Skin and Smoke

On the seventh night the fear had nowhere to go, so it did what fear does when it has nowhere to go: it turned into need. We had been wound like springs for a week, Eli and I, and the springs were at their limit, and that night, after Mae and Theo took the firepit and the last of the wine out to the yard, Eli and I went inside, and we shut the door, and we stopped pretending we were two people who could wait.

I will not tell you the details. They are mine. They are the only things from the cottage that are still mine and still clean, and I'm keeping them. What I'll say is this: it was the kind of closeness that only happens when you've been afraid of losing someone, when every inch of their skin is proof they're still here, still warm, still yours, and you have to touch all of it to believe it. He was careful with me the way he was careful with everything, the locks and the doors and the road, but here the carefulness was gentleness, and his hands shook, and when he said my name it was like a question he needed the answer to, and I answered it and answered it.

The lamp was off. The window was open a crack for the air. The lake sound came in, the small lap of water, and outside, far off, the murmur of Mae and Theo at the firepit, their voices rising and falling, safe, a few yards away. The door was locked. I'd checked it. He'd checked it. We checked it together and then we didn't check anything anymore, we were only each other, his mouth, his hand in my hair, the dirty blonde of it going black in the dark, the blue of his eyes gone to a color you only see when someone is that close.

That was the night. That was the whole of the good part of the night. The two of us, in the dark, in the locked room, in the cottage on the lane where someone had died, refusing to let the lane be the only story, making a small story of our own that was only ours, that was about being alive, that was, in its small way, a kind of fight, a refusal to be counted out by the dark outside.

And the dark outside was patient. I want you to hold both of those at once, the way I have to hold them now and forever: that inside the room was a love so whole it felt unkillable, and that outside the room, behind the open crack of the window, in the soft dark, something was already there, already listening, already measuring the distance between itself and the door we had locked, and it was closer than it had ever been, and none of us knew, none of us, because the murmur of the firepit was still going and the lake was still lapping and the door was still locked, and a locked door is not a wall when the person on the other side of it has been learning the lock for five nights from the tree line.

I didn't hear it. I need you to understand that I didn't hear it. He didn't hear it. We were breathing each other's breath and the lake was lapping and Mae and Theo were laughing, somewhere, safe, a few yards away, and the thing that had been a shape between the pines was now a shape against the wall, and the wall of the cottage is thin, it's just pine boards and air, and a person on the other side of it can hear everything, and it heard everything, and it waited, and it chose its moment, and then the moment came.