Page 6 of My Halloween Hunter

That night I do it on purpose.

I eat, bank the fire and wash the mug, then stand in the window with the curtain open and let him look for as long as he wants. When I go to the door, the brass handle is warm from the room. I turn it a quarter, the same slow turn his hand made from the other side, and feel the give and let it go.

The chair by the stove sits too close to the door; anyone coming in fast would catch a shin on it. I pick it up and carry it to the far wall.

Then I climb the ladder, strip to my underwear and lie on top of the quilt in the dark, waiting.

Cade. I say it once into the pillow without a sound, to see how it fits in my mouth. It fits.

It doesn't take long for my hand to go where it wants to. I slide it down over my stomach and under the elastic of my underwear, and I'm already slick, wet from nothing but a moved chair and an unlocked door and the thought of him out in the cold deciding what to do about them. I spread myself open with two fingers and touch my clit so lightly it's barely touching at all, and my hips come up off the quilt.

I keep it slow. I want to be doing this when he comes.

I think about the boot prints sunk into the needles and how my whole hand fit inside one. I think about his breath on the back of my neck on the creek trail, that long slow pull as he breathed me in, and I circle my clit harder and have to turn my face into the pillow.

After midnight the frost crunches at the north wall.

My hand stops. My whole body stops, listening, and then my fingers start moving again in time with his steps, because I can't make them do anything else. One slow circle for every footfall while he walks the wall eight feet below me. When he turns the corner, I push two fingers inside myself and bite my lip until I taste copper.

One circuit. I'm so wet I can hear it, a soft slick sound in the dark that seems as loud as a shout, and I have no idea whether it carries through the boards to where he's walking.

Two. My thighs are shaking. I work my fingers in and out and grind the heel of my hand against my clit and pretend it's his hand, huge and rough and cold from the night, and that he's the one keeping me quiet.

Three. He stops at the north wall, right beneath me, and I hear him breathe in.

He knows. I'm as sure of it as I've ever been of anything, and the certainty tips me over. I come with my fist jammed against my mouth and my back arched off the quilt, clenching around my own fingers in long hard pulses, and the sound I make into my knuckles is small and broken and absolutely loud enough to hear.

There's no fourth circuit. There's only his weight coming up the porch step, and the board that squeals under me every morning squealing under him.

I'm still shaking, still slick, my hand still inside my underwear when the handle turns.

This time the door opens.

4

Cade

The chair's gone.

I stand in her doorway with the cold at my back and the heat in my face, looking at the empty place by the stove where it sat at an angle for four nights, always in the way. Now it's up against the far wall.

She moved it for me.

I step inside and ease the door shut without letting the latch catch. The room is hot and everything in it is hers. Boots by the door, jacket on the hook, the mug upside down on its folded towel the way she leaves it every night. Her camera bag sits on the table with a tag stitched to the strap in black thread: DARCY. IF FOUND, CALL.

Darcy. Oh, I found, all right...

Her scent is in the wool and the wood and thick in the hot air, and I stand in the middle of it with my hands shaking and breathe until my chest hurts.

She isn't asleep up there. Her breathing's wrong for it, too quiet and too careful, every fourth breath catching at the top. And under the woodsmoke there's something else hanging in the hot air at the foot of that ladder, sweet and heavy and fresh. I heard her come through the wall. Now I can smell it. When I walk to the foot of the ladder and put a hand on a rung, it stops altogether.

Ten rungs. She's lying in the dark waiting for me with her fingers still wet.

I don't climb.

Her scarf hangs over the back of the moved chair, grey wool worn thin at one end. I drag the kerchief down under my chin, press her scarf to my face and pull in a breath of her so deep my ribs creak. Then I cover my face again. Then I give her the first words I've ever said to her, up into the dark.

"Come down."