I understand what she's describing — that point in your relationship with materials where you've made peace with what they are and stopped wanting them to be something else. I don't say that. I say:
"The Jamie stone is different. I want it to outlast everything. I want it there in two hundred years when no one knows his name anymore. Just the stone, still there, telling the hill that something happened."
She puts her hand over mine on the thermos. Stays there without pressing, just the weight of it. We don't say anything else.
On Thursday of the third week she stays late at the workshop, cross-referencing species against soil sample results. I'm working the inscription geometry — the lettering is the last thing I'll do, and I want the cuts right before I commit them to the face. The overhead fluorescent stays off. Task lighting, warm and direct. In that light the stone dust in the air catches and drifts and the whole space has a quality I don't notice unless someone else is in it.
She looks up. "Can I see it?"
The Jamie stone is still in the corner, partly revealed. I've been protective of it in a way I'm not usually protective of works in progress — showing it too early would be giving something away that it hasn't finished becoming. But I take the drop cloth off.
She stands in front of it without speaking. The quartz vein catches the light and the grain of the stone is visible now, the direction it grows, the place where it decides to be what it is. I've done forty percent of the surface and the shape is beginning to emerge — not a symbol, not a human form, something between those things. Something that has weight without being heavy.
She reaches out and puts her hand flat against the unworked face.
I put my hand over hers.
Her hand against the stone. My hand over hers. The stone cold under both of us. I can feel the grain through her hand, or something like it — the same reading I do with my fingertips every morning, but different now because she's between me and the stone and the stone is between her and three years of not being able to look at a chisel without feeling the absence.
She turns her hand over under mine. Her fingers close around two of mine.
She looks up at me.
"Ivy," I say.
"I know," she says.
I take her face in both hands. She's slight enough that I'm aware of my own size. She turns into my hands. Her eyes stay open. I know she wants to see me — keeps them on mine the whole time I'm learning the shape of her jaw, the line of her cheekbone, the specific soft skin just in front of her ear.
"I'm going to take your hair down," I tell her. Low and direct, the way I'd tell a stone where I'm going to make the next cut. "And then I'm going to take everything else."
She reaches back for the edge of the worktable without looking away from me.
I take the tie from her hair and it falls and then I take her mouth properly, thorough and unhurried. My hands find the hem of her shirt and she lifts her arms for me without being asked. She's wearing a plain bra, linen-coloured, and I think she'd laugh if I told her she matches the stone dust in the air, so I don't.
"You too," she says, already at my buttons.
I let her get two undone and then I take over because I'm not a patient man and we've been circling this for three weeks. She pulls my shirt off my shoulders and puts both hands flat on my chest and looks at me the way she looks at a site she's already decided on — not deciding, just confirming.
I reach behind her and undo the bra clasp in one move. She makes a small sound when the cool air hits her and I bring her in against my chest because I want her warm and I want to feel her against me before anything else. She's small enough that my hands span most of her back. She smells like soil and cedar. I'll know that forever.
Then she gets her hands between us and goes for my belt. I decide I've been patient long enough.
I lift her onto the worktable. She hooks her legs around me and I push her skirt up and get my hand between her thighs and she's already wet. The feeling awakens my inner caveman. I work herwith two fingers and she grips the edge of the table and stops pretending she's composed. I watch her face the whole time. She keeps her eyes on mine — stubborn about it, like eye contact is something she's decided to hold — and I keep my fingers moving until she's rolling her hips against my hand and her breath is gone and she comes with a sharp sound and her thighs clamped hard around my wrist.
I hold her through it. Her forehead drops to my shoulder and she breathes.
I get the rest of her clothes off and mine and then I'm between her thighs with her sitting at the edge of the table and she reaches down and wraps her hand around my cock and guides me.
I push in slow because she's small and I'm not and I want to do this right. Her head goes back. I hold her hips and give her a moment before pushing in even deeper, moving with hard deep jerks.
I fuck her against the worktable with my hands gripping her hips and she is considerably louder than she's been in three weeks of professional conversation. I'm glad the workshop is fifty meters from the road because someone driving by might have heard us.
“Fuck, Ivy,” I groan.
She tells me what she wants with her hands — pulling me closer, adjusting the angle, her nails in my shoulders.
I give her all of it. She gets there with her legs locked around me and her face buried in my neck and a sound that goes straight through me, and I follow two strokes behind her with my forehead against hers and both hands flat on the table taking my weight.
