4. Daniel
four
Daniel
There's a way water gets under a collar and runs the length of your spine that no jacket ever built has solved. Lena has been living with it since eleven this morning without one word of complaint.
I’m right about the rain and relieved when she decides to come back to my place instead of hauling her muddy self back to the lodge.
I get the door open and she comes into the mudroom behind me, streaming, and stands there while I peel out of my shell and hang it on the hook.
"Boots," I say. "Socks. Everything wet. There's a stack of towels in the basket."
"Do you do a lot of stripping in this room?"
"I do a lot of not tracking the mountain into my own house."
She sits on the bench and hauls the boots off and her socks come away in one grey sodden clump, and she peels them and laughs at the state of her own feet, wrinkled white to the ankle.
The rain's coming off the eaves in a sheet across the doorway.
Four degrees, maybe five, blowing straight up the valley from the northwest, exactly the way I told her it would.
I get the stove going.
The main room is one room. Table, two chairs, a counter with a two-burner propane range, and along the whole north wall the drying screens, four tiers, loaded — chanterelles in halves, hedgehogs, a full screen of black trumpets from a spot up the creek I'll die before telling anyone about.
The place smells like woodsmoke and drying fungus and cold stone.
It’s home.
"Oh," she says from the doorway.
She's in my wool socks to the knee, a towel around her shoulders, and her damp base layer and she's not looking at me. She's looking at the screens.
"That's, wow, Daniel, that's four thousand dollars of dried chanterelle."
"Closer to six."
"Can I?"
"Yeah."
She goes down the wall slowly, touching nothing, bent close, reading them the way you'd read a bookshelf in someone's house. And I stand at the stove with my hands doing nothing and watch her do it, and the room is not a room I've ever seen with somebody else in it.
Three years ago there was a woman I was seeing in September who by the last week of October had stopped returning anything.
Four years before her, the same shape. October takes what it takes.
I made peace with that a long time ago and I've never once broken the terms of it, and I have never brought a single one of them up this road.
"You're cold," I say. "Come here."
Lena stands in front of the stove with her back to it and her arms crossed and I put my hands on her upper arms to rub the cold out and that lasts about four seconds before both of us stop pretending it's about circulation.
She looks up. There's rain still in her eyelashes.
"Say something," she says.
"I'm going to kiss you."
“Yes, please.”
I take her face in both hands, which are warm now, and hers are not, and she gets them flat against my chest under my collar and the shock of it goes through me.
Her mouth is cold at first and then it isn't. She makes a sound into it and my hands go into her hair.
I feel her come up onto her toes to get closer.
I get the wet base layer up and off over her head and drop it on the boards. Her skin is cold across the shoulders and warm under her arms and she shivers hard, once, and pulls me back in by the shirtfront.
"Off," she says. "You're wearing four layers, this is absurd."
I strip out of all four. She puts both hands flat on my chest and takes her time, thumb over the old white line of a scar on my shoulder.
Her bra comes off against the heat of the stove.
I get my mouth on her breast and she says something in one breath that isn't a word, and her nails go into my shoulder.
I take my time there — one, then the other, until the shivering has turned into something else entirely.
Her legs go weak. She's holding the edge of the counter behind her for the sake of standing up.
"You’re still cold, babe," I say against her collarbone. “Let me warm you up.” I scoop her into my arms and take her to the bedroom.
The back room is smaller and darker and the rain is loud on the roof of it.
I get her out of her leggings and her underwear at the edge of the bed and she gets my belt open with the efficiency of a woman who works with her hands, and then we're both down on the wool blanket and there's no cold left anywhere.
She's got a hand around my cock, learning the weight of it, and I let her do that for a while with my forehead against her temple, breathing.
Then I move down.
I get my mouth on her pussy, flat and slow, and she arches straight up off the blanket.
She's already soaked and she tastes like salt and heat.
I hold her hip down and stay slow, because slow is the only way I know how to do anything.
Two fingers in, curled. Tongue on her clit in a rhythm I don't change even when she asks me to.
"Please — Daniel!"
"Not yet."
"You're a very cruel man."
"I'm a thorough one."
She comes with her hand fisted in my hair and her thighs shaking around my ears, and she's still saying my name when I come up her body and settle over her.
I push in slow. Her breath goes out in one long unsteady line and her legs come up around the backs of my thighs and I stop halfway, because I want all of it, not a blur.
"Look at me."
Her eyes meet mine.
"You're the first person I've wanted up here," I say. "Not the first person who's been up here. The first one I wanted to bring."
Something moves across her face that isn't about the sex at all.
"That's not fair," she says. "You can't say that now."
"It's the only true thing I've got."
She pulls me down and I go all the way in and she makes a noise against my throat like something coming loose.
I get an arm under her and start to move, and it stops being measured around the third stroke. She takes it with a sound I feel in my teeth, and then both her hands are flat on my back, pulling, trying to get the whole weight of me down onto her.
"Harder," she says. "I want you to fuck me properly." No joke on it, no wry turn, plain as a knife through an onion. "Not carefully. I've been thinking about it since the tailgate on Thursday and I want to still feel it in the truck tomorrow."
I move in her hard and slow with one hand under the small of her back to keep the angle, and she meets me every time, and the rain is going on the roof, and her breath is hot at my ear saying yes, saying my name in a voice I've never heard her use for anything else.
She's close again fast. I can feel it in her stomach and her thighs and the way her hands stop being organised, and she's tightening around me every time I bottom out, which is doing things to my ability to keep a rhythm.
"Don't stop," she says.
"I'm not stopping."
I keep the thumb where it is and get my other hand around the back of her thigh and open her further, and the next one goes deep enough that she swears at the ceiling. Then I put my mouth by her ear.
"Come on," I say. "I've got you. Let go."
She does, and she's tight around me and shaking, and I go two strokes past being able to hold anything back and finish with my face in her neck and her hands flat on my spine.
The rain has changed pitch on the roof. Neither of us says anything for a long time.
"Well," Lena says finally, into my shoulder. "That escalated." She laughs, and I feel it everywhere, and I do not for one second wish it had gone slower.