Page 61 of On Dry Land

Slipping my jacket on, I make sure my gloves and hat are in the pockets. Unsure about leaving the door unlocked, but also unsure about whether Dryden has his key, I take mine and decide to find him before I leave. Stepping outside, I immediately see him and smile. No finding will be needed.

I lock the door in hopes that maybe I’ll get lucky and won’t have to walk alone today. Tucking the key into my pocket, I wait for Dryden’s face to turn in my direction before I lift a hand and wave. He meets me at the back door, giving me a slight sense of déjà vu, harking back to the first time I ever approached this door, tentative and slightly afraid of what reception I might receive but feeling a call to try anyway. Swallowing against a dry throat, I smile at Dryden.

“Going somewhere?” he asks in a way that makes my stomach cramp.

“Want to take a walk? I need to get out.”

He stares at me, face a blank mask and eyes dark. I can’t stop thinking about how he told me my eyes were pretty and wondering if he hasn’t been looking in the mirror properly. He’s so beautiful it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that draws you in, but looking at those lovely, inky-brown eyes, I think a case could be made for them being his best feature.

“Sure,” he says after a moment, stepping back and gesturing me into the big house. “Are we taking the car?”

I smile, charmed that he thinks we need to drive somewhere to find a place to walk. I shake my head.

“No, I thought we’d just take the road a ways.”

He raises an eyebrow at that but doesn’t comment. The man with the clipboard, who had been noticeably absent until now, walks down the stairs with a heavy-booted tread.

“Well, Roy, I think we can plan on this being—oh, hello.” He catches my eye and nods in a gesture similar to a way someone might tip their cap. Clearing his throat, he puts his attention back on Dryden, over by the front door and pulling his jacket from the hall closet, supremely unconcerned. “Based on what you told me and what I’m seeing here, I think your best bet is a teardown and rebuild. Not what you wanted to hear, I’m sure, but⁠—”

“That’s fine,” Dryden says calmly, and I almost laugh at the expression on the other man’s face. I wonder how many people respond with “that’s fine” when told their best option is to demolish their house.

“It’ll be a pretty penny.”

“Send me over the estimates. I’ll take a look and get back to you by the end of next week,” Dryden replies, waving him toward the door. When I approach as well, he puts his hand on the small of my back as though I need to be guided through the doorway. I try to lean into it a little bit, telling him I like the contact without actually saying it in front of the other man.

“Contractor?” I ask Dryden once he drives off and the pair of us follow him down the driveway on foot. Dryden’s hand is no longer on my back, and he’s not a hand-holding sort of guy. The narrow distance between our bodies ensures our sleeves and hands brush as we swing our arms, which is enough for now.

Dryden told me, in a tone of voice more suited to a funeral than the bed where we’d been at the time, that he didn’t enjoy providing overt demonstrations of affection and that he found public displays particularly difficult to manage. “I’m not good at it,” he’d added, as if showing someone love required the same sort of skills as tennis.

But this is also the man who draped a scarf over my neck when it was snowing and I didn’t have one. The one who simply takes off his sweater instead of complaining about how high I have the temperature set in the guest cottage. The man who will fall asleep on the other side of the mattress but somehow always manages to find me in the dark and pull me in. And he’s the man who will tip my chin up to kiss me hello and pause, looking into my eyes like he needs to remind himself of the color at the end of every day. If this is a person unskilled in providing affection, then I must be a person unable to recognize it.

“Yes. It’s time for something new,” Dryden agrees. I use my body to steer him gently toward the right when we reach the turn off his driveway. We’ll be walking away from town, and it’ll be less likely for anyone to pass us on the road or stop to chat.

“You can put all those home reno shows to good use,” I joke. On the nights Dryden has the remote, he’ll put on a hockey game. On my nights, I usually go with home improvement. On one occasion, Dryden put on a documentary. I fell asleep fifteen minutes in, and he hasn’t tried again.

“Indeed,” he agrees, boots crunching on the snowpack along the shoulder of the road. It’s not lost on me that he’s positioned me on the inside and himself nearest the road.

“Thinking you’ll just expand what you did with the cottage?”

“Actually, yes. I have a few designs mocked up and a few contacts whose strings I can pull for materials.”

He doesn’t sound excited, per se, but there’s definitely something there. A little less bitterness and a tad more harmony. I lean into him a little bit, waiting for his eyes to meet mine.

“But keeping the pool, right?” I ask him, breath fogging in the cold air between us. He smiles.

“Of course.”

A couple of cars pass on the road, slowing down and moving over the center line to give us a little space and avoid splashing any slush. For the most part, it’s just us. It’s still, here, and silent but for the creaking of the trees in the breeze, and the soft snap and thump of branches as snow weighs them down until they break, the sounds of our shoes and our breathing, and the occasional swish of a jacket as we rub against one another. Every time we round one of the bends, Dryden puts his hand on my back as though fearing a car coming around the curve and preparing to shield me. I turn my head and look at the trees to hide my smile.

“Sometimes I take a drive through here,” he says, breaking the comfortable silence with soft words. I glance at him, hands tucked into my pockets to protect them from the cold.

“Let her rip around the corners?” I ask, thinking of the Porsche and Dryden’s commitment to driving it even in the winter, no matter that he has a more suitable vehicle sitting unused in the garage.

“A little bit,” he admits. “Not in the winter, though.”

I nod, glad for that, not wanting to envision him wrapped around a tree trunk after hitting a patch of black ice on a curve.

“My sister bought me that car,” he adds. It’s the most talkative he’s been in days and the most personal information he’s offered without prompting since I’ve met him.