Page 13 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

I don't sleep much. I lie in the dark with her against my side and think about February.

Around four I get up and put wood in the stove and stand watching it catch, and Moss leans on my leg because he can't get up on the bed anymore and doesn't like being left out of things.

She wakes at six.

"You've been up."

"Little while."

"Come back."

I sit on the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees. "I built this life so I wouldn't need anybody."

She sits up. Pulls the faded quilt around her. Doesn't say anything, which is how I get through it.

"I don’t say it for pity. I looked at how most people live and how I wanted to live and I picked, and then I spent eleven years finding out I'd picked right." I look at my hands. "A well I dug. A roof I put on. I've been happy up here in a way most people wouldn't credit."

"I credit it."

"I know you do. That's the problem." I turn enough to see her. "It worked. Right up until the second week of October, when a woman told me not to put my own honey in tea. And it's still working, that's the part I can't get around — the bees are still right and the wood's still stacked and everything about this place is still exactly what I wanted. It's all still here. It stopped being enough anyway, and I don't have a system for that. I've got a system for everything else."

She's quiet for a while.

"You know I can work from anywhere," she says.

"You've got shoot dates."

"Third to the seventh, in a studio in Vancouver, and I'll be at them, and then I'll drive back." No flourish on it, which is how I know she thought it through before this morning. "The book isn't in Vancouver. The book is a full pantry and a story worth telling, and there's more of both within four kilometres of this cabin than in my entire neighbourhood. My last proposal had a chapter on ingredients I could buy from a wholesaler in Richmond. This one has a stand of old-growth spruce and an insect nobody's heard of."

"That's the book. What about you?"

"You want me to say I'd move to a cabin with no wifi."

"No." That's true, and I'm glad she made me find it. "I'd rather you didn't. I don't want a woman up here going quietly out of her mind by January because I decided the treeline was the only place worth being."

"I can get satellite internet." She shifts round to face me, knees up. "It’s not a compromise I'm making for you. I've been in that apartment for four years and I have never once slept as well as I sleep in this room."

I put my hand on her ankle first, which isn't a plan, it's what's nearest.

She pulls the quilt off her shoulders and lets it go down around her waist and sits there in the grey light and lets me look at her.

I lie down and pull her over me and she comes up on her knees astride my hips, and I get my hands on her waist and hold her there and don't do anything else for a while.

We're chest to chest, her thighs over mine, close enough to feel her breath change when I put my mouth on her collarbone. I take my time. Her throat. Her jaw. Down to her breast, and I stay there until she's rocking against my stomach without knowing she's doing it. She gets her arms around my neck and holds on.

"Say something," she says.

"You want the talking now?"

"I want the talking now."

"Been thinking about your mouth since four this morning while I was pretending to think about February." I get a hand up her back, spread wide between her shoulder blades. "Been thinking I want you in this bed in January when there's a metre of snow on that roof."

"Keep going."

"Been thinking that this is the only thing in eleven years I've wanted that I didn't build myself."

She kisses me for that. Hard, one hand in my hair, and I feel her smile against my mouth in the middle of it.