Page 100 of The Wild Beneath

He debates asking her to clarify whateverythingis. Whether it means all the people she’s lost: Aiden and Mara and Ruth. Or something else?

“I want to forget it,” she says, “and just be us.”

“It would be impossible to forget everything.”

“It would be so much easier to never think about it all again.”

He’s still not sure whatitmeans, but her grey-blue eyes are searching his face. He would prefer to never think aboutitagain either—­the secrets he’s keeping. A line from a Robert Frost poem floats to mind, one he always misquotes, but it’s something like:the only way out is through. He has to tell her the truth, doesn’t he? Get everything out on the table, all the things they cannot forget. If he told her, she might leave him. Would she be better or worse off without him? It might destroy her... then what’s the point of telling her?

Annie’s still looking at him. “I just want to forget everything for tonight,” she says.

He has to offer her something. “How about you shower. And I’ll make us a fort? Like we used to.”

She smiles, the first legitimate smile he’s seen from her today.

While Annie showers, Evan pulls the couch cushions onto the floor and covers them with a fleece blanket. He lines up kitchen stools for a makeshift wall, then stretches a sheet from the couch to the stools, weighing it down with heavy books. With walls and a roof in place, he adds pillows and their duvet to create a cozy nest inside.

She’s turned off the shower.

He grabs an extra comforter from the hallway closet while Annie towels herself off en route to the bedroom. Since moving to Vancouver, she’s always cold—­especially her feet and her hands—­so much so that he bought her a heated blanket that he often plugs in before they go to sleep.

He doesn’t want to deal with the extension cord, so he takes the extra comforter and puts it over the cushions on the floor, then lays the bed duvet over top of everything. They’ll be sandwiched this way.

She arrives, on hands and knees, crawling through the entrance of the fort, wearing only his last remaining Hale Timber T-shirt. She loves to wear his clothes and does so often; says itmakes her feel like they’re together even when they’re apart. He lifts the blankets for her and she dives under.

She whispers. “Take off your clothes, please.”

He slips off his jeans, hoodie, and undershirt, and is down to his boxers in seconds.

Back when they made forts onAmphitrite, they were too young to know they’d need to get very good at building hiding places. An escape for her, mostly; places where time moves differently and all the sounds are dampened.

They used to readChoose Your Own Adventurebooks in those forts. Once they moved here, Evan made up the adventure stories himself. Once upon a time, a boy built an elaborate sandcastle with moats and turrets for a girl who called herself the Octopus Queen. Once upon a time, that girl taught the boy he could climb to the top of the highest trees and speak with the forest gods. He told her make-believe stories while he kissed her earlobes and wrapped his arms around her, while she slid her feet between his and kissed him slowly.

“Noses,” she says. Which means: Lie on the cushions facing each other, close enough for their noses to touch. To breathe each other’s air.

He pulls the blankets up to their chins to cocoon them. She runs her hands up his ribs, to his cheeks, and she kisses him, her lips so soft, and he wants to devour her—­except that, in here, she gets to decide how it goes. That’s the unspoken rule. He tells the stories, and she decides the rest.

Sometimes they make a fort and she wants to eat popcorn with sprinkles, wants to recount the conversation she overheard in the elevator: about six-metre-long manta rays that collect in herds—like bubbly manta cocktail parties—in the middle of the ocean. Or she wants to listen to his stream of consciousness, and he ends up talking about his mom and what it might be like if she was still alive and the scent of her rosemary shampoo or the way she made him brush his teeth even at lunchtime. Annielistens intently to him, as if she’s trying to hear something else underneath the words.

She does not want to talk tonight.

Her mouth is on his already, her leg up over his hip. She runs her fingertips over his abdomen, pushing down the waistband of his boxers. Tonight is for bodies talking, and before he can remove her T-shirt, she has rolled over, pressing her backside into him, already insisting.

She melts against him as he enters her gently. With a low moan, she reaches behind and pulls him deeper inside.

The sound of their synchronized breathing, as he rocks into her again and again, a cascade of pleasure building from his hips and surging through his body.

This is usually the moment he begins to hear her.

But it’s not a sound that he hears with his ears. It seems to come up from within her, an underneath tone. It’s so quiet and rhythmic—­watery even—­he must be imagining it. Is it the sound of his own blood rushing?

When they are still and her breath has calmed, he retucks them under the blankets and she finally sleeps. He whispers: “I love you no matter what.”

He hopes she’ll take him with her, into the water sound, into her dreams.

Chapter 38

Five days later, Annie sits on an examining table in the ambulatory-care wing of the hospital.