I'm not shaking anymore.
Kourtney leaves food on my doorstep. Not every day but regularly, incorporated into her routine without asking permission. A container of whatever she made for the compound, and the first time she left biscuits I understood it was a statement because nobody in Mississippi leaves biscuits without meaning something by it.
We don't mention it to each other. We just have this thing between us now. Cora brought me a cutting from the jasmine along the compound fence and told me to put it in a window. It's in the south window where the light hits it in the afternoon and it's doing fine.
The compound has absorbed me in the specific way it absorbs things. Not dramatically. Not with ceremony. Just incrementally, until one day you look up and the absorption is complete and you realize you stopped tracking it because it stopped feeling like something worth tracking.
Remy comes to the outbuilding on a Thursday.
I hear her before I see her; the specific quality of her walk, which I've learned the way you learn anyone's walk when you share space with them for six weeks. She comes to the open door and leans against the frame. She looks at my shelves and my worktable and the jasmine in the south window with the expression of a woman doing an inventory.
"You're going to be a pain in my ass," she says.
I look at her across the outbuilding. "Probably."
Remy almost smiles. It's the specific expression of a woman who has decided something she wasn't planning to decide and is annoyed about the decision but is going to live with it anyway. She looks at the jasmine. "That's Cora's cutting."
"Yes."
"She only gives those to people she likes."
"I know."
Remy looks at me for a moment longer. There are things in her face that aren't going to be said out loud; things about a parking lot and two hands on a wound in the dark and a word I said to her in the common room that she's been thinking about since.
She's not going to say them. I'm not going to make her. We're not those kinds of women with each other, and I think neither of us wants to be.
"Good light in here," she says.
"North-facing. Best for the work."
She nods, pushes off the door frame, and walks back toward the main compound. I watch her go and I think about the night she looked up at me from the dirt and the nod from the infirmary cot and the almost-smile just now. That's everything. The whole conversation, and it's enough.
The evening is warm and the light is doing something to the far tree line when Judge comes to the outbuilding.
I'm working the Chalmette frames. Not the ones that went to Carr, but the ones I made for myself. Grudge and Maria. The light in a cold storage container. I've been looking at them the way I look at all my work after the fact, deciding what they mean.
He fills the doorway completely.. He looks at me at the worktable. I look at him. The evening light is doing the thing it does in late summer in Mississippi, turning everything amber and unhurried.
I put the camera down.
I cross the outbuilding to him.
He meets me halfway, his hands finding my face, and he kisses me. Slowly. No urgency in it, nothing underneath it that needed resolving. Just the choosing of it, which has always been the thing that gets me. This man who does nothing without intention, choosing this, choosing me, evening after evening, in the ordinary unhurried way of a life that's been decided.
He walks me backward to the worktable and lifts me onto it and I go, and we take our time.
There's no adrenaline underneath this. There hasn't been for six weeks. Just the two of us in the outbuilding in the amber light, his hands on me with the specific patience of a man who has decided this is worth his complete attention and gives it completely.
He undresses me slowly. His mouth follows his hands: my collarbone, my throat, the inside of my wrist where my pulse lives, which he's developed a particular interest in, pressing his lips there and holding like he's taking the measure of me through it.
I know the shape of him now the way you know someone's shape when you've put your hands on them enough times; the geography of his chest and shoulders, the old injury on his left side he doesn't talk about, the way his muscles shift under my palms when he's stopped performing anything for anyone.
His mouth moves to my breast. His tongue drags over my nipple and I pull in a slow breath and he stays there; patient, reading my breathing, learning again what he already knows.
I get my hands into his hair and hold on because I want his full attention exactly where it is. He shifts to the other side and does the same thing and by the time he's done, I'm already warm and wanting and my hands are not gentle in his hair.
His hand slides between my thighs.
