I do it again, slower, watching his face lose its composure piece by piece, and he lets me work him until his hips push forward and then he wraps his fingers around my wrist and pins it to the mattress and the feeling goes through me like a current.
He pushes my thighs apart and lines up and pushes inside me in one long stroke and I exhale hard at the fullness of it. He stops there, forehead dropped to my temple, both of us just breathing.
Then he starts to move.
Deep and slow. His weight on his forearms. Face close to mine, eyes open, on me. The lamp makes everything warm and gold and I can see all of him and he can see all of me and there is nothing between us — no dark, no pretending, just this room and this light and his eyes on my face like I'm the most interesting thing in the entire mountain range.
He finds the angle that undoes me and stays there. I dig my fingers into his back and he drops his head and works, steady and patient, and I feel everything winding tighter and faster than I expect.
"Harder," I say.
He gives me harder. Gets a hand under my hips and tilts me and goes deeper and I stop being able to form words. His thumb finds my clit and he keeps moving and I come apart underneath him — thighs locked around him, back arching, his name the only thing left in my mouth — and he pushes deep and goes still and follows me, his face buried in my hair.
We lie there in the quiet afterward. His hand settles on my stomach, warm and certain. The woodstove ticks. Outside the bedroom door, something small and deliberate lands on a shelf and considers it.
Then knocks something off.
A pause. Then something off a different shelf. Slower this time. Making a point.
Dawson exhales through his nose.
"Cashew," he says.
"I figured."
"He does that when he thinks he's being ignored."
I stare at the ceiling. "Honestly fair."
I start laughing and I can't stop and Dawson makes a sound that is unambiguously a laugh, low and real, and I turn toward him and he pulls me in and the cabin holds us, the woodstove ticks, and outside the mountains are doing their patient, enormous thing, indifferent to everything and present for all of it.
His hand presses against my stomach once. Warm. Certain.
Nyla
One Year Later...
It'sraininginthatsoft, insistent October way that turns the whole valley gold even as it soaks everything, and I'm on the cabin porch with my second coffee watching Cashew try to herd a pine cone.
He found the cone at the base of the big spruce about twenty minutes ago. First he sniffed it thoroughly, then batted it twice to establish dominance, then sat back and regarded it with his head tilted as though conducting a full structural assessment. He has apparently determined that the cone belongs at the far end of the porch rather than its current location, and he has been executing this relocation ever since, nudging it forward with his nose a few centimetres at a time, pausing to reassess, occasionally sitting down and staring at it as if it might cooperate on its own if he waits long enough. He is not frustrated. He is not reconsidering. He is simply working. He has all day.
"That's not going to work, Cash," I tell him.
He ignores me. He always ignores me. He ignores me the way he ignores the fact of being a cat — comprehensively, without apology, with the serene certainty of an animal who has decided certain facts don't apply to him and has not yet been proven wrong.
I pull my knees up and wrap both hands around the mug. The rain is changing the valley, softening the edges, turning the larch slopes on the upper ridges to amber and gold, laying a low grey sky over the peaks that have their first proper snow now, the white sitting up there clean and patient above the treeline. I've been trying to photograph that specific combination for two months. The gold and the grey and the snow and the particular quality of October light that lasts about forty minutes in the morning and then shifts into something entirely different. I've gotten close twice. I haven't gotten it yet.
Two prints are sitting in the back room. A ridgeline shot from last week — I went up with Dawson on a three-day client trip, carrying my camera and staying out of the way and letting the mountain show me what it wanted to show me, which is what he taught me without teaching it, by example, by watching him do it for a year. And a tarn reflection I finally got last Tuesday at six in the morning when the light did something unrepeatable for about four minutes and I was standing in exactly the right place because I have been learning, slowly and with great patience from a man who has none of the shortcuts, how to arrive somewhere before the light does.
The prints go in the rack at Maple's hotel. No website. No inbox. No social anything. Just the prints in the rack and occasionally someone buys one and Maple leaves the money in an envelope under the counter with a note in her extremely neat handwriting.
My phone is on the kitchen bench inside. It has been there since I woke up. I have not thought about going to get it, whichis the thing I track now — not the days when I resist the pull, but the mornings when the pull isn't there at all. When not reaching for it is simply the shape of the day, as unremarkable as the rain or the coffee or Cashew and his inexplicable projects.
He achieves his goal. The pine cone reaches the far end of the porch, its correct and rightful location, and Cashew sits back and surveys it with the satisfaction of a job properly done. Then he turns around three times and lies down on top of it, tucks his nose under his tail, and goes to sleep. Protecting it now, presumably. It was a lot of work to get it here.
"Well done," I tell him, sincerely.
He doesn't respond. He's busy sleeping.
