20. Sacha
SACHA
Ihad been a dead man walking for three years. She kept making the inconvenient mistake of treating me like I was alive.
We spent the next day working against each other in the friendliest possible way.
I cut the low brush along the approach so no man could come up it without giving me two full seconds of his shoulders.
I moved the truck behind the shed and left it nose out.
Between two birches I ran fishing line at shin height and hung a half dozen empty cans off it, which is not elegant and has not once failed me.
She spent the same hours making the place harder to leave.
When I came in at noon there was a second chair pulled up to a table that had held one chair for three years.
There was a jar on the sill with a handful of bare willow twigs standing in it.
Kevin had been turned to face the light, and the sunrise by the door had acquired a companion.
The new one showed a row of hospital windows at night with every one of them lit.
"You have put a second hole in my wall," I said.
"I've opened a gallery. There's a members' evening later this week and you are not invited."
"I am fortifying this house. You are decorating it."
"We're both making it harder to get into." She did not look up from the level she had improvised out of a jar lid and a finger of water. "Mine just takes longer to notice."
I returned to the tree line and thought about that for the better part of an hour, which is the sort of thing that happens to a man's afternoon once he lets a woman into it.
The wind died after supper. I keep that detail.
A cabin with no wind in it is very quiet, and quiet has never been a friend of mine.
She washed and I dried, and the dog took himself to the rug by the stove without being told, having accepted the new order of the house with a dignity I did not know he owned.
She turned from the sink with her hands still wet and caught me watching her.
"You've been doing that all day," she said.
"I do not follow."
"You stand three feet away with your whole face shut, looking at me like I'm a math problem you're not allowed to solve."
Four nights earlier she had been the one to cross the room.
This time it was me, and I did not decide to do it any more than a man decides to fall down a flight of stairs.
I took the towel from her and set it on the counter.
I put my palm along her jaw with my fingers buried in her hair, and she came up onto her toes to meet me before I had finished getting there.
"Say it," I said, against her mouth. "You know what I am asking for."
"Yes, I want this. I will say it out loud, on the record, in front of the dog. The answer is still yes."
"Then stop talking for one minute."
"That is bold," she said, and then she did.
Here is what I understood inside the first thirty seconds, and I will set it down plainly, since I have no gift for saying it any other way.
The first time, she had reached for me in the dark and I had let her, and letting is a passive act, and a passive act can be revoked by morning.
That night I was not letting anything happen to me.
I had my hands on her because I wanted them there, and wanting is not a position a man can retreat from with his dignity intact.
Somewhere between the sink and her mouth I had decided that she was mine to look after, and that I intended to be the steady place she had never once been given.
I kissed her, and I did it the way I have never permitted myself to kiss anybody, with no plan in it and no exit drawn.
She tasted of the coffee she had been drinking and of the cold that still came off her hair from the woodshed.
Her mouth opened under mine, my beard scraped her chin, and she pulled me down into it by two fistfuls of shirt, up on her toes and off balance and not caring in the least. When I put a hand at the small of her back and took her weight she made a low sound into my mouth that I have every intention of keeping.
Her hands were already under my shirt, small and fast and entirely without patience, and she had it up over my shoulders and then stopped with both palms spread on my chest.
"Look at you," she said. "You are standing there letting me."
"Do not narrate."
"I narrate everything. It's a documented condition."
I took her sweater off over her head and put my mouth to the hollow under her ear, and then I worked down the side of her throat without hurrying, learning where the breath went out of her and stopping there each time until she stopped being able to hold still.
The sound she made traveled the whole length of me and arrived somewhere I had no name for.
Then I lifted her onto the counter, which quieted her, and I stood between her knees with my hands at her waist and took a moment I had no business taking.
I am thirty-nine years old. There are fifteen years of daylight between us and I have counted every one of them at three in the morning.
She was sitting on my kitchen counter in the last of the firelight with her hair coming down and her eyes gone dark, and there was nothing anywhere in me that I would have called worthy of her.
What I found instead was the only offer I had to make.
She had spent two years being the one who holds the hand and reads the chart and stands in the corridor afterward, and nobody, not once, had put himself between her and anything at all.
I could do that much. It is the one work I have never been bad at.
"Whatever you are thinking," she said, "stop it."
"I am thinking that you are twenty-four."
"And I'm about ten seconds from doing the age gap in detail, at length, with statistics." She hooked her heels behind me. "Try something braver."
So I did.
I got the rest of it off her there against the counter, and I took my time doing it, because I wanted to look at her and I had spent three years teaching myself that I was not a man who got to want a look at anything.
Her boots went first, one and then the other, off the heel with my hand closed around her ankle.
Her socks after that. Then the button of her jeans, and she lifted her hips off the counter so I could draw them down her legs, watching my face the whole while to see exactly what it did to me. What it did to me was considerable.
I reached behind her and got the last of it undone and drew the straps down her arms myself, slowly, and then there was nothing left between the firelight and her at all.
She let me look. That is the part that undid me first, before I had laid a hand anywhere that mattered.
She sat there bare to the waist with the fire throwing orange up one side of her and did not cover herself and did not make a joke, and she watched me watch her with her chin up, as though she had decided that being wanted was a thing she would take standing.
I put my mouth on her then. I learned the small hard rise of her nipple against my tongue, and the soft plane below her breast where her ribs came up when she arched, and I stayed there long past the point where a patient man would have moved on.
Her fingers went into my hair and closed and pulled, and her heels left my back and drummed against the cabinet door.
"You're doing that on purpose," she said, and her voice had gone unsteady.
"I do everything on purpose."
"That's the worst thing anybody has ever said to me in a good way."
I got the last of her clothing off and dropped it somewhere I did not care about.
Then my hand was between her thighs, and she was already slick and open and ready for me, and the sound that came out of me at that was closer to a groan than I would have chosen.
I have spent a working life reading rooms and hands and the exact second a man decides to move, and I turned every bit of it on her instead.
What pulled her breath short, I did again.
What made her stop arguing with the world, I found and then refused to change, no matter how she moved against me or what she called me.
She got one arm hooked around my neck and the other braced on the counter behind her, and she came apart on my hand with her forehead against my shoulder and my name coming out of her in pieces.
I held her through the whole of it and I watched her face the entire time, because I wanted to see it, and because I have spent three years looking at nothing worth seeing.
"You could have warned me," she said, when she had breath for it.
"You would only have argued."
"I'd have argued and then agreed. That's how I work." She was boneless and pink to the collarbone and grinning at the ceiling like a woman who has won something. "Take me to bed, please. My legs have resigned."
I carried her across the room and she laughed against my throat the whole way. I put her down on the bed, and she got a fist in my belt before I had straightened up.
"My turn," she said.
I want to be honest about what happened next, because the physical part of it is not the part that levelled me.
She got my belt open and the rest of it off me and put her mouth on me, and she did it slowly, with her eyes up, watching what it cost me.
Nobody has done that in a very long time.
Nobody has been permitted to. I stood there with one hand braced in her hair and the other in a fist at my side and let a woman half my size take me apart by inches, and every instinct I own was screaming at me that this was an unforgivable loss of control, and I told every one of them to be quiet.
When it got close enough to matter I made her stop, and I had to say her name twice to do it.
"Not like that," I said. "Not tonight."
"Bossy."
"Come here."