Page 9 of Kept By the Devoted Mountain Man
She's quiet for a moment. "I've been performing a lot of things lately," she says. "Or I was. The relationship — the whole last year of it — I'm trying to be someone who didn't need the things I needed. Kept telling myself I was being flexible, that it was love. Then one night I just — run out of performance. Say it out loud.I want children. I have wanted them since I was old enough to know what wanting something meant.And he looks at me like I'm finally getting around to a conversation he's been dreading for years."
She wraps both hands tighter around the mug. "And now, I don't have a plan. I just need to be somewhere that isn't my apartment."
The porch light is off. There's still enough sky-glow to see her face.
"Good that you came here," I say.
She turns her head to look at me and I look back and the evening is very warm and very still and I can smell the pine from the tree line and faintly, underneath it, the particular warm clean smell that is hers.
She says: "Nora's lucky. To have someone who shows up every day."
I put my mug down. I lean forward. She doesn't move back.
The kiss is quiet. Her mouth is warm and she makes a sound low in her throat when I cup her jaw and she tips into it, and for a moment it's just that: the porch and the dark mountains and her hand coming up to my arm, gripping lightly.
I pull back.
I don't want to, but I pull back.
She looks at me. Her eyes are dark and her lips are slightly parted and she doesn't say anything yet, giving me room.
"You're leaving soon," I say.
The warmth doesn't leave her face. "I know," she says.
Neither of us moves. The river goes on below the tree line. The last birds go quiet. The mountains hold the dark.
"Beckett," she says.
"Yeah."
"I know," she says again. Softer. Complicated.
She picks up her mug. Finishes her cold coffee. We sit for another twenty minutes and talk about ordinary things — the reading program, the trail I've been working on past the ridge, whether Nora's fox will find his way home. Normal things. The kind of easy conversation I haven't had with another adult in a long time, and that fact sits in my chest right alongside the fact that she’s not going to stay, and I hold both of them and don't know what to do with either.
When she leaves I walk her to her car and she says goodnight and drives back toward town. I stand in the gravel and watch the taillights disappear through the trees and I stand there for a while after that too.
five
Tessa
I'mgoingtofindhim.
The idea arrives somewhere between the kiss and the drive home and I've been talking myself out of it since last night, which is how I know I've already made up my mind. When I'm actually undecided I don't have to work at it. The working is the tell.
I find the maintenance road. I find the truck pulled off in a wide spot with two others, and the sound of work somewhere ahead — chainsaws, the particular percussion of timber being moved. I park and I sit for exactly thirty seconds, which is enough time to know I'm not going to turn around, and then I get out.
The trail crew is a hundred metres up: three men working a section of blowdown, two on the far side of a log pile and Beckett near the truck with his back to me, marking something on a clipboard. He's in the same jeans and grey shirt as always, sawdust on both.
He hears me before I reach him and turns before I speak.
"Tessa."
"Hi."
He looks past me at the road, then back. Waiting.
"Sorry for interrupting," I say. "I just… I need to say something and I thought if I waited until pickup I wouldn't say it."
