"You were in my way," he explains. His voice has dropped into a register that the stove has nothing to do with.
"You could've said excuse me."
"I did. Three days running."
We are not pretending anymore. Last time, we both pretended it was nothing. Now, he's looking down at me, and I'm looking up at him, and the pretense is justgone,dismantled overnight like the Berlin Wall blanket, and neither of us is rebuilding it.
Then the pan hisses, threatening to scorch, and he turns back to the stove. I'm left sitting on the table, breathing hard like I just took the stairs.
Wolf, from his post by the door, yawns enormously.
"Nobody asked you," I scold him.
The phone thing happens in the afternoon, and I almost don't register it as a thing at all.
Afon goes out to check the perimeter and comes back dusted in snow, and because we have somehow become the kind of people who do small domestic services for each other without discussion, I take his jacket while he stomps his boots and turn to hang it on the second hook.
The jacket is heavy. It's always heavy; it's a workman's jacket built for a man who nearly outweighs the mountain we've come to call home. But as I lift it, the left breast swings against my forearm and there's something in there. Hard. Rectangular. Substantial—heavier than a wallet, bigger than the folding knife, with a stub of antenna-ish rigidity at one end that my fingers read through the canvas for a second before I get the jacket onto the hook.
A radio? A GPS? One of those chunky outdoorsman gadgets that men of a certain disposition collect like Pokémon?
I open my mouth to ask.
And then I look at him—crouched by the stove, feeding in a log, the firelight doing flattering things to a face that needs no assistance in the good looks department—and I think about the deal.His way. His order. When he says so.We've come so far since "I haven't ruled out shooting you," but the ice we're standing on is new ice, thin ice, ice that has held only one day's weight so far.
It'd be a bad idea to push.
So I don't ask. I file it away for safe keeping. I put it in the same mental cabinet where I keep the bronze ring he still wears and the woman in the blue sundress, the cabinet labeledTHINGS I AM CHOOSING NOT TO DETONATE TODAY, which is, frankly, the most crowded cabinet I own.
It's probably nothing. Probably a fancy compass. Not even worth worrying about.
The collision happens after dinner, and I'd love to tell you who started it, but the honest answer isphysics.
It goes like this: I'm clearing the tin plates, he's reaching past me for the kettle, and since the hut is approximately the size of a Manhattan parking space, we miscalculate. My shoulder meets his chest. His hand comes up to steady me and lands at the small of my back.
I look up to deliver a quip—I have one loaded, something about traffic patterns—but it dies somewhere between my brain and my mouth, because his eyes have gone dark and fixed and the air between us has acquired the density of standing water.
"Caroline," he says. It's supposed to be a warning, but it comes out like a confession.
"I didn't do anything," I whisper.
"I know," he says. "That's the problem."
And then his mouth is on mine.
The first kiss, against the stone wall, was an accident of pressure—a thing that escaped him, all that fury with nowhere else to go. This is not that. This is deliberate. His hand slides from the small of my back and splays between my shoulder blades as he pulls me in like he's been doing math on this maneuver for days.
The plates clatter out of my hands onto the table and for the life of me, I could not tell you whether anything breaks, because his other hand finds my jaw, tilts it, and the kiss goes deep, slow, and devastatingly thorough. I whimper against his mouth.
We hit the table. The table, bless it, holds. He lifts me onto it for the second time today and this time there is no pan, no pretext, nothing but his hips between my knees and his beard scraping my jaw as his mouth moves down my throat.
I get my fists in his sweater—my signature move at this point, I should trademark it—and pull. He comes willingly, a wall of heat folding over me. His hand slips under the hem of the flannel.
His palm on the bare skin of my waist is so hot it's nearly a sound. Rough, careful, enormous—he touches me like I'm something he's been ordered not to touch, which, knowing him,is probably literal, an order he issued to himself in the third person at four o'clock in the morning.
His thumb traces the lowest rib. I arch into it and say his name, and that plaintive little whine affects him; I feel it go through him like current. He kisses me again, harder, and my hands find the hem of his sweater and slide up and over the ridged map of his stomach, the scar, the old swallow inked low on his ribs, and he exhales against my mouth like a man surfacing.
We're doing this. We are absolutely doing this. On a table. In a gulag. While a Rottweiler watches—or, preferably, takes a nice, well-timed nap.
