The ones that weren't built for me — the meetings where they hand the technical questions to my twenty-six-year-old male colleague, the tenure hearing where a man in a good jacket asked me twice if I'd had help with my modelling.
How you learn to be unflappable, and how unflappable is a skill you can't put down once you've picked it up, and how nobody in eleven years has asked me if I'm tired.
"Are you tired?" he asks.
The lamp gutters. The rain leans on the roof.
I sigh and shake my head. "Ask me something else," I say.
Creed asks about my parents, and my father's opinion of my career, and I'm still standing when I finish, and somewhere in there he's come around the table.
He puts one hand flat on the map beside my hip. Doesn't touch me. Waits, close enough that I can smell woodsmoke and rain in canvas.
His mouth comes down on mine and it isn't careful.
That's the surprise: everything in his hands all week has been precise and unhurried, and this is neither.
He kisses like a man who's finally let his arm drop.
I get both hands into his jacket and pull, and he lifts me onto the table, and the wrench goes off the edge and neither of us cares what it was.
"Careful," I say against his jaw. "That map's federal."
He laughs into my neck and then his mouth is on my throat.
He undoes my shirt one button at a time with his eyes on my face the whole way down, and it takes long enough that I say his name to make him hurry, and he doesn't hurry.
He pushes the shirt off my shoulders. Pulls the cups of my bra down rather than bothering with the clasp and puts his mouth on my nipple, and my head goes back and my hand goes into his hair and I hold him there.
He tastes like woodsmoke. This mountain man tastes like the last five days, the stove and the rain in his collar, and I get all of it at once with my tongue against his and something behind my hips goes soft and low and heavy.
"Off," I say, pulling at his shirt, and he strips it over his head one-handed. Lean, marked up, a long scar under his collarbone, and startlingly warm when I get my palms flat on his chest.
He works my jeans open and I lift so he can get them down, and then his hand is between my legs, two fingers sliding through me, and he makes a sound low in his chest at how wet I am.
"Look at that," he says.
I whimper, trying not to be embarrassed at the way he’s looking at me.
"You're going to come on my hand before you come on my cock." He circles my clit with his thumb, unhurried again, back in his own rhythm now that he's found it. He pushes his fingers into me.
I go back on them, spine against the paper, one boot still on. He follows me down, mouth at my breast, hand working, and he learns me faster than anyone has any right to — finds the angle in under a minute and stays there, deliberate, watching my face.
When I come it goes through my thighs first and I say something that isn't a word, and he doesn't stop until I put my hand over his wrist.
Then he stands up and unbuckles his belt, and I get up on my elbows to watch, because I want to.
Belt, button, zip. His cock is thick and hard against his stomach and he takes it in his hand once, absently, looking at me spread out on his ruined map with my trousers hanging off one ankle.
"Come here," I say.
He steps in and I get my hand around him, and the noise he makes goes through the middle of me. Hot in my palm, and heavy, and when I move my hand he puts his forehead down against mine and lets me do it, breathing carefully through his mouth.
"That's enough," he says, eventually.
"Is it?" I tease.
"It is if you want the rest." Then he pulls me to the table edge by the backs of my knees, and pushes into me slowly, all the way, and holds there.
"Nadia."
"I know."
"No, look at me." He's breathing hard through his nose, his hand spread over my hip. "This doesn't happen to me. This — ease. Not this fast. I want you to know that I know that."
I have to turn my head.
I turn it toward the lamp and I make my face into a face and it costs me more than anything has cost me in years, because he thinks he's telling me about five days and I'm hearing five years, and every second I let go past is another second of a thing I'm taking from him without asking.
"Hey," he says.
"I'm here." I get my ankles up around him. "Move."
He pulls back until he's almost out and pushes in again, and the whole of me follows him. He does it again. Again. Deep and unhurried, one hand spread over my hip to hold me where he wants me, and every stroke ends with a small sound out of me I have no control over.
"Faster."
"No."
"Creed."
"You'll get it." He's teasing, making me wait.
He gives me another dozen like that until I can't hold a sentence together, and that's when he leans his weight in, hooks my knee up over his forearm, and starts driving.
The table walks across the floor. My shoulder blades slide on the paper.
The lamp jumps and I get a hand back against the wall to brace and it doesn't help at all.
He gets his arm under my back and lifts me up against his chest without slowing down, still in me, my legs locked behind him. It's better like that — his skin all down my front, his breath going ragged at my ear — and I feel it coming up through my thighs like a dam about to break.
"There," he says. One word. Aimed.
I come with my teeth in his shoulder and both arms around his neck. He holds me right through it and then he isn't controlled at all anymore, his hand fisted in the back of my hair, and he goes four strokes later saying my name once, quietly, like it's information.
Afterward he holds the back of my head and doesn't say anything for a while.
"Your map's ruined," I tell him.
"I've got another one."
He carries me the eight feet to the bunk. I lie against the length of him with his arm heavy over my waist and listen to his breathing go long, and the guilt arrives on schedule and stays on my chest all night.
I don't say it. Not then. Not once.