“Yeah. That’s how it goes.”
He uncapped his water and took a long swig. I did the same. He told me about the first cabin he’d ever built—solo, when he was twenty-three, off a hand-drawn plan he’d done in a notebook on his kitchen table over a winter. He still owned it. He rented it out to the same couple from Asheville every August.
“You drew the plans yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“At twenty-three?”
“I had to draw them twice. First draft, I forgot to put a door on the bathroom.”
I laughed.
The laugh came out of my chest suddenly and surprised me. It was the first time in months that I’d laughed.
He looked at me.
He set his water bottle down on the granite. He set his sandwich aside. He turned his body toward mine, and he reached up and put his hand against the side of my face. His palm was warm and rough and a little calloused from work.
He kissed me.
It wasn’t last night’s kiss.
Last night had been an introduction. This was the second kiss of a man who’d been thinking about the first one for fifteen hours. It deepened. His hand slid back into my hair. My hand found the front of his shirt. The granite was warm under us from the sun, and somewhere down the ridge, a hawk called.
I was in his lap. I didn’t remember getting there. My knees were braced on the granite on either side of him and his hands were on my waist, palms flat, fingers spread. His mouth had moved to my jaw. He was breathing hard.
I broke the kiss and lowered my head, eyes closed. I had to say it twice in my head before I said it out loud.
“I’ve never done this.”
He went still under my hands.
“Any of it,” I said. “I haven’t—I just want you to know.”
He pulled back, just enough to see my face. He didn’t take his hands off my waist. He looked at me for what felt like a long time.
Then he moved one hand up from my waist to the back of my neck and rested it there. His palm was warm against the skin under my hair.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you for telling me.”
“I don’t want you to think it changes anything.”
“It changes everything,” he said. “But not what you think it changes.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
He kissed me again. Slowly. He didn’t push it past where we were. He kissed me like a man who’d just been handed something he intended to handle carefully.
After a while, he pulled back. “I want to take you somewhere quieter.”
“Quieter than this?”
“Yeah.”
