Page 9 of Hard Cider Mountain Man

Her hands go over my shoulders, my ribs, gripping and losing hold and gripping again.

"Harder," she says.

I give her harder. The blanket's going with us across the boards by inches. She's saying something on every stroke now, half of it my name and half of it not language at all, and I get my hand into her hair at the back of her skull and hold her head where I can see her face.

"Look at me."

She looks.

"That's it," I say. "Stay there."

She comes with her whole body arching up off the floor and her thighs locked around my hips, clenching around me hard enough that I have to stop moving entirely for three seconds or it's over. She's still coming when she gets her mouth against my throat and bites, and that finishes it.

I go into her deep and stay there, shaking, one hand under her head so she doesn't hit the boards and the other still in her hair.

The stove ticks. She's got one leg over both of mine and she isn't in a hurry to move it.

"I don't apologize for wanting things," I say into her hair.

five

Juneau

Subject: REVISED — Northgate Storage Partners / Harker (9.02 ac) — accelerated close

Rob Teale writes the way all acquisitions people write, in short paragraphs with a lot of white space, and the white space is doing the work. Northgate has approval on two other sites in the region. Capital allocation for the fiscal year closes end of month. They can move funds today. Signed offer back by Saturday noon and they'll add ten thousand to the purchase price as a signing incentive, and here is the wire confirmation from their solicitor's trust account, attached, three hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars sitting in a lawyer's account with my grandmother's name in the reference line.

If not Saturday noon, they redirect the capital. That's the last line. No threat in it. A fact about a fiscal year, delivered as one.

I sit down on the end of the bed and do what I always do, which is the math.

Twenty-two thousand in student loans. Nine thousand on the line of credit I opened for my mother's funeral. Eleven thousand on the card from the year after, when I was twenty-two and grieving and buying furniture instead of crying. Forty-two thousand dollars of a life I've been paying down at the rate of a woman who is very good at spreadsheets and not good at asking for help.

Three hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars clears it in a morning. Not in eleven years of automatic transfers on the fifteenth. In a morning. It clears it and it puts a down payment on the apartment on 12th I've walked past nine times. It puts my mother's estate to bed. And it does the thing I actually want, which I am too proud to say out loud even in an empty hotel room: it proves I can be handed a piece of inherited family mess and deal with it cleanly, efficiently, on schedule, without becoming one of those people who lets a dead person's feelings run their calendar.

My mother never came back here either. Not once in her whole life after they left. She used to say, when I asked, that there was nothing there and she'd left nothing behind.

She was wrong about that.

I put the phone down and pick it up again.

Sign it, and by Monday I am a woman who was handed a piece of inherited family wreckage and disposed of it correctly inside a single business week — no drama, no dragging it out, no becoming the kind of person who lets a dead woman's grudge dictate her fiscal year. That's not nothing. That's the entire architecture I've built since I was twenty-two.

Don't sign it, and by Monday I'm a twenty-seven-year-old urban planner who turned down sixty-five thousand dollars of somebody else's money over a feeling, in a town where I know four people, one of whom I have slept with on a floor.

I have a mark on the inside of my thigh from a man's beard. I've been aware of it every time I've crossed my legs since Tuesday, in the hotel, in the car, in a lawyer's waiting room. I woke up at five this morning out of a dream I'm not going to write down, with my hand already somewhere it had no business being, in a room that smelled like hotel soap instead of woodsmoke and cold cellar air, and lay there afterward doing arithmetic about flights.

Four days. That's the whole file on this. Four days and one wool blanket on a floor, and I am sitting here with three hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars on the screen thinking about the exact sound he made against my throat at the end.

I am an extremely reasonable person. I have never once been this unreasonable and it is not, at this precise moment, a problem I want solved.

I open the site plan again. Rows six through fourteen under the slab. And I sit on a hotel bed with wet hair and I want, with a specificity that alarms me, to sign it.

That's the part nobody tells you. It isn't a hard choice because one side is bad. It's hard because the clean, fast, correct answer is sitting right there being clean and fast and correct, and everything on the other side of the scale is four days old.

I drive out to the cidery.

He's up a ladder against the pressing shed with a socket wrench, fixing a gutter bracket that came loose, and he comes down when he sees the car and wipes his hands and listens to all of it. The accelerated offer. The wire. The Saturday noon deadline. The number.