Page 11 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

"Then talk to me. You've been shutting the door an inch at a time since Thursday, and I spent a day and a half in a motel room finding out what the finished version of that feels like, and I'd rather you slammed it."

"You've got a flight," he says.

"On the twenty-eighth. I've had a flight the whole time. You knew about the flight."

"I knew about it Thursday differently than I knew about it Tuesday. Knew about it again yesterday, when your car wasn't on that road."

"You could have come down."

"I could have. I didn't. Because your face went somewhere else while you were standing right there." He looks up. "I've watched two hundred colonies for eleven years. I know when something's split its attention. You went out of the yard and your body stayed."

That lands, because it's accurate.

"That's fair," I say. "I'll own it, and I want to say something about it. But first you're going to say the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"The thing where you've decided how this ends and you started moving out of the way three days early. You're doing the thing where you disappear before I can decide to."

He doesn't answer.

Moss shifts by his feet.

"Heath."

"You want me to deny it."

"I want you to say it."

He looks at the window, where there's nothing to see but our own reflection and the dark cabin interior behind it.

"I know how this goes," he says. "You go back to a city with two million people in it and a job you're good at and a book with your name on it. First week you'll call. Third week you'll call. By February the drive up that fire road is going to look a lot longer than it does in October." He turns the mug back the other way. "So yes. I started getting ready. That wasn't a decision. That's a thing I caught myself already doing on Thursday, and I didn't stop it."

I set my shoulders and march up to him, so close that our boots are almost touching. Moss sniffs and looks between the two of us, wondering if he needs to pick sides. I haven’t prepared myself for any of this conversation, so I hope it comes out right.

“For three hours on that first Saturday, and for most of last Wednesday, and for the whole time you were telling me about your grandmother and the five feet, that part of me was not in the room. That's never happened. In five years, not once, not at home, not with anyone. You think the phone means I'm going. It means I'm scared, because the only thing I know how to do with something I love is turn it into a story, and I don't want to do that to this."

He's quiet.

I've learned to wait through it now. I wait.

"Say it again," he says.

"Which part."

"The one where you said love."

"I love you," I say. "That's the part. I've known you eighteen days and I love you, and I've been carrying it around like something I might drop."

Heath gets a hand around the back of my neck, thumb under my jaw, and holds me there and looks at my face like he's checking the sound of a hive before he opens it. Whatever he's listening for, he finds it.

Then he kisses me and it isn't careful.

I grab a fistful of his flannel. He walks me backward and my shoulders hit the shed wall and he makes a sound against my mouth, low, annoyed at himself, and pulls back enough to strip his jacket off and shove it between me and the boards. Then his mouth is on me again. Canvas at my back, warm from him. The whole shed smells like split fir and the cold underneath it.

He gets my zipper down and my jacket open and pushes my sweater up with both hands, and the October air hits my ribs and I gasp and he swallows it. His hands are rough. Hive tools and wire and eleven years of the same work — I feel every callus, and I want them, and he knows it because I say his name into his shoulder.

"Say the rest of it," he says.