Page 89 of The Cabin
Silence. I look up at him, and his eyes drill into me. Search me. He’s unrushed. Patient. Still and gentle and strong.
“What do you want?” I whisper it to him. “With me, I mean.”
“More.” Soft, and his usually rough voice is almost smooth, but that’s just because he’s nearly whispering. He’s admitting something at great cost: risk, vulnerability. I could and might reject him—again.
The fire crackles, the only sound. Except my hammering heart.
His hand cradles my face, his palm like sandpaper and leather. He’s waiting. For me to get up, to tell him again that I can’t, that I don’t know, but I do know and something inside me, a tender just-germinated seed of something tiny knows that I can. And that I want to.
I’m warm, wrapped in the blanket and in his arms.
I shift to sit more upright, so my face is closer to his. Look at him, and tell him yes with my eyes even though my voice is caught in the hammering trap of my throat. My hands rest on his chest.
He angles his head to one side. Closes in. “I’m gonna kiss you, Nadia.”
And then he does.
It’s soft and slow. The beard is unfamiliar and ticklish, brushing rough against my upper lip and somehow soft at the same time, and his lips are warm and dry, and they feel cracked against mine and taste of rainwater. It is an unhurried first kiss. Gentle and questing at first, waiting for the pull-away. But it doesn’t come because I don’t want to pull away. I’m okay, here, in his arms, in the shelter of the blanket and his body and the cabin and the forest and the weeks and months of time to ache and hurt and question and rage.
It’s all right to kiss Nathan.
I’m giving myself permission.
He pulls away, first. Only a little. Enough for his lips to move, a barely vocalized question, his eyes too close to mine so they seem more like one cyclopean eye. “Okay?”
I nod. My fingers trail up from his chest to his shoulder, feeling the thick hard layer of muscle over dense bone, and then further up the side of his neck, and I momentarily feel his pulse drumming fast under my fingertips—he’s nervous too—and then I tangle my fingers in his beard.
“Kiss me again,” I whisper.
He shakes his head. Brushes at my damp hair. “Nope.”
I frown, pull away further. “No?”
A smirk, small and sly. “You kiss me.”
I weave my fingers into his beard; pull him back to my lips. “Fine.”
And now I kiss him, I lift up and I curl my other hand around the back of his head in the soft feathery damp weight of his hair and I let feelings for him well up inside me. Let them rise. Let them exist. They’ve been buried inside, deep down, locked in a cupboard. Growing, until the hinges were creaking and fit to burst.
He’s good.
He’s kind.
He’s patient.
He understands my bad days, my ugly moods, my morose silences, my simmering anger. He doesn’t judge me for them or let them hurt him because they’re not about him.
He’s handsome.
He has gentle, creative hands that can tease artful life out of dead wood.
I kiss him, slowly, and let the things I feel escape, all of their complicated whirring wings like a twisting murmuration of starlings whispering and fluttering out of their too-small cupboard and let them escape and let their song begin to rise.
And I think of the title of Adrian’s last book, the one he didn’t give to me: Redemption’s Song.
I get it, Adrian. I hear your song.
I’ll always love Adrian. I won’t forget him. I’ll always have days where I miss him. I’ll hear a song and think of him. I’ll pass by a restaurant downtown where we had dinner after a movie, and I’ll see his ghost and mine walking hand in hand in the sweltering Atlanta evening and for moment I know I’ll almost hear his voice telling me how he’d rewrite the movie, which is why he usually only read nonfiction in his spare time.
But those moments will pass.
He’ll still be gone, and I’ll still be here, alive, on earth, with a future I still have to fill with memories, with life. I can’t live in the past: he’s not there any more than he’s here. I’ll have the memories, the time with him. His love.
He’s loving me from beyond the grave.
He was telling me how much he loved me—he has been, through this whole thing. The cabin is his love letter to me. Each item was his voice and his hands, caressing me. Reminding me that he loved me that I was his and he was mine and he knows me. But the cabin was also him telling me that I still have to remember to live.
That I have to go on without him.
