Page 5 of True North Mountain Man

I have to turn my head.

I turn it toward the lamp and I make my face into a face and it costs me more than anything has cost me in years, because he thinks he's telling me about five days and I'm hearing five years, and every second I let go past is another second of a thing I'm taking from him without asking.

"Hey," he says.

"I'm here." I get my ankles up around him. "Move."

He pulls back until he's almost out and pushes in again, and the whole of me follows him. He does it again. Again. Deep and unhurried, one hand spread over my hip to hold me where he wants me, and every stroke ends with a small sound out of me I have no control over.

"Faster."

"No."

"Creed."

"You'll get it." He's teasing, making me wait.

He gives me another dozen like that until I can't hold a sentence together, and that's when he leans his weight in, hooks my knee up over his forearm, and starts driving. The table walks across the floor. My shoulder blades slide on the paper. The lamp jumps and I get a hand back against the wall to brace and it doesn't help at all.

He gets his arm under my back and lifts me up against his chest without slowing down, still in me, my legs locked behind him. It's better like that — his skin all down my front, his breath going ragged at my ear — and I feel it coming up through my thighs like a dam about to break.

"There," he says. One word. Aimed.

I come with my teeth in his shoulder and both arms around his neck. He holds me right through it and then he isn't controlled at all anymore, his hand fisted in the back of my hair, and he goes four strokes later saying my name once, quietly, like it's information.

Afterward he holds the back of my head and doesn't say anything for a while.

"Your map's ruined," I tell him.

"I've got another one."

He carries me the eight feet to the bunk. I lie against the length of him with his arm heavy over my waist and listen to his breathing go long, and the guilt arrives on schedule and stays on my chest all night.

I don't say it. Not then. Not once.

four

Creed

She says corridor with the weight on the front of it. CORR-idor. Slightly clipped, like the word's a piece of equipment she's carried a long way.

And something triggers deep in my memory.

"—which is why the pinch point matters more than the total area," she's saying, "you can have eleven thousand hectares of perfect habitat and if the corridor necks to sixty metres at the highway you've got two populations, not one—"

"Say that again."

"Which part?"

"Corridor."

She stops with the pencil against her lip. "Corridor."

"Hm."

"Creed."

"Nothing." I go back to the traverse. "Keep going."