Page 14 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

"Look up."

She looks up. There's a window over the desk and the yard in it, timber stacked square to the world in the grey-gold light, and past it the bench, and I put my mouth against her ear.

"That's yours out there. Nobody's putting a gate on it." I get a hand between her legs and work her clit while I move in her. "You're not visiting anything. Say it."

"I'm not visiting."

"Again."

"I live here." Her voice breaks on the second word. "Gideon — I live here, ah!"

After that I stop being careful.

I take her hard enough that the counter moves, hand spread wide on her stomach to hold her where I want her, and she pushes back into every stroke and tells me exactly what she wants in language I would not have guessed at three weeks ago. Her thighs start to shake. I feel it build in her before she says a word about it.

"You live here. With me. Mine."

She comes on that. Hard, loud, both palms flat on fifty-year-old fir, and the clutch of her drags me over right behind her.

We stay like that. My arms are shaking and I don't let go.

Then she starts laughing, still bent over the counter. “Isn’t this where you do payroll?”

"Yep," I say, and I kiss the top of her spine.

"Your grandfather's counter," she says eventually, into my neck.

"He'd have understood."

She laughs, and I feel it everywhere.

The next morning there's a new drawing on the fridge, held up with a magnet shaped like a pear.

Three stick figures under a triangle roof. One tall with a black rectangle of beard, one small with brown scribble hair, one in the middle with a blue coat.

Underneath, in pencil, pressed hard enough to emboss the page: DAD, ME, FAYE. HOUSE.

Rue's at the table eating cereal and does not look up. "I was waiting."

seven

Faye

Rue has claimed a table in the community hall parking lot by staking it with four pumpkins.

It's the last Saturday of October and the whole lot smells like woodsmoke, pumpkin guts, and somebody's deep fryer. Trestle tables down the middle, a bin of donated pumpkins from a farm out on the flats, a hundred people in toques. The market's packed up for the weekend down at the field and the vendors have come straight here with their folding chairs. They've got that end-of-season look, generous with the leftovers, giving away bruised pears because they're not hauling them home again. The line up is longest at the honey stall. Somebody's playing music nobody is listening to.

"This one's mine, this one's Dad's, this one's Faye's, and the little one is a spare."

"A spare pumpkin," Gideon says.

"In case someone ruins theirs." She looks at him. "It's for you."

"It was one time."

"It was two times."

This is the first time the three of us have been out in public as a unit. I've thought about it more than I'd admit. I’ve been worried about being the city girl in a small town.