Page 135

“Stand up,” he said.

I stood.

He stood. Moved his chair to the center of the room, away from the table, away from the wall. He sat back down and held out his hand.

I took it.

He drew me to his right side. His hand went to my hip, guiding, and I understood what was happening and my body understood before my mind did — the positioning, the arrangement, the geometry of what we’d agreed to.

Then he took my right hand. The wrapped one. Gently, the way he’d taken it at the arena. He turned it, looked at the bandage, and placed my forearm along the seat of the chair, beside his thigh, so it rested on the wood without bearing any weight.

“You’ll keep that here,” he said. “No pressure on the joint.”

He hadn’t asked how to position it. Hadn’t needed to be told. He’d looked at the wrap, understood the injury, understood which motions would stress the joint and which wouldn’t, and arranged me accordingly.

I registered that.

I registered it the way I’d registered the eggs cooked the way I liked them, the way I’d registered the lamp angled away from my eyes, the way I’d registered every small, precise act of attention that proved he was watching — not to catch me failing, but to know what I needed before I could say it.

He guided me across his lap. My left hand found the floor for balance. My right forearm rested on the chair seat, the wrist supported, the fingers loose. My weight was on my hips and my left arm and his thighs, and the wrapped wrist was held clear of everything.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to start.”

“I know.”

“I’ll check in. You use the words we agreed on. Yellow to slow down. Red to stop.”

“I remember.”

“I know you do.”

His hand rested on my back. Flat. Warm through the flannel. He held it there for a moment — not a pause, not hesitation. A breath. The kind of breath a man took before he lifted something heavy, not because he wasn’t strong enough but because he intended to do it right.

Then his hand moved to the hem of my flannel.

“I’m rolling this up,” he said. “So I can see what I’m doing. No clothes coming off.”

“Okay.”

He folded the flannel up to my waist. The air hit the skin of my lower back — cool, the bunkhouse air, the creek-air, the Montana-evening air that was neither warm nor cold but present.

His hand settled on the small of my back. Steady. A point of contact that said I’m here and I’m not going anywhere and this is happening because we both decided it would.

I closed my eyes and waited.

The first one was a sound before it was a feeling.

His palm flat against the center of my right cheek, the contact firm and clean, the crack of it loud in the quiet bunkhouse. The sensation arrived a half-second later — a bright, spreading warmth that bloomed outward from the point of contact, not sharp, not devastating, but real. Present. The kind of warmth that said this is happening and I am here and you are here and this is what we agreed to.

He paused.

His hand stayed. Resting on the skin he’d just struck, the warmth of his palm against the warmth he’d created, and I could feel both — his heat and the heat, layered, his hand larger than I’d expected, the calluses on his palm rough against the smooth skin of my lower body.

“Okay?” he asked.