Page 50 of Fated, Allegedly

He reaches under me again, finds my clit, and rubs in time with his thrusts. The third orgasm hits harder than the others, sharp and full-body, my walls fluttering and squeezing around him.

"Fuck Eri…" My name partially breaks from his throat.

He lasts only a few more strokes after that. He drives in deep and holds, cock pulsing as he comes inside me. He falls onto my back, still inside me, breathing hard against me, and then eases out, pulling me into the curve of his body. I feel the cool air on the sweat cooling on my skin. His arm settles across my waist, heavy and warm. Our breathing gradually slows to the same rhythm. I close my eyes and let the quiet settle around us, the only movement the rise and fall of his chest against my spine.

"Tuesday in November," I say into his ribs.

"Soup," Nash agrees.

32

NASH

The birds come back in the second week of July. By summer, the valley has started learning how to be ordinary again.

I'm on the shore with a coffee when she comes in at seven, and she doesn't tie up properly, just throws the painter at the cleat and vaults out with her notebook held over her head like a trophy.

"Eleven," she says. "Eleven on the west shoal, and there were six last Thursday, and that's not birds moving around — the shoal's holding them, which means there's something on it to eat. Nash, the whitefish are back on the spawning ground."

"You're sure?"

"I've got egg counts. I've got fry." She smacks the notebook against my chest. "Six weeks ago that shoal was a desert. I'd have told anybody who asked that recovery on a system like this takes fifteen years and I'd have been able to cite four papers at them."

"And now?"

"And now I've got to write a paper explaining why a lake got better in eight weeks, and I can't put the actual reason in it, and I'll be extremely annoyed about that until the end of my professional life."

She's happier than I've ever seen her. The rest comes back through the summer, one thing at a time.

The herons come to the drowned timber in late July, nine nests where there were none in April. The otters are on the outlet side by August and Wyatt has photographs of a pair with three pups. There's a bear on the east ridge that I haven't seen the like of in three years, and the water farther than the drop-off has gone from that flat dead gray back to the green-black it's supposed to be.

The families move back into the bay in stages. Their numbers had fallen from fourteen to nine before we got underground. There are eleven now, with the two we brought up from site two, and in August there's a birth, and Erin is invited to it and comes home at dawn unable to speak.

Grace says the pack's healing runs quicker again. Nobody has a way to measure that except my mother's forty years of judgment, and I'll take my mother's judgment over an instrument.

The coalition meets for the first time in September, at Marrow Creek, and it goes better than it has any right to.

Bracken's grandmother has been made their Alpha outright, which anybody could have predicted after the first week in our valley. Loon River comes with four people instead of one. Two of the drowned-timber elders are carried in on stretchers and put in a stock tank, and nobody thinks it's strange, which is the whole point.

Erin presents for forty minutes on the state of the source. She's been running a field-strength proxy off water chemistry all summer — her own method, built from nothing, because Helix's instruments went into the flood with everything else.

"Recovery's real but it isn't complete," she tells them. "The gradient's back to roughly ninety-one percent of what I can reconstruct for the pre-drilling baseline, and it's still climbing. I'd guess three to five years to full."

"Guess," Loon River repeats.

"Guess. I've been measuring this thing for four months and it's four hundred miles across and nobody in the history of the world has ever had a baseline for it." She grins at him. "You're going to have to learn to live with a scientist who says I don't know, because the last people who measured it never did and look what they built."

Afterward, Loon River finds me by the fire.

"That's the second time I've watched her tell a room full of Alphas she doesn't know something," he says. "In my community that would end a person."

"In your community somebody should try it."

He laughs. "We're doing the second meeting at Bracken in the spring. You're still chair. Don't sulk about it."

We hold the gathering toward the end of September, on the point, when the maples have gone.

Every community sends people. By the time the sun's down, there's an overflow of people, plus every Stillwater family, plus a stock tank hauled to the water's edge on a trailer by four of the Kettering boys with a great deal of shouting. My father has been cooking for two days. Hazel has her tenth notebook and won't be moved from the good chair.