"You can." He kissed me, slow, while his hips kept their rhythm, and his thumb circled my oversensitive clit with a gentleness that was its own kind of devastating. "You can, Nell."
The third orgasm was different: slower, deeper, rolling through me in waves while he held my gaze and I held his and something passed between us that was not physical, a recognition so raw and mutual my eyes stung.
He followed me over. His hips stuttered. His grip on my thigh went bruising-tight. He came with my name on his mouth, raw and unhidden, and I held him while his body shook and the waterfall kept falling and the world carried on around two people who had forgotten it existed.
We lay tangled on the rock. His head was on my chest, my fingers moving through his wet hair. The sky was deeply, impossibly blue above us. A bird I couldn't name was calling from the cedars. My body was humming with a satisfaction so complete it felt structural, as if something had shifted at the load-bearing level.
A bug landed on my stomach. I flinched.
"That's nature," he said, his head still on my chest. "It comes with the ambiance."
"The ambiance is excellent. The entomology is unwelcome."
He brushed the bug away and kissed my sternum. "Noted."
We swam again, the cold less shocking. He held me in the shallows and I pressed my face into his neck and breathed in cedar and clean water and the warmth of his skin, and I thought: I do not want to leave this. I do not want to leave him. I do not want the plan I made in an office in San Francisco.
I did not say any of it. But I held on tighter.
WE WALKED BACK IN LATEafternoon light, his hand finding mine on the narrow parts of the trail. I was wearing his pullover over my damp clothes and thinking about how it smelled like him when the cabin appeared below us.
"I'm going to shower," I said. "You should call Jeannie about that Thursday group." Jeannie Hauck ran Moose's, and Cliff used her lot to meet his Thursday groups. I knew things like this now.
"Already confirmed." He kissed my forehead. "I'll start dinner."
I went through the main room, down the short hallway, and into the bathroom. Turned on the water. Was pulling the pullover over my head when I heard his voice through the wall.
Not talking to me. Talking on the phone.
"— yeah, I left the voicemail last week. Masterson. M-A-S-T-E-R-S-O-N."
A pause.
"Right. The vasectomy reversal consultation. I need to schedule — yeah."
The pullover was over my head, half off, my arms caught in the sleeves. I stood there.
Vasectomy.
Reversal.
"Whatever you've got in the next two weeks. I know it's a process: the consultation first, then the procedure. I just need to get it started."
The water was running. The bathroom was filling with steam. My arms were still caught in the sleeves and the word vasectomy was repeating in my head on a loop that sounded nothing like my usual analysis and everything like the high-pitched tone of a system going offline.
He had a vasectomy. My husband had a vasectomy. The man I had married for the express purpose of getting pregnant was physically incapable of getting me pregnant. Every night I'd lain in that bed thinking about timing and cycles and a baby that was the entire reason I was standing on this mountain, and none of it was possible. It had never been possible.
I pulled the pullover off. My hands were shaking.
But. Reversal. He was scheduling a reversal. He'd called last week: the voicemail was from the night we'd first slept together, the night he'd gotten out of bed after I'd fallen asleep and left a message I never knew about. He was trying to undo it. For me. Because he had changed the same way I had changed, and his version of change was not words or plans or spreadsheets but a phone call to a doctor's office in the middle of the night.
I turned off the shower. I stood in the steam with my heart slamming into my ribs. The two facts collided: he had lied, and he was fixing it. Neither canceled the other. My brain could not make them resolve into a single coherent conclusion.
I opened the bathroom door.
He was in the hallway. Phone still in hand. He saw my face and the color left his.
"Nell —"
