I packed what little I had. A change of clothes, the flannel I wasn’t wearing, socks, my toothbrush from the bathroom shelf. My notebook, which he had given me.
The contract was in the front pocket of my bag. I felt it through the canvas when I lifted the bag onto the table. Folded in quarters. Signed.
I was not going to think about the contract.
I zipped the bag.
In the corner by the desk, the scanner muttered. The same low static it had been muttering for nine days. I had stopped hearing it the way you stopped hearing a refrigerator. Now, standing in the middle of the room with a bag on my shoulder and a shoebox under my arm, I heard it again, and it sounded like what it was:someone else’s equipment, in someone else’s cabin, tracking someone else’s frequencies.
Not mine.
The kiss surfaced in my mind. It came up uninvited — Dante’s mouth on mine, his hand on my jaw, the particular weight of his forehead against mine when he pulled back. Not without a structure we’ve both chosen. Not without agreement. He had said it and I had not argued because I had not had words, and now we had a contract and rules and a word for what I was, and he had decided — he had decided, not me, him — that I was still not ready for him. That my readiness was a thing he got to measure.
Who made him the boss of that?
I had asked him, no, begged him to kiss me last night, but he had been resolute.
“We need to wait a while longer,” he had said.
I stood with my bag and my box and the indignation flared up hot and useful, the way it always flared up when I needed it to get me across a threshold. Who made him the arbiter of what I was ready for? I was twenty-four years old. I had been ready for things nobody asked whether I was ready for since I was six.
And as hard as today was, tomorrow was going to be even worse.
Tomorrow, the Heavy Kings and Dante and whatever he was doing on those laptops would finish with the Diablos. He had said so. Not in those words — he didn‘t use those words — but in the shape of the last three evenings, the thinning of the red marks on the maps, the way Marcus’s voice on the satellite phone had gone from urgent to satisfied over the course of the week. It would be done.
And what then?
What then.
I would stay in the cabin. I would eat three meals a day. I would sleep in the bed. I would have designated Little time during which I was not on duty and could be whoever I wanted in that hour, and the whoever I wanted would keep getting softer and more dependent on a man who had kissed me once and then told me I wasn’t ready for him to kiss me again. I could feel it happening already. The edges of me going soft. The sharp clean outline of the person I had spent twenty-four years carving out of nothing, blurring around the seams, the way a drawing blurs when you put it down in the rain.
I could not afford soft edges. I never could. The one thing — the only thing — I had ever had that was mine was the hard line around my own self, and it was dissolving in here, in this cabin, with this man, and I was watching it happen and doing nothing to stop it.
I looked at the door.
The first night. The cabin door and the working latch and him at the desk already typing. He had said it. Not in those exact words, but in substance: You can leave whenever you like. It had been part of the offer. The offer that had no visible hook, that I had looked for a hook in and failed to find, and maybe the reason I had failed to find it was that the hook was inside me, not in him — the hook was Clover under my arm and the contract in my pocket and the two words I had scribbled out on a piece of paper face-down on the table.
I could leave.
He had said so.
I was taking it.
I hoisted the bag higher on my shoulder. Clover’s box tucked firm under my left elbow. I did not look at the face-down paper. I did not look at the desk or the maps on the wall or the place on the floor where he had slept between me and the door for nine nights.
I opened the door.
The mountain air was cold and clean and smelled of pine.
I stepped through, and I pulled the door shut behind me, and the latch caught with its solid brass click, exactly the way it had caught the first night, and I walked down the porch steps and onto the track and I did not look back.
***
The track ran downhill.
That was the first thing in my favor. Gravity was on my side. The bag on my shoulder was light because I owned almost nothing, and the shoebox under my arm weighed less than a bag of groceries. The track sloped away from the cabin toward the service road which sloped away toward the main road which sloped toward town. Downhill all the way. I had walked worse roads carrying worse things.
My boots hit the gravel in a rhythm. Fast. Not running. Running was for people who were scared. I was a woman taking a walk down a public road on a public afternoon, and the fact that my chest was tight and my jaw was set and my left arm was already aching from the box did not change the basic arithmetic of what I was doing.
