I come on my own hand under the sky with her watching from the back of the truck bed. I come the way she said come, into my own palm, with my hips rocked up off the wool, with my left hand pressed flat at my own bruise, with a sound out of me that goes up over the pines and down over the valley and is the loudest sound I have made since I have been in her care, and she comes a count after me with her head back against the cab and her mouth open and a single sound out of her that is not a word.
I lie back.
I am breathing hard.
She is breathing hard.
The sky is full dark. The stars are out. The wind moves the pines. The wool is rough at my back and warm at my front where the coat covers me, and my hand is wet against my thigh, and her hand is hidden inside the wool of her coat, and we are feet apartin the bed of a truck on a forest service road outside the city, and we have just come for each other without touching once.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Come here."
She moves.
She comes up the bed of the truck on her knees. She bends over me. She does not push my legs up. She does not put her hand in. She lies down beside me on her side and she puts her arm across my stomach above where I am wet, and she puts her face into the side of my neck, and she breathes out long against my skin.
"Was that all right?”
"Max."
"Was it?”
"It was the second-best thing you have done for me.”
She is quiet a count.
"What was the first?”
"Yesterday."
"Yesterday."
"Yes."
She lets out a breath I feel against my throat.
"All right."
We lie like that. I do not know how long. The wind moves. A single hawk-cry comes up out of the valley. The truck is cold but our bodies are warm where they touch. After a count I tug the second blanket up over us, and we lie under the blanket on our backs, and we look at the stars.
"Max."
"Yes."
"Take me home."
"Yes."
She sits up. She buttons her own trousers. She helps me into the sweats. She buttons the top button of my coat and she pulls the wool hat back down over my ear, and she lifts me down off the truck bed, and she folds the blankets, and she puts them in the toolbox.
She drives us home.
I sit against her shoulder. The cab is warm. The radio is off. The pines pass black against the dark. I put my hand on her thigh on the wheel side and I leave it there, and she takes the wheel in one hand and lays her other hand over mine, and we drive the fourteen miles back to the county road and the four miles up to the cabin in the dark.
The porch light is on at the cabin.
