Page 11 of Kept By the Devoted Mountain Man
I set the pace and he lets me, for about thirty seconds, and then something in him gives way and he stops letting me. His hands take over, lifting and pulling, and I grab the back of his neck and go with it. The workbench creaks under us. Outside the birds are loud and the trees are loud and somewhere down the trail his crew is finishing up for the day and none of it is relevant in the slightest because Beckett Hale has his mouth against my ear saying quiet wrecked things about how I feel and what he wants and I am not a person who loses track of herself but I have completely lost track of myself.
"Don't stop," I say into his hair.
His hand moves between us and finds where I need it and I say something that is definitely not a word and he does it again, harder, and I clench around him and the world narrows to this shed, this man, the specific sounds we're making, his breath jagged in my ear.
"Tessa."
I pull back enough to look at his face and his expression is completely open, every wall down, just him at the bottom of it all, and that's the thing that does it. Not the touch, not the heat, not the friction. That face. The real one.
I come hard enough that I have to muffle the sound in his shoulder, my whole body shaking, and he follows right after — his hips stuttering, grip fierce, a single rough sound against the side of my head that he will never, I suspect, make in any other context on earth.
We stay tangled together for a long moment. The shed is hot and smells like sawdust and sex and summer. A woodpecker starts up in the trees outside, completely indifferent to the situation.
six
Beckett
SundayItakeNorato the river. We skip stones and eat sandwiches on the flat rock and she talks about school starting in September and I listen and answer and do the work of being present.
She's quiet on the walk back. She holds my hand without swinging it, which is how she walks when she's thinking about something hard.
"Is Miss Tessa still coming to the program on Tuesday?" she asks.
"She's supposed to leave."
Nora processes this. "Tomorrow?"
"Today."
Two steps. Three.
"She's going back to Vancouver?"
"That's where she lives, bug."
She doesn't say anything else. We get back to the truck and I get her in and buckle her and go around to the driver's side andwhen I get in she's looking out the window with both hands flat on her thighs, very still.
"Okay," she says.
Like she's putting it in the same place she putsDaddy isn't coming back,and the thought of that — the thought of her having a practiced place for loss, at five years old — does something to my chest I don't have words for.
"Nora."
"I'm okay," she says.
She's not. I'm not. We drive home.
I'm making dinner when I hear her.
She's in Jace's room — I can hear her through the wall, the specific quality of sound a child makes when they're crying and trying not to. Small, controlled, the kind that means she's been doing it for a while. I leave the stove and go down the hall and open the door.
She's on her bed, face in the pillow, Jace's old hockey jersey pulled over her shirt — she does this sometimes, wears it to sleep, doesn't say why — and when I come in she goes still, waiting to see if I'm going to make it worse or better.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
"Come here," I say.
She comes. She climbs into my lap, all forty pounds of her, and puts her face in my neck and cries properly — the full-body kind, shoulders heaving, nothing controlled about it. I put both arms around her and hold on.
