“I’ve got good teeth.”
“She’ll want to verify.”
Then she got up.
I watched her pull on cargo pants — olive green, a size too big, cinched with a belt — that she’d picked up at Connie’s after her three-day suitcase ran out of options. A tank top from the same haul. She grabbed my T-shirt off the headboard where it had landed, rolled the sleeves to her elbows, and left it untucked. It looked better on her than it had ever looked on me.
“Stay,” she said, pointing at the bed. “I’m making breakfast.”
“You don’t have to—”
“You have fed me every single day since I got here. Trout, venison, sandwiches delivered to the garden with ice water. I have been a freeloader, Atlas. A well-fed, sexually satisfied freeloader. I’m making you breakfast.” She pointed again. “Stay.”
I stayed. I heard the stove click, the fridge open. Eggs cracking into the cast-iron skillet, the sizzle of butter. She was humming again, that wandering melody, and I lay there listening to a woman cook in my kitchen and my lungs expanded until I couldn’t breathe around it.
She came back with two plates. Scrambled eggs with chives she’d cut from the patch by the porch, sourdough toast with honey drizzled in thin lines, sliced apple on the side. Shebalanced the plate on my chest because I was still lying down and raised an eyebrow.
“I told you I could cook.”
“You did tell me that.”
“You called it a bluff. The night we made venison. I remember.”
We ate in bed. She got crumbs on the sheets and honey on the pillowcase and I didn’t care about any of it.
“I can do my work from here,” she said between bites. “Most of my clients are in Portland but the design side is all remote. Site visits I can fly back for.”
“There’s room in the loft for your drafting table. Once the window’s in, the south light will be good for drawing.”
She put her fork down. “You’ve been thinking about where my drafting table goes.”
“I’ve been thinking about a lot of things.”
“You’ve been pricing glass and planning furniture layout and you didn’t know my last name when I got here.”
“I knew your last name. You said it facedown in the dirt.”
She buried her face in my shoulder. “You can’t say these things to me while I’m naked and emotional.”
“You’re not naked. You’re wearing my shirt and cargo pants.”
“I’m emotionally naked. It counts.” She tipped her chin up. Her gaze was bright and damp and fierce. “I love you. I should have said that first. Before the logistics. I love you.”
Six years on this mountain, not needing anyone, and believing it. Then she’d showed up and talked for five straight minutes and most of it had been a lie. None of it mattered. The part that was real was the only part I needed.
“I love you,” I said. It came out plain and true and not nearly big enough for what I meant. But she heard it — she always heard me, the full sentence behind the short one — and her whole face opened up.
“That’s the first time you’ve said it.”
“I’ve been saying it. You just weren’t listening to the right frequency.”
“Decaf and vitamins.”
“And a floor. And a window I haven’t cut yet.”
She kissed me. The taste of ginger and salt. When she pulled back there were tears on her cheeks, and I wiped them with my thumbs.
The light in the bedroom had shifted. I could hear the bees in the balsamroot, the spring forage rising toward its peak. Flora’s garden was blooming. The penstemon along the creek, the lupine in the middle band, the blanketflower opening orange faces toward the sun. She’d built that. A pollinator corridor that would carry my colonies from April to first frost.
