6. Creed
six
Creed
There's a version of me that would've let it stay tidy.
Accept the apology, keep the eight hours a day of field work, sign the certification on the twenty-sixth and drive down the mountain with a good memory and a bad ache and call it even.
I've done that. Not with a woman, but I've done that with a job, a town, a friendship — taken the tidy version because it's cheaper and told myself I was being reasonable.
But, I go get the box out from under the bunk instead.
"What's that?"
I set it on the table and take the lid off. Field books, spine-labelled by year, and a green folder with a society crest on it that I haven't opened since the day it was handed to me. "I keep everything. Come here."
She comes around the table. Stands at my shoulder while I go through the programme — the awards list, the floor plan of the reception rooms, the poster abstracts stapled at the back — and I find her name in eight-point type and put my finger under it.
"Osei, N. Modelling functional connectivity in the absence of continuous cover." I read it twice. "You told me the title was terrible."
Her hand comes down on the back of the chair.
"The title was terrible," she insists.
"You said everybody maps presence because presence photographs well.
Absence doesn't photograph. That's why nobody funds it.
" I explain. "You had a glass of white wine you weren't drinking.
There was a man with a very loud tie who kept trying to get my attention over your shoulder and you clocked him and turned so I couldn't see him. You did that on purpose."
"You looked cornered."
"I was cornered. I'd been cornered for two hours.
" I turn around in the chair to look up at her.
"And you laughed at something I said about the Fraser delta, and I thought about that laugh for about six months afterward, and I never told anyone that, including myself.
That's what I've got. That's all of it, and it took me three days to get it back, and I want you to know it was in there.
It didn't survive that year in good shape, but it was in there. "
She doesn't say anything. Her eyes are wet and she isn't doing anything about it, which is very like her.
"Five years is a long time to hold onto a conversation," I say.
"It's not the conversation I've been holding on to."
I get a hand around the back of her thigh and pull her into me, and she comes down onto my lap facing me, knees either side of the chair, and takes my face in both hands.
I stand up with her and she gets her legs around my waist and laughs, right against my ear. I get her down onto the bunk and pull her boots off, one, two. Trousers. Then I take my time, which I didn't do Saturday.
I put my mouth on the inside of her knee and work up, and she goes up on her elbows to watch me do it.
"You're doing that on purpose."
"Everything I do is on purpose."
"Insufferable—" and then she isn't talking, because I've got my mouth on her pussy.
She's already wet. I hold her open with my thumbs and lick into her, slow, learning the whole shape of her properly — the taste of her, the way her thighs come up off the blanket when I get it right, the noise she makes when I don't stop doing the thing she likes — and when I find the place that undoes her I stay there and don't move on. She gets a fistful of my hair.
“Fuck, Creed,” she whimpers.
I look up the length of her — throat, breasts, her stomach going tight — and push two fingers into her without letting up with my tongue.
She comes hard and long, thighs shut around my head, as she comes. I keep going through the whole of it until she's pushing at my forehead.
"Get up here."
I strip my shirt. She sits up on the edge of the bunk and gets my belt open and my cock out, and her hand on me is hot and sure and I have to put a palm flat on the wall above her head.
"Look at you," she says, in my own words, back at me.
She takes my cock in her mouth instead. She's unhurried about it with one hand at the base, the other spread on my hip, her eyes coming up to find mine every so often to check what she's doing to me.
I let her go until my thighs start to shake and then I take her by the jaw and lift her off.
"Enough."
"You're no fun."
"Get on your back."
"That's better."
She lies back and pulls her shirt over her head and drops it off the side of the bunk, and I stop for a second to look at her.
Nadia pulls me down over her by the shoulders, and I push in and she's tight around me and warm all the way through, and this time neither of us goes slow for long.
Her heel digs into the back of my thigh.
Her nails on my shoulder blade. I brace my forearm above her head and get the angle she likes, the one I found on Saturday, and when I hit it she makes a sound like the wind's gone out of her.
"There," she says. "There, don't—"
"I'm not going anywhere." I put my forehead against hers and groan. “Fuck, you feel so good.”
Her face changes. She gets both hands on my jaw and holds me where she can see me and says, "Say it again," and I say it again with my hips still moving, and she comes apart under me with her eyes open, watching me, which is the single best thing that has happened to me in twenty years.
"Again," she says, before she's got her breath back. "Don't stop, I want—"
"I know what you want."
She's still going when I get an arm under her and turn us, and she comes up over me astride with her hands braced on my chest and takes over, slower, rolling her hips, taking exactly what she wants and making me watch her do it.
I get a hand up around her throat, thumb under her jaw, no weight in it, and she leans into the hand and closes her eyes.
I get both hands on her and let her. She leans down until her hair is around my face and says something filthy about the table into my ear, and laughs, and the laugh is what finishes me.
I hold her down hard by the hips and go with my teeth set and her name somewhere in it.
She collapses onto my chest. Stays there.
Her heartbeat, the stove, the wind on the north wall.