The Cabin Read online

  “I want to be inside you,” he growls.

  “I took all day tomorrow off, and I already had Saturday off,” I said. “We have all the time in the world.”

  “But I need—”

  I touch his lips with a finger. “What you need is to lay there and enjoy what I’m doing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah?” I slow down, but add a twist. He loves the twist.

  “God, yeah.” A huff. “Do that again.”

  “What? This?” I do it again.

  “Fuck, yeah. That.”

  “What if I do…” I lean over him. “This?” And taste him.

  “Ohhhh shit, Nadia. You do that and it’s over.” He loses his voice, then. Because I’m not stopping.

  He groans, and I’m loving him all over, with my hands, my mouth, my tongue.

  We don’t keep score. This isn’t about what he did while I was cuffed to the bed. It’s not even about the necklace currently draped on his upper thigh as I tongue him to ecstasy.

  It’s about how much I love his pleasure. How much I love the feel him abandoning control to me. Letting me show him my desire for his release. It’s about…me.

  I dreamed of this while trying to fall asleep, so many nights.

  Now he’s here and you bet your ass I’m gonna make my own dreams come true. After all, he’s made the rest of my dreams come true.

  Most of them, at least. Almost all of them.

  I push that away, viciously. Later.

  Now, it’s him. This. Us.

  It is over fast. I love it that way. I enjoy knowing I can make him lose it in two minutes flat, max. He’s mine. I know him, I know what he likes. Inside and out, I know him.

  When he’s gone and done, I kiss his belly, his chest. His lips. He kisses me, unafraid to taste himself on my breath. He works into a sitting position, and we eat our yogurt and bagels, drink our lattes, and there’s no need to talk. Our eyes say it all. The silence itself says everything.

  And I’m fully aware that when we’re done eating, he’s going to keep eating…but me, instead of food. That might be part of it.

  It’s all a big complicated circle. And I feel no need to figure it out. It works, and that’s what matters. I know him, he knows me, and we work together perfectly.

  He finishes first. I’m much slower to finish, both my food and my climax.

  He takes his time, this time. No hurry. Not a race to as many as possible. This is about making sure I feel every moment of it, fully.

  And I do.

  * * *

  We watch a movie, and a second, until we’re tired enough to sleep—well past three in the morning.

  I wake to full daylight through the windows, and Adrian in bed with me, hard, grinning, waiting.

  We take our time.

  * * *

  It’s noon on Friday before I bother asking about his trip.

  “It was a trip,” he says, as if even talking about it is boring. “Libraries, historical battle sites, lots of driving around in rental cars. Nothing exciting.”

  “What’s the story going to be?” I ask.

  He’s quiet. A long time, actually. Much longer than the question merits; he’s always talked through his ideas with me, from inception to publication.

  “I…” he sighs. “This one, I think…I think I need to sit on it a bit longer before I’m ready to talk about it.”

  I don’t know what to make of that. “Um. Okay?”

  I’m on my back, head resting on his bicep. Sheets around our hips. The afterglow is pungent. His finger idly, lazily traces figure eights around my breasts, circling one nipple then the other, back and forth, possessively, simply enjoying the privilege and right of touching my body.

  He does not physically, audibly sigh again, but nonetheless, his pause before responses just…feels like a sigh. “I don’t know how to explain it, Nadia. All my stories up till now have just sort of flowed out of me. Naturally, easy as breathing. Some have felt…bigger than others. You know what I mean? Like, not in terms of length, or even possible popularity, sales, like that. Just…the size of the story. The weight of it, inside me.”

  “Like when you wrote Love, Me?” I ask, referencing the book that put him on the literary map, and cementing his place in the public mind. “Because I remember when you first started talking about that idea, you said it felt big.”

  He nods. “Like that. But this one is…bigger. Just more.”

  “And you can’t talk about it?”

  He shakes his head. “Not yet. I need time to stew on it. I might need to get some of it down even before the research is done. I just feel it, Nadia. And it’s not going to come out the way I usually work, so just…just be patient with me, okay? Just give me some space to do this one differently, is all I’m asking, I guess.”

  His words feel heavy. Like they are freighted with meaning I cannot quite fathom. As if the true depth of what he means is something he could not truly even put into language.

  I lie in the silence. “Adrian…” But I don’t even know what I’m trying to say, what I want to say.

  There’s something, but I don’t have the shape of it yet. Like someone blindfolded me, brought me to a table, sat me down, took off the blindfold, and in front of me was a two-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, but I didn’t have the box for reference of what it was supposed to look like—I just had to try to fit the pieces together one at a time and get a feel for what it was supposed to be as I went.

  He rolls over, curling his arm to pull me closer as he levers himself over me. Gazes down at me. His eyes are full of unconditional love, blazing hotter and clearer than the day we said “I do.” Whatever the puzzle is, I do not have a single shred of doubt that this man loves me. I can rest on that. Whatever is going on with him, he loves me, and more now than ever.

  I can taste the truth of that as he kisses me; it’s written in the crush of his lips on mine. I can feel it as he touches his forehead to mine, breathing my breath. Times like this, we need no foreplay. No games. He kisses me, and I kiss him, and we wrap up together as if someone had filmed a braid coming loose and then reversed the flow, so you saw the braid twining itself together. Or, perhaps more apropos: a glass shattering on the floor, breaking into a million, million pieces, into glass dust and infinitesimal shards. Filmed, the flow reversed, so the dust assembles into shards, and the shards into jagged chunks, and the chunks puzzle fit themselves into sections and the sections fuse into the whole.

  That’s how we make love, in this moment. He kisses me, and I taste the absolute adoration on his tongue. I feel the fullness of his devotion as he fills me, bare within me, and then our love is joined, molded together in this sacred movement. We writhe together in an everlasting ouroboros, whispering love, worshipping each other by name, and the time it takes to reach our mutual completion is an instant, an hour, I neither know nor care, I only find awareness of him pulsing within me and my own shattering around him and our sweat commingling and lips touching and tongues tasting and gasps mashing into tangled groans.

  * * *

  Evening Saturday. Sunset a bloody orange fading to full scarlet.

  I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve made love since his return Thursday. We’ve screwed on the back porch with a bottle of wine as the summer fireflies flash orange in the dull heavy suburban Atlanta heat. We’ve fucked in the kitchen, me bent over the island, the marble cold against my bare breasts, his thrusts short and rough. We’ve languorously debauched in the tub, frothy mountains of bubbles revealing our union in brief glimpses of flesh as the water sloshes over the edge.

  He’s frantic for me.

  Wild.

  Rougher than he’s been in a long, long time. Desperate, almost.

  As if proving something to me, or to himself.

  But after, as he holds me and nuzzles away our sweat and whispers iloveyou like a benediction in the slow silence, his gaze sometimes seems a million miles away, a thousand years away. Then I speak, and he�
��s with me again, and whatever I saw in his eyes is gone and I doubt I ever saw it.

  Saturday evening, and I’m making dinner. Spaghetti bolognese. Easy, quick. A bottle of red uncorked and breathing—Josh, my favorite brand. I’ve been battling my hair, brushing it out of my eyes with my wrist as I knead spices into the raw ground beef with my bare hands, blow it away with a huff, and finally I get sick of it. Wash my hands and head up to our bathroom in search of a hair tie.

  I hear our toilet flush, a pause, and then flush again. When I go into the bathroom, there’s a sour tang in the air. Adrian is wiping his mouth with a hand towel. Mouthwash bubbles as it swirls down the drain. I eye Adrian, waiting for some kind of explanation.

  “I realized I haven’t brushed my teeth since I’ve been back and they felt fuzzy.” He brushes lips against my temple. “Dinner smells good—I can smell it from up here.”

  And then he’s heading downstairs, leaving me in the bathroom wondering if I’ve missed something.

  His toothbrush is dry. The bottle of mouthwash is still in the medicine cabinet—where I always put it. In the ten years we’ve been married, he has never one time put the mouthwash back in the cabinet when he’s done with it, he just leaves it on the counter. It’s one of those little things in a marriage that drive you bonkers, but aren’t worth making a big deal out of. I just put it back, sigh and shake my head and sometimes mutter a few annoyed curses. I do things like that which prompt the same response from him, and it’s just how it is.

  But the mouthwash being put away…it sticks in my head as meaning something; I just can’t put my finger on what.

  He smelled like mouthwash when he kissed my temple. I scented it, briefly, faintly.

  And something else.

  Sharp, sour.

  “Nadia?” I hear him shout. “Water’s boiling. I’m gonna put the noodles in.”

  I set it aside. Later, I’ll have time to puzzle over why he would lie about mouthwash.

  But it sticks in my craw—whatever the hell that stupid phrase even means. What’s a craw, anyway? I consider Googling the origin and meaning of the phrase, but it slips my mind and the rest of the evening passes in easy conversation and watching a sci-fi thriller on Netflix and opening another bottle of wine and then I’m tipsy and we sleep together, this time just sleeping, and yet even as I drunkenly slumber, I dream of Adrian standing in front of me, and he’s just looking at me, and in the dream I NEED to ask him what he’s hiding, but my lips won’t work, my mouth won’t open, and he turns away in the dream and the opportunity to ask him is gone. And when I wake up with the sliver of silver moon hung in the window frame like a stray fingernail clipping, I can’t grasp the shape of the dream, only the fleeting emotional substance of it.

  Whisky & Women

  I’m having trouble with my appetite. Just…not hungry. Nauseated. I’ve been warned that with pancreatic cancer, having symptoms at all is not a good sign. The early symptoms tend to be vague, more generalized and not immediately tagged as symptomatic of cancer. Thus the fact that I didn’t get mine diagnosed till it was already spreading, and fast.

  It’s already beyond my pancreas, so surgery wasn’t an option even then, at the very beginning. Chemo isn’t going to cure it. Just extend my life. Make it suck less.

  People have lived for years with it, and others have died within months of first detection.

  I’m maudlin, today. Nadia is at work, and I’m feeling like shit. Since she’s gone, I let myself just wallow in the shittiness, a rarity for me. It sucks. It hurts. I don’t want it. It’s not fair. Wah-wah-wah. The river of bullshit from my weak mind and sensitive, artiste heart is sickening even to me. Fuck this.

  I’m trying to force myself out of the funk when my phone rings. Oh, yay! A distraction.

  “Hello?” I answer it on the third ring. Don’t want to seem too eager.

  “Adrian, hey. This is Nathan Fischer.”

  I blink. “Hey, bud. Long time no see, how are you?”

  Nathan is a carpenter, real salt of the earth kinda guy. I met him on the set of Love, Me, for which I was a consultant and executive producer and he was a set construction foreman. We ended up spending a lot of time together during the filming, drinking whiskey in my trailer and talking about our mutual love of old Hollywood westerns. We still talk, every so often, still connect for drinks every few months. He sometimes gets contracted for jobs outside the Atlanta area—he’s been in Glasgow for the past four months, working on a shoot for a miniseries, a WWI piece, I think he said. He must just be getting back into town.

  “Doing good, man, glad to be home.”

  “You were in, what, Glasgow?”

  “Mostly, yeah. It was a challenging set. Complicated and extensive. Looks good on the ol’ resume, though. The director is getting a lot of attention, so having worked on his set will do good things for me.”

  “Good to hear it, happy for you.”

  “How’s books?”

  “How about we meet downtown for drinks and talk, huh? Usual spot?”

  “Sounds good. See you in twenty?”

  “For sure.” I end the call; get my wallet and keys and head out. I still feel like shit, and drinking is probably not a great idea considering liver failure is what tends to be the real killer behind pancreatic cancer, but fuck it. I’m gonna live while I’m still alive.

  Nathan is good people, and I always enjoy getting to talk to him.

  We meet up at our favorite bar in downtown Atlanta. He’s big, Nathan is. Six-four, and broad as a damn barn. Heavy shoulders, thick chest, thick arms. His hair is almost as dark as Nadia’s, but he has tinges of gray at the temples. Short but thick beard, also streaked here and there with silver. He’s the same age as me, forty-one. His hands always fascinate me—they’re gargantuan, almost double the size of my hands; when we shake, his grip is loose and easy, but it’s like shaking hands with a cinderblock.

  He got here before me and ordered for us—we chose this bar as our haunt because they have a bewildering selection of whiskey and scotch and rye. He’s ordered an obscure scotch, something he discovered in the UK, I figure.

  It’s just shooting the shit at first. He talks about the set in Glasgow, lots of building trenches and such, the challenge of making new wood look old and muddy and splintered and blasted, things like that.

  Two doubles in, and I sense him going sour. He’s quiet, and I let it be. He does this when he’s a few drinks in—goes from animated and easygoing to slow and dark.

  “Thinking deep thoughts over there, Nate,” I say.

  He shrugs. “Nothing worth sharing.”

  “Try me.” I don’t usually push, when he goes dark like this.

  He never wants to talk about it anyway, and seems to appreciate that I can just sit and sip and let him claw his way out of whatever pit the whiskey shoved him into. Today, though, I can’t shake my own maudlin, my own depression. I’ve tried to fake it, hanging out with Nathan. A glance here and there from him, though, tells me he sees through it and is just being polite enough to ignore it.

  “I will if you will,” he says, his voice a low, bumpy grumble.

  I sigh. Flick a finger at the bartender at the other end of the bar; she nods, brings over the bottle. “Breaking the mold here, my friend,” I say. “But you’ve got a deal.”

  He waits until our tumblers are full again, two ice cubes each tinkling around the amber. “Truth is, I’m thinking about my wife.”

  This has me rocking back on my stool. “You’re married?” I cough around a startled mis-swallow. “I’ve known you almost four years, and you’ve never told me you’re married.”

  “Was.”

  “Past tense.”

  “Yup.” A hefty slug from the tumbler. A hissed growl as it burns on the way down; this is thick, bold scotch, with a rough burn that only turns honey-smooth after you’ve swallowed it.

  “Divorced?”

  He shakes his head. “Nope.”

  “Shit.” This hits close.
“She, um…she passed?”

  He harrumphs. “Hate that bullshit phrase. She passed, like she just sorta moved on, nice and easy. She died.”

  I take a more tentative sip. “You, uh. You want to talk about it?”

  He’s silent for a long time. “I’ve talked to a shrink. After she died. Every week for six months. Helped, I guess. Very least, I started to understand what I was feeling. Which is…it’s a fucking lot.”

  My face burns. The whiskey is unsettled in my belly. I can’t look at him—I’m scared he’ll see the nature of my curiosity. “I imagine it is a lot.”

  “No. You don’t imagine.” His forefinger, the size of a frankfurter, if not thicker, taps rapidly on the bar top. “It’s just so much, man. And it’s all tangled together like one big rubber band ball of fuckedupness.”

  I go for a sideways bolt of honesty. “I don’t know how to navigate this conversation, Nathan. I want to ask, but not if it’s going to hurt you more. You want to talk, talk. I’ll listen.”

  He humphs again, snorting into his whiskey, a narrowing echo of sound as he brings the tumbler to his lips through the snort. “You don’t know what to ask?”

  “What not to, more like.”

  He chews on the inside of his cheek. “Ask me about her.”

  “What was her name? What was she like?”

  “Lisa. Lisa Leanne Fischer. Thompson, originally. She was tiny. Five three in socks, a buck ten soaking wet. Somehow made short and lean look curvy. Blond hair, blue eyes. Firecracker. Girl was hell on wheels, man. All attitude and sarcasm. Funny as hell.” He sighs. “Most I’ve talked about her since she died. In therapy I tended to talk about how I was feeling, not her.”

  “Have you…” I hesitate. “I dunno how to put what I’m trying to ask.”

  “Just ask, Adrian. Won’t offend me.”

  “How do you move on? Have you moved on?”