She's still catching her breath when I move back up her body. I run my palm down the full length of her because I want to feel all of it and I am done pretending I don't. She wraps her hand around my cock and I go still. She strokes me slowly, watching my face, and I drop my forehead to her shoulder and breathe through it.
"I want you in me," she says. No ambiguity.
I get a hand under her hip and push in slowly. Feel every inch of her taking me, feel her adjust, feel her exhale long and low when I'm all the way in. I hold there a moment. Look at her. Her mouth is open and her dark eyes are steady on mine and she rolls her hips once like a question.
We start slow and it doesn't stay slow. She urges me deeper with her hands on my ass and I give her what she's asking for and the sound she makes gets louder and less careful. Something in me give way. Ten years of quiet. Ten years of just me and the mountain and the work. And now this woman underneath me in the open air, the river loud behind us, the cottonwoods throwing dappled light across her skin, and she is meeting every stroke and asking for more.
"Harder," she says.
I give her harder.
She gets her legs up, wrapped around me, changing the angle, and I feel the difference move through her face — her eyes go heavy and her nails find my back and I drive into her and shetakes it and wants more. The sound of it is loud against the riverbank. Skin, breath, the creak of the grass under us, the river running over rock. Nothing between us and the wilderness. No walls, no roof, no reason to be quiet about any of it.
I get a hand between us, find her clit, keep moving. She arches hard.
"Shaw — frick! — don't stop —"
I don't stop.
She comes the second time like it takes her whole body to do it, with her hips grinding against my hand, her pussy clenching tight around my cock, her head thrown back and her throat open and she is not quiet about any of it. Not one second. I feel it everywhere and I keep going, ride her through it, and only when she's trembling and loose and pulling me down by the back of my neck do I finally let go.
It's not quiet. Not careful. I come with my face in her neck and my hands gripping her hips and ten years of solitude in the sound I make.
Afterward, neither of us moves for a long moment.
The river keeps running. A bird settles back into the cottonwoods above us. The sun is still warm on my back, and her body is soft and heavy under mine. I don't have any words for what just happened except:yes. That. I want that for the rest of my life.
I roll to my back and pull her with me. She tucks into my side, her head on my chest, one hand spread flat over my heart.
"You've been alone up on that mountain too long," she says.
"Apparently."
I feel her smile against my skin.
I stare up at the cottonwoods and think about how a man can believe he has everything he needs, right up until the moment he doesn't.
five
Lara
Thetrackuptohis ridge is exactly what he said it was: rough gravel, steep, the kind of road that requires both hands on the wheel and a vehicle that doesn't mind a fight. We don't talk much on the way up. He drives, and I watch the valley drop away below us through the passenger window and feel the particular satisfaction of going higher.
The cabin comes into view around the last bend, and I understand immediately why he lives here.
Timber frame, a covered porch facing west, the valley spread below in a way that must be extraordinary at sunset. A woodstove chimney. A darkroom addition off the back that I can see through a half-open door, the red light off, the smell of fixer faint in the air. On the worktable inside: lenses, field notebooks, a jar of memory cards on the windowsill catching the morning light.
I stand on the porch and look at the view for a long moment.
"This is exactly right for you," I say.
He's quiet beside me. When I look over his expression has done something I haven't seen before, open in a way he doesn't usually allow. Like I said something that landed somewhere he wasn't expecting.
"Yeah," he says. "It is."
We go inside and he shows me his photography.
He pulls up images on his laptop at the worktable like he's thinking out loud, explaining what he was waiting for in each shot, what the light was doing, what went wrong on the ones that almost worked. He's self-critical in a productive way, the way someone is when they have genuine standards rather than performance anxiety. He pulls up the owl shot and then three others from the same blind, same birds, different light conditions, and shows me why yesterday's was the one.
