"It's not no to you. It’s a no to what you want to do. I just don’t have sex like that. I like to give.”
"I know."
She looks at me a count.
“I’ve never done it.”
She is sitting on her heels in her work boots and her black trousers and the black shirt she wore to the meeting in the city, and her hair is messy and the wool collar of her coat is bunched at the side of her neck where my mouth was, and her eyes are pale in the violet light. I have not looked at her like this from below before. I have not looked at her sitting back on her heels three feet from me with her hands on her thighs.
She is the most beautiful woman I have seen. I trace the sharp lines of her jaw, of her cheekbones. I admire the shape of her eyes.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Tell me what you want now. I want you to come, too.”
She is quiet a count.
"I could watch you touch yourself,” she says.
I know she loves that. I can do that for her.
“Here?”
"Yes."
"On the blanket?”
“Yes. And I will sit at the back where you can see me, and I will touch myself, and that is the way I will come. That is the way I will take it from you.”
I look at her.
"Why is it like that for you?” I ask.
She does not answer for a minute. I wait.
She is quiet a count and then she says, "It is the way I have taken it always.”
I sit with that.
I sit with it because she has not given me a piece of her like that since I have been in this cabin, and I will not waste it by asking the next question. I have known that she was not a woman who got into beds easily. I am only this minute learning the size ofeasily. She has been in bed with me for two nights. She has been alone in beds for some other count of nights I do not know yet. Or with others who she made love to on her own terms.
She is telling me that the watching is what she is used to, which is the same as telling me that the watching is what she trusts.
"All right," I say. I want to make her happy. Whatever that looks like.
"You will tell me if you do not want to?”
"I want to,” I say. And I mean it.
"You will tell me?”
"Max. I want to."
"All right."
She moves to the back of the truck bed. She sits with her back against the cab, knees up, boots flat on the wool. She settles her weight. She watches me.
