She sits. After a while her breath evens out further. I think she might be asleep against my shoulder. I don't move. When she straightens up, her eyes are dry.
"I should sleep."
"Yeah."
She stands. She looks down at me. Her hand, not the bandaged one, the other, comes up. Her fingers brush the side of my face above the beard. Light. A thumb at my cheekbone. The touch of a woman finding out what she is allowed.
I let her. She takes her hand back.
"Goodnight, Rafe."
"Goodnight."
She goes into the bedroom. The door doesn't close all the way. I hear her get under the blankets.
I sit on the porch in the cold with the rifle across my lap. I think about the shape of her thumb against my cheekbone fora longer time than I should. It has been eleven years since I noticed the weight of a woman's breath against my arm. Eleven years since I noticed where someone's knuckles rested when they leaned on me. The fact that I am noticing now, tonight, about a woman I caught on a path at dawn this morning, is a thing I would normally consider a problem.
It’s not.
four
Hazel
Thestormcomesupover the ridge in the middle of the afternoon.
I watch it from the porch steps, bandaged thumb curled in my palm, coffee going cold against my knee. A black wall of cloud slides in from the west with the rain-foot dragging under it like a curtain being pulled across the valley, and the temperature drops twenty degrees between when I first notice it and when it arrives. The wind turns sharp. The spruces along the road start that deep flex, a long slow lean that makes them look as though they're all trying to agree on something and can't quite get there.
Rafe comes around the side of the cabin with an armload of split fir, drops it into the crib on the porch, looks at the sky.
"Inside."
It breaks twenty minutes later. A few fat drops on the tin roof, and then all at once it's a roar. The windows streak. The cabin goes dim in the middle of the afternoon. He has the oil lamp lit and the woodstove open, and the whole room smells like wet spruce and smoke and the specific ozone that precedes close lightning.
Three days we've been up here now.
Three days of him feeding me at careful intervals and pretending not to watch while I eat. Three days of my hands slowly, gratefully, forgetting how to shake. Three days of him not sleeping, as far as I can tell, except for a two-hour stretch yesterday on the couch while I sat in the chair and held a book I wasn't reading.
Rafe is interesting. He checks the road every forty minutes without appearing to. He'll get up to add a log and his eyes will pass the front window on the way, and the check is folded inside the movement so neatly you'd miss it if you weren't paying attention. He smells like pine and woodsmoke and a soap I've identified as olive oil and lye from the bar by the sink. Yesterday at this table he held my hand in both of his to close the cut on my thumb with butterfly bandages, and when he was done he didn't let go, and I didn't pull away, and neither of us said anything about it.
I've never let a man hold my hand that long.
I've had three relationships. All appropriate, all tidy, all with men who would have let go the second the procedure was over and probably handed me a pamphlet about wound care. None of them ever made the probability-assessment engine in my brain go quiet. That's what happened yesterday at that table — not slowly, not gradually, but all at once, the way a spreadsheet resolves when the last formula locks in. His thumb against the gauze on mine, and the whole machine just stopped.
I know what that means.
So here it is: I'm in love with him. It's not rational, it doesn't have clean columns, and I am not going to fight it, because I know the difference now between things I'm running from and things I'm running toward. He is the first thing I have run toward. I didn't realize I was doing it until I was already here.
I'm not saying any of it out loud yet. I have a small amount of dignity left and I intend to spend it wisely.
After dinner we end up on opposite sides of the woodstove. He made elk stew from a jar his father put up the year before he died — told me that in one flat sentence and didn't expand, and I ate every bite without commenting because I understood that adding words would only make the next telling harder. I'm on the floor in front of the stove, which has become my spot without either of us deciding it. He's in the armchair. Rain on the roof. Lamp on the table throwing the middle of the room gold and the edges dark.
"Tell me about your grandmother's place," he says.
A gust hits the cabin. The stovepipe ticks against the flashing.
So I do. She bought the land in 1968, with her own money, because she was a nurse and she'd saved for it. She built the cabin with her second husband in the seventies — he was decent, she told me once, not nice or kind, just decent, which was about as much as she ever said about him. She came out from Montréal every summer, first with my mother, then with me when I was small enough to believe that everything worth seeing in the world was at the end of a long drive. She taught me to clean a fish on that porch. I hated it. I loved her more than I've ever loved anyone except possibly the man across from me, which is a thought I close the door on firmly.
"You spoke French with her."
