Vermont wasn't as painful for either of them as they'd thought it might be, starting out. Peter filled the first few days with sensory gifts: bacon waffles with maple syrup; a newspaper spotted with donut frosting; strong coffee on a porch covered with pine needles; a second-run movie in a theater with actual curtains. Since they'd hashed out their differences on the first night, Peter felt like Olivia was really trying to enjoy herself. She smiled more, talked more, and sometimes she even laughed. They'd gone to see the horses a few times and, despite expressing no desire to ride, she'd patted them fearlessly on the nose and neck, pleased with herself.
Peter worried, though, that he was missing some bigger picture. Walking around town with her, stopping into little places filled with penny candy and one box of every brand of toothpaste, he kept feeling like he was skating the surface of how she felt. Playing card games at the kitchen table, he watched her bet and suspected that, despite the penny ante, she was holding back. And at night, when she climbed into bed with him, he received her warmth gratefully but sensed a gap in the circuit between them that he hadn't fully closed, one he couldn't locate on his own.
Once, on the third day, he tried to press her about it.
"So," he said delicately, over the mystery stacks at the tiny library/town hall/post office, "how're you holding up out here?"
"What do you mean?" she said, flipping through the pages of a cheap trade paperback.
"I mean, you've made it three days out here, confined to mostly small and dusty places, with me. And while I'm sure I'm one of your top three favorite people, alongside my father and possibly our pizza delivery guy back home, I'm still impressed you haven't chewed off one of your limbs trying to escape."
Olivia reshelved the book with an odd look toward him.
"What I really mean," Peter said, "is that I hope you're having as good a time as I am."
Olivia's odd look faded, but didn't quite disappear. "Sure," she said, and she picked up another book.
It was all the answer he could ask for, but it didn't reassure him at all.
On the fourth night, he drove them home late after a few beers in town. They went straight out again for a walk, not ready to sleep. The road through the woods was abused and abandoned, all disintegrated asphalt and loose stones, happy to trip Olivia sideways while she forged ahead in the dark. Peter followed, wide pupils staring into the dark space between indigo trees. When the moon came out of the clouds, leafless saplings glowed against the heavy firs like bones.
"Am I going too fast for you?" she called back to him. He heard a twig snap under her foot and the nearly-silent expletive that followed.
"Sounds like you're going too fast for you," he said, picking his way around a frozen puddle the size of a small lake. She'd probably just gone right over it: fearless as usual.
"No such thing," she said. She stopped by a stand of birches, iridescent in a cloudbreak. Peter caught up to her a minute later in a burst of crackling ice.
"What is it?" he asked. Without answering, she gazed silently into the woods. Peter looked with her, and they both heard the sound when it came again. Olivia turned back to him, surprised by her own excitement. Though he could barely see her expression, Peter couldn't help but mirror it.
"You never heard an owl before?" he whispered. He'd heard a hundred owls, mostly through the window screens of the cabin on Reiden Lake. Maybe there weren't as many owls on army bases. "Didn't you ever go to Girl Scout Camp?" Olivia shook her head at him. Between them, her smile was Velcro-sticky and tough to ignore. "He's probably sitting up there," he said. "Look in the low branches."
As she scanned, Olivia realized that she was looking for the shape of the only owl she knew: plastic, with eyes that moved only back and forth. Of the two owls in her world - one a shadow not yet filled in, only a hope of seeing, and the other hanging on a wall miles and miles away, the heartbeat of the home they'd left - what excited Olivia most was the prospect of seeing the latter again.
Peter glanced at her, not meaning to catch her looking at him but catching her just the same. "It's right behind me, isn't it," he deadpanned.
She played along willingly, looking just over his head. "Big teeth, for a bird," she said. Peter grinned silently, and though she'd seen him do it a hundred times, it looked different when he did it now. The dark made everything feel just a little bit unreal, and that unreality made Olivia feel different. She leaned closer to him, frozen dirt crunching under her heels.
"I didn't think I'd say this on this trip," she said, "but I'm almost having fun."
If Peter didn't know better, he might have thought she was drunk. "Yeah?"
She didn't answer, but for a second, before the moon submerged again, they stared at each other in a way they hadn't, quite, before. And then it was gone.
An hour later they came out of the woods, through the edge of the trees and into the open field. Olivia was leading, still, and Peter didn't bother to call to her when he stopped halfway across. Had the sky been clearer, he could have shown her how even the best of planetarium shows can't get close to the real thing. Ten yards ahead of him, Olivia stopped, too, like she'd had the same idea.
"Peter," she said. He approached her looking up, ready for her to point to whatever it was, so when he felt her hands on his neck he almost backed away in surprise. She didn't let him. She kissed him, instead.
Shock kept Peter still, but Olivia moved like it was something she did all the time, something they did all the time. She walked into his body like a warm wall and, when he'd recovered enough to breathe, she took the breath from his mouth until they were both dizzy. In the middle of the tall brown grass, Peter held her head in his hands and let the world spin. The most he could think to do was lean into her, keeping them both standing as she put more and more of her weight against him. She pulled at his collar, riding it up his neck until it almost chafed.
"Peter," she whispered, when she pulled away.
"Right here," Peter reminded her, in case she wanted to try again. He was pretty sure she would; anyone who kissed like that often did. "Jesus Christ, sweetheart, I'm right here." He breathed against her cheek, closed his eyes, and waited. But nothing happened. He'd never waited out a longer minute than the one before he opened his eyes to a cold vacuum of air and the ghost of her face as she turned away from him, starting back toward the cabin. He followed her, and it was force of hope that made him expect something more to happen once they reached it. But again, nothing did.
She disappeared into the bathroom, and he waited until he couldn't keep his eyes open for another minute, finally falling asleep with his clothes on, sprawled across the bed that was meant for the both of them.
Olivia looked over him when she emerged, from the hand spread over his stomach to the tiny upturn of his slack mouth as he breathed, dreaming. About her, maybe. Lifting his arm from her side of the mattress, she placed it by his side and lay down where it had been.
"Peter...," she whispered, and then hesitated, on the verge of saying more. Shifting against him, she put her mouth as close to him as she dared. His warm hand reflexively reached for her hip, and suddenly the precipice of the next words seemed too real and too steep. She turned away in a quiet hurry, shoving her pillow under her chin, and tried until daybreak to fall asleep.