My grandmother’s dulcimer hangs on the wall where it’s been since before I can remember. I take it down.
I’m not entirely sure why. Protective instinct, maybe, something to do with my hands, something between us, something that is mine and known and steady in a way everything else is not.
As I pull the stool from the corner, it scrapes softly across the floorboards. By the time I settle the dulcimer into my lap and look up, he’s in the doorway watching me with an expression I can’t fully read.
“You said maybe,” he says.
“I did,” I say.
He crosses to the couch and sits. The couch takes him without complaint, old enough and deep enough to have developed a tolerance for whatever gets put on it. He settles in and puts his arms along the back and looks at me and doesn’t say anything else.
I look down at the dulcimer. My grandmother’s hands were here. Mine have been here so many times since that the wood knows the weight of them. I find the first position the way I always find it, by feel, without deciding.
I play.
Not performing. Not demonstrating. Just the first song that comes, which is the one with no name that my grandmother made up and never wrote down, the one that went from herhands into mine through the air across more Sunday evenings than I can count. It’s not a showy song. It doesn’t have anything to prove. It just goes where it goes and ends where it ends, and I let it.
Somewhere in the first few bars, I become aware that Kragen has gone completely still.
Not the stillness of someone being polite. Not the stillness of someone waiting for something to end. The other kind. The kind I’ve seen in him twice now: once when he looked at the phlox photograph and thevelaraflowers from home surfaced in him without warning, and once when he stood in front of my grandmother’s photograph and went somewhere else for a moment. Full-body quiet. Like whatever in him that is always moving has simply stopped.
I looked up StillWater after his first visit. Quiet, deliberate, internal: the definition was easy enough to find. The discrepancy between that definition and the male who came into my workshop talking and smiling and taking up every available inch of space was significant enough that I thought about it for several days. I thought I understood it intellectually.
Watching him right now, I understand it differently.
He ran from this. Spent years running from it: the stages, the crowds, the performance of belonging. And here it is anyway, arrived through my hands, through my grandmother’s song, and he is sitting on my grandmother’s couch in the house where four generations of women stayed and he has gone completely,utterly still and he is the most StillWater thing I have ever seen in my life.
I play through to the end of the song.
The last note fades. The room is very quiet. Outside, somewhere in the oaks, an owl says what owls say, once, patient as the dark itself.
Both our heads turn toward the window. Then we look at each other.
He stands.
And suddenly he’s very large in this room. With him standing and me sitting, I become aware of how much of the room he takes up against my grandmother’s wallpaper and lace curtains, the lamp throwing amber light across the floor. He crosses toward me, stops in front of me, and holds out his hand.
I look at it. Then up at his face.
He’s not performing anything right now. That’s what I notice first, the absence of the easy smile, the openness that’s always slightly on, the charm that I’ve understood for a while is real, but is also, at least in part, a thing he does. None of that is happening. He’s just here, taking me in.
I put the dulcimer down carefully, on the side table, both points of contact, the way you set down something that matters, and I put my hand in his.
He doesn’t pull me to him immediately. He just holds my hand for a moment, both of us standing here. His hand is huge around mine. His fingertips are callused from the strings. I’ve thought about his hands since the first visit. Thinking about them is nothing like being held by them.
Something goes very warm at the base of my throat and moves downward. I don’t move. I don’t trust myself to move.
Then he steps closer, and I tilt my face up, and he comes down to meet me, and—
The kiss starts careful and becomes something else almost immediately.
His mouth is warm, and he tastes faintly of apple pie. I register that, absurdly, before I register anything else.
He kisses me the way he does everything: present, with patient certainty, like there’s nothing else happening anywhere. My hand is still in his. His other hand finds my face, and his palm is so large it curves from my jaw to my cheekbone. I feel impossibly small. The slight angle of his head, the careful placement of it—I understand now what his tusks require, and the fact that he has adjusted for me registers somewhere I don’t examine. I don’t mind it. I don’t mind it at all.
Then he sits back onto the couch and draws me with him in one smooth motion, and I end up standing between his knees, which is how we manage the geometry of this without either of us having to think about it. We are at eye level, and the careful part is over entirely.
His hands go into my hair, one at my temple, fingers spreading, tilting my face up to his, and my chest cracks open quietly, the way ice does in spring, without drama and without warning. He pulls back just enough to see my face. His amber eyes are dark and very close.
