Page 7 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

"Boots," I say. "Socks. Everything wet. There's a stack of towels in the basket."

"Do you do a lot of stripping in this room?"

"I do a lot of not tracking the mountain into my own house."

She sits on the bench and hauls the boots off and her socks come away in one grey sodden clump, and she peels them and laughs at the state of her own feet, wrinkled white to the ankle. The rain's coming off the eaves in a sheet across the doorway. Four degrees, maybe five, blowing straight up the valley from the northwest, exactly the way I told her it would.

I get the stove going.

The main room is one room. Table, two chairs, a counter with a two-burner propane range, and along the whole north wall the drying screens, four tiers, loaded — chanterelles in halves, hedgehogs, a full screen of black trumpets from a spot up the creek I'll die before telling anyone about. The place smells like woodsmoke and drying fungus and cold stone.

It’s home.

"Oh," she says from the doorway.

She's in my wool socks to the knee, a towel around her shoulders, and her damp base layer and she's not looking at me. She's looking at the screens.

"That's, wow, Daniel, that's four thousand dollars of dried chanterelle."

"Closer to six."

"Can I?"

"Yeah."

She goes down the wall slowly, touching nothing, bent close, reading them the way you'd read a bookshelf in someone's house. And I stand at the stove with my hands doing nothing and watch her do it, and the room is not a room I've ever seen with somebody else in it.

Three years ago there was a woman I was seeing in September who by the last week of October had stopped returning anything. Four years before her, the same shape. October takes what it takes. I made peace with that a long time ago and I've never once broken the terms of it, and I have never brought a single one of them up this road.

"You're cold," I say. "Come here."

Lena stands in front of the stove with her back to it and her arms crossed and I put my hands on her upper arms to rub the cold out and that lasts about four seconds before both of us stop pretending it's about circulation.

She looks up. There's rain still in her eyelashes.

"Say something," she says.

"I'm going to kiss you."

“Yes, please.”

I take her face in both hands, which are warm now, and hers are not, and she gets them flat against my chest under my collar and the shock of it goes through me. Her mouth is cold at first and then it isn't. She makes a sound into it and my hands go into her hair. I feel her come up onto her toes to get closer.

I get the wet base layer up and off over her head and drop it on the boards. Her skin is cold across the shoulders and warm under her arms and she shivers hard, once, and pulls me back in by the shirtfront.

"Off," she says. "You're wearing four layers, this is absurd."

I strip out of all four. She puts both hands flat on my chest and takes her time, thumb over the old white line of a scar on my shoulder.

Her bra comes off against the heat of the stove. I get my mouth on her breast and she says something in one breath that isn't a word, and her nails go into my shoulder. I take my time there — one, then the other, until the shivering has turned into something else entirely. Her legs go weak. She's holding the edge of the counter behind her for the sake of standing up.

"You’re still cold, babe," I say against her collarbone. “Let me warm you up.” I scoop her into my arms and take her to the bedroom.

The back room is smaller and darker and the rain is loud on the roof of it. I get her out of her leggings and her underwear at the edge of the bed and she gets my belt open with the efficiency of a woman who works with her hands, and then we're both down on the wool blanket and there's no cold left anywhere.

She's got a hand around my cock, learning the weight of it, and I let her do that for a while with my forehead against her temple, breathing.

Then I move down.