Epilogue
Neera
Sinking in:a condition in which the paint medium absorbs into the underlying paint layer.
Three years later
There wasa bird waiting for me when I arrived home this morning.
I leaned a hip against the kitchen counter as I studied the newest addition to my flock. This one was stone, probably quartz or granite, and no bigger than an egg. This one had required time.
By now, I had more than a hundred of them and always a new one to welcome me home when I've been away.
Birds and a happy beagle we called Matilde.
"Hello there," I said as she tap danced at my feet. "Have you been good?"
She let out an indignant howl and I crouched down to receive my ration of kisses and irritablewhere have you been?yips.
"She's been hunting badgers again," Gus called as he shuffled down the stairs. From my position on the floor, I couldn't see him but I loved the sleepy drawl in his voice and the lazy way he thudded from one riser to the next. Sleepy, lazy Gus was one of my favorite iterations of this man. "She thinks it's her duty to thin the local population."
I gifted Matilde a meaningful stare. "Again?" She replied by nestling her head against my belly and frantically wagging her whole tail end. It was never just the tail. Always the whole back half of her body, wagging like it was making a wide turn.
"I tried to reason with her, particularly with respect to her commitment to leaving her trophies under the deck," he continued, stepping into the kitchen with both palms pressed to his eyes, "but she wasn't having it. She said it was her life's work and who am I to argue with that?"
I took Matilde's face in my hands, melting at her contagiously joyful grin. "We're not getting the hunter out of you, are we?"
"Owen appreciates it," Gus said, stopping behind me. "When I dropped by for dinner last night, he told me the badgers were gnawing on some of his nets last month. Digging up some of his cucumber plants too. Cole told me a long story about the Canadian fur trade. I don't remember the specifics. I was busy drinking his gin."
I gained my feet and stepped into his space, my arms closing around his lean—and delightfully bare—torso. He was still busy waking up, his skin warm and hair sticking in every direction, and he was mine.
"It seems I should ask whetheryou'vebeen good?" I pressed my lips to my husband's neck.Husband. And I was his wife. Even after two years of marriage, that title still caught me like a blast of blinding sunshine after a week of dreary darkness. Of all the titles I'd collected in my life,wifewasn't one I'd expected. But now, I couldn't imagine living without it.
We'd stumbled into the nuptial conversation around the time Gus was finishing his residency back in Silicon Valley. Nothing about that year had been easy on us. I still couldn't believe we'd made it out intact. He'd moved himself into my apartment immediately following our return from Talbott's Cove, though neither of us were skilled at the art of cohabitation. We argued—a lot—and gradually learned the difference between disagreeing about issues of importance and instigating in the name of foreplay. Very, very gradually.
Once I'd announced my intention to step away from the company, my business travel schedule quadrupled as I was busy transitioning projects and management tasks at locations all over the globe. Even when I was in the office, my days started before sunrise and ended long past sunset, leaving us little time for both disagreement and instigation. Save for the weeks scheduled for visiting Talbott's Cove, I saw more of Gus's carved birds than I did of him during that period.
Thankfully, he'd discovered life beyond the stiff boundaries of the Valley and spent most of his time exploring everything from Big Sur to Half Dome. He'd stayed as far away from the campus as possible and, in that time, managed to create several spectacular sculptures which were now on display in the campus's flagship building. He'd claimed they were the worst thing he'd made since primary school. I disagreed but I loved him enough to know when to argue, when to instigate, and when to let him be wrong without telling him about it.
In addition to all the drama and exhaustion of that year, and our plan to move into a renovated farmhouse on the other side of the country, we'd decided to get married. The idea had first come up when Gus mentioned his O1-B visa was expiring and he was due to apply for an extension unless I'd rather save him the time and marry him.
We'd laughed for a minute because he hadn't meant to propose. He hadn't. Not after the year of constant bickering and separation and frustration over one thing or another. There were days when we barely tolerated each other and required some angry sex in semi-public locations to break through the tension. There were days when we doubted our plan to build a new life together in Maine because how could we do that when we couldn't agree on whether to run the ceiling fan all night, regardless of the weather. But I stopped laughing and I set all those issues aside, and I said, "Yes, I'd like that very much."
Two weeks later, we flew to Talbott's Cove. Owen conducted a brief ceremony in the forest which ended with, "I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may now adopt a dog."
None of these things were part of our plans but now, a little more than two years after our impromptu wedding, I couldn't imagine life without my husband and our heart-of-a-killer dog. The learning curve was steep but we'd scaled it together.
We still argued, still instigated. Still engaged in angry sex in semi-public places. But our world was different now and we didn't need the same things.
"I've never once been good." Gus slipped his hand down my back to squeeze my ass. He smelled like oil paint and pine needles, which meant he'd been painting in the barn. Unlike his former studio back in California, the barn was nothing more than a barn. Wooden beams, dirt floors, a single string of lightbulbs running down the center. The ocean-facing front was almost always bathed in bright sun, the forest-facing back was almost always shaded under the branches of old pines. It was uncomfortably simple and exactly the way he preferred to work. "How could I possibly start now? I wouldn't know where to begin."
"An excellent point." I dropped my cheek to his chest and inhaled. "Was the late night courtesy of the gin or the paint?"
"Gin, then paint," he replied, bringing his hand to the back of my neck and kneading the tense muscles there. Leaving Silicon Valley and launching a strategic philanthropy venture was exciting—and stressful as hell. Making the decisionsandexecuting them kept my days busy and my hands full, though I savored this stress. I'd chosen it and I was the one to plot the course. "How was Cape Town?"
"Intense, but good." I hummed as his thumb found an especially tough knot. "More of that, please."
"More you shall receive," he murmured. "Tired, sparrow?"
