I get dressed and drive out past the second ridge.
Everett is in the garden. He's staking the late tomatoes and he looks up when my car comes down the drive, and his expression does what it always does: registers, waits.
I get out of the car and walk to the garden gate and he watches me come.
"I turned down the job," I say.
"Sloane—"
"Not for you." I want to be clear about this because he needs to hear it clearly and I need to say it clearly. "For me. Because I'm not the same person who drove up here four weeks ago and the person I am now doesn't want to go back." I look at him. "You are a very significant factor. But you're not the reason."
The morning is quiet around us. The bees are working the borage. Burl is on the porch.
"What is the reason?" he says.
"The beans," I say. "And the fact that I cried after you touched me and felt better. And the rabbit is about to be released and I want to be here for that. And the fact that your cat likes me and I talked to Burl for forty minutes about basil and I wasn't embarrassed about it at all, and that's new, and I don't want to lose it." I pause, realizing I was rambling. "And you. In all of that, alsoyou."
He opens the garden gate.
We work through the morning and we don't talk about it much more, but it feels good. I pull weeds in the east bed and he stakes tomatoes and at some point his hand finds the back of my neck, briefly, as he passes behind me, and that's everything. That's the whole conversation.
At noon he releases the rabbit.
The rabbit looked great. The splint off, the leg healed clean, the rabbit getting restless in the crate. He carries the box to the east field, the long grass at the fence line where he found her, and crouches down and opens the front panel.
She doesn't move for a moment. Sits in the opening and looks at the field with her nose going.
Then she's gone. A few hops at first, testing the leg, and then faster, and then she disappears into the long grass and the field closes behind her like she was never there.
I'm crying. I don't do anything about it because I'm past pretending tears are something to manage. I just stand in the field and cry about a rabbit and Everett stands beside me and doesn't sayshe's fine, she's just a rabbit,which is the only thing you can say that matters.
"She went fast," I say, when I can. "The leg's completely healed." I look at the grass where she disappeared. "I'm going to be honest with you. I'm crying about more than the rabbit."
"I know," he says.
He takes my hand and we stand in the field for a while.
That evening the light in the farmhouse goes gold.
That's the only word for it — gold, the specific late-July evening gold that comes through west-facing windows and turns everything warm and still. I'm in the kitchen and Everett comes in from checking the hives and the light is doing that thing and I look at him in it — all of him, the same way I let myself look in the early days before I knew I was allowed — and something in me has been patient for too long.
I cross the kitchen.
He sees me coming and goes still, hands at his sides, watching my face.
I reach up and put both hands on his jaw and kiss him.
He makes a low sound and his hands come to my waist and then immediately pull me in closer, and I'm already working his shirt out from his jeans, and he says "Sloane," rough and low.
In the bedroom, I take my time with him the way he took his time with me.
I get him on his back on the duvet and I pull off my shirt and unclasp my bra myself and toss it and enjoy the way his jaw locks watching me do it. His hands come up and I let them. I get his shirt off and his jeans and then I sit back on my heels and just look at him in the gold light and he looks back and neither of us says anything.
"Your turn to hold still," I say.
His chest moves on an exhale. "Sloane."
"I know." I lean down and drag my mouth down his throat, his chest, following the line of his abs, and he goes rigid under me,hands gripping the duvet. I follow the trail of dark hair down his stomach and wrap my hand around his cock and stroke him slowly and he makes a sound that goes straight through me.
