45. Lily
LILY
No secrets. No war. No exit planned in the back of my mind. Just him, and the rest of my life, and a dog who flatly refused to respect a closed door.
We stayed.
That was the whole decision and it took about four seconds. Doing anything about it took the rest of the afternoon, since a cabin nobody has lived in for that long does not simply resume.
He got the stove going and I found the lamp oil.
He bled the fuel line on the generator out in the shed and I ran water until it stopped coming out brown.
There was a mouse situation in the flour bin that I'm not going to describe.
By dark the one room had come back up to something a person could live in.
The windows had gone black. The place smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool and that particular hot dust a stove gives off when it hasn't been lit in a while.
I stood in the middle of it with a dish towel in my hand and had a very strange experience.
I wasn't counting anything.
I want to explain what that is like for somebody who has done it since she was twenty-two.
For two years I walked into a room and knew things about it inside four seconds without ever deciding to.
Where the door was. Where the second door was.
What the window opened onto, how long the lease ran, and which bag I'd take if somebody gave me ten minutes.
It wasn't fear. It was housekeeping. It was so completely automatic that I never once heard myself doing it, the way you never hear your own breathing.
I stood in that cabin with a wet dish towel and my brain simply didn't do it.
"Sacha, I have a problem."
"Mm."
"I don't know where my bag is."
He turned around from the stove. "It is under the bed."
"That's not what I mean." I had to stop and get the words right, since it mattered. "I mean I don't know. I haven't thought about it since we came through the door. I always know where it is. Always. I could have told you where that bag was in any of eleven towns at any hour of the night."
He came across the room, took the dish towel out of my hand, and set it on the back of a chair. That is how he clears a table before he says something.
"Then put it in the closet," he said, "and let it get in the way."
I laughed and then I didn't laugh, and he watched me do both without saying one word about it.
"Feed me first," I said. "I'm going to be sick at about nine and I'd like there to be something in there worth the trip."
"That is the most romantic sentence anybody has said to me."
"Stick around, big guy."
So we ate. He made the only four things he can make.
I told him for the ninth time that a man who owns one onion cannot call it cooking, and he told me for the ninth time that the dog has never once complained.
Tank sat under the table for the entire meal on the theory that his patience would eventually be rewarded, and he was correct, because I'm weak.
At half past eight I put Tank out on the porch with a blanket and a bone the size of my forearm, and I shut the door on him. I did it entirely on purpose. Sacha watched the whole performance from the bed with his boots off.
"He is going to open that."
"There is a latch on it."
"Lily, he has opened that latch four times since he was a year old."
"Then why don't you fix your own door?" I said. "You fixed Doris's. You fixed the diner's step. There is a whole county out there with functioning hinges because of you, and your own latch is a piece of bent wire with an opinion."
He thought about that for a moment.
"I have not been here," he said.
"You're here now."
"I am aware."
I crossed that eight feet of floor. No other eight feet in my life has had as much thought put into it. Then I stood in front of him and got my hands on either side of his face.
I want to say what was different about it, since the difference is the entire point.
There was no clock in the room. That's what it was.
Every other time I've put my hands on that man there has been a clock somewhere in it.
There was a storm coming or a road opening or a truck to catch or four hundred miles of winter to drive, and every kiss had been quietly and horribly priced.
That night there was nothing. Nobody was coming up the road.
Nobody had a bounty on him. There was no morning I had to leave in, no bag by the door, no thing I was keeping in my chest that I hadn't said out loud.
I had the rest of my life and I had absolutely nowhere to be.
"You're allowed to take a long time," I said.
"I intend to take all of it."
He kissed me from underneath, with his hands coming up the backs of my thighs and his mouth open, and I got a knee onto the bed on either side of him and stayed there and let it happen.
It went on a long time. He kissed like a man who has finally been told the building is his and he may take the whole tour.
Every time I tried to move it along he slowed it down again, and when I complained about that against his mouth he laughed into me, and I felt it all the way through my chest.
"You are in a hurry."
"I'm not going to apologize for it."
"You have the rest of your life."
"Don't quote me at me."
He got the buttons of my shirt with one hand while the other stayed at the back of my neck, and I've never understood how he does that and I've stopped asking.
He didn't rush the shirt either. He opened it one button at a time and put his mouth on whatever each button gave him.
The first one gave him the top of my sternum.
The second gave him the inside curve of a breast. The third gave him the hollow under my collarbone.
By the fourth I had both hands in his hair and was making a low sound I had not authorized.
Then he put his mouth on the small brown mole below my right breast that he has counted more times than I have, and he stopped.
"Something has changed," he said.
"You noticed three days ago and said nothing."
"You are tender."
"They are the size of a national emergency and they hurt when I turn over," I said. "It's going to get worse, and I've decided to be very brave about it publicly and completely unbearable about it in private."
"Then tell me what I am allowed."
That undid me somewhat, and I had to put my forehead down on the top of his head for a second before I could answer him.
"Slow," I said. "No weight on them. Use your mouth and not your hands, and stop the second I make the other noise."
"I know the other noise."
"You know all my noises."
"I have a catalogue," he said.
Then he did exactly what I had asked, and he did it for a long time, and I lost the thread of the conversation entirely.
The first pass was so light it was hardly contact at all.
There was heat, and the broad side of his tongue, and his breath coming back over wet skin.
My whole body went stupid on the third one.
He stopped when I told him to and started again when I told him to and never once got it wrong, and that is a sentence about a man I would not have believed six weeks ago.
He was careful in a way that would have annoyed me from any other man on earth. From him it wasn't carefulness. It was attention, and attention is a completely different animal. He has been paying it since the first week, and I don't believe anybody had ever paid me any before him.
He got me out of the shirt and then out of everything else, unhurried, with the stove ticking and one lamp going and that black window behind us.
Then I made him stand up, because I had never once been allowed to do this without a clock somewhere in the room.
There is a great deal of that man. He is thirty-nine and he has been used hard and every bit of it shows, and I went over all of it in lamplight with my hands and refused to hurry one part of it.
There is an old rope of a scar along the top of one shoulder.
There is a pale seam under his ribs where somebody did a bad job with a needle, and I have been privately rude about that needle since the first week.
His stomach goes hard when he is holding still on purpose.
A dark line runs down from his navel, and I traced it with two fingers until his breathing changed and then abandoned it altogether.
He stood there and let me look at him, and it cost him something, and he let me see that it cost him.
"You are enjoying this."
"I'm cataloguing," I said. "Turn around."
"No."
"Turn around, Sacha."
He turned around. I laid both hands on his back and put my mouth between his shoulder blades, and I felt every part of him go still under it.
I stayed there a while. A man who has spent three years making certain nobody ever stood behind him has earned somebody standing behind him who is not going to do one thing about it.
Then I put my hands on his chest and walked him backward until the bed caught him, and he sat down because I told him to, and I kissed him until neither of us could see straight.
He laid me back on that bed and knelt on the floor at the end of it.
"That's new."
"It is not new. It is the correct height." He got my knees over his shoulders and hooked both arms around my thighs. "I have been thinking about this since a truck outside a doctor's house and I would like to be efficient about it."
"You are not being efficient. You haven't been efficient since the storm."
"Efficiency is overrated," said the most efficient man in North America, and then he put his mouth on me and I stopped having opinions about anything at all.
He started nowhere near where I wanted him.
He put his mouth high on the inside of one thigh, in the place where you can feel your own pulse straight through the skin, and stayed there breathing on me until I said something unrepeatable about his character.
Then he did the other side and took just as long over it.
Then he worked the crease where my leg joins the rest of me, twice on each side, with the broad of his tongue and no pressure whatsoever.