Chapter 54: a steeple holds a bell, the night sky holds the moon
On Monday the clouds roll in. On Tuesday the rain begins.
It's not like before. It doesn't feel like ominous rain, rain acting as harbinger for things far worse than being unable to escape the wet. It's a gentle kind of rain, almost soft enough to not force the use of an umbrella if you'll only be outside for a few minutes. People in town seem nervous about it, jumpy, and it's not hard to understand why. On Tuesday night when Daryl stops in at the diner a few blocks away from the feed-and-seed - a pleasantly greasy place with a correspondingly greasy all-day breakfast menu and a large matronly waitress named Bella who seems to like him for some reason - the people in booths and at the counter are talking in low mutters, heads bent together as if they're afraid the weather will overhear them and start getting ideas.
Maybe he should be worried. Maybe he should be terrified. Maybe he should be terrified for the very reason he's not terrified: he's halfway through wolfing down his roast beef sandwich when his phone buzzes.
miss you
He just sits for a moment, looking at it, sandwich still in his other hand and meat juice running down his fingers.
Two words. Simple. Innocuous. It's not like she hasn't said them before. It's not like they're some big new thing.
Except they are. All her words now are new. Because everything is new. Because he didn't realize it at the time, didn't understand it until now, but when the world flooded the world itself went into the water, was washed clean, remade, came up changed. It doesn't seem like anyone else is aware of it - more than once in the last couple of days he's wanted to grab someone and demand to know if they've noticed anything different about everything - but that doesn't make it less true.
It's not just him. It's not just in his head. Everything is different. And he's not terrified, because a few miles outside of town there's a girl who misses him and wants him to know it.
He puts down the sandwich and gropes for a napkin, turns his head toward the window, snapping the phone shut and closing his fingers around it like he's trying to keep the words from spilling out all over the countertop and blinding someone. He's staring at the rain going slate-colored in the dusk, staring through it at nothing at all. He doesn't even see it. He sees the elegant ivory curve of her back, tendrils of silver hair. He sees her hands dancing through the dark.
He should reply.
He doesn't know any poetry - none except what she's given him - but he would really like to compose a sonnet or something, text it back to her.
So then he's laughing silently. He's laughing at himself, the rain, his sandwich. Fucking hell, he thought he was crazy before.
In the end he settles for three words. They'll do.
girl thrown in at the end, like a fingertip pressed against the seam of her lips.
It's a school night, obviously - Christ, that still fucks with him sometimes - so he can't sneak out to her and she can't sneak out to him. Or shouldn't. They really need to be careful now, because now the opportunities for being stupid are so much greater. But there is the phone.
There is most definitely the phone.
So then he's gripping himself in a tight, torturous fist, telling her to come for him, imploring her, beseeching her to give herself everything because he can't. Thinking but not saying, because he's not sure how, that if he deserves to feel good then she deserves ecstasy and she deserves it constantly, but he'll settle for hearing her make herself come, knowing that for these few gasping, shuddering seconds she almost has it. What she should have all the time, every second of every day. What he would give her if he could.
He used to suffer because he wanted her like this and knew he couldn't have her. Now he suffers because he can have her, just not right now.
It's okay.
After, they don't hang up. They talk in low murmurs, not about anything in particular. Like usual she does most of the actual talking, and that's fine. He loves to listen. He lies on his back, staring at the trickles of orange-gray rainlight on the ceiling and he loses himself in the flow of her sweet voice. Telling him about her classes - there's an English Lit midterm coming up that she's mildly stressed about. Telling him about the ridiculousness of the student council elections in full swing. Telling him about the pep rally on Friday afternoon which everyone has to attend and which she's desperately trying to think of ways to get out of - time better spent with him, God, yes - and about how Jimmy always used to be into the football team, like a lot, and she just never got there with him. Not a big deal at the time, but now it's just one more thing.
He would like anything she likes, and if she didn't like something he likes he would well and truly not give a fuck.
But no. That's silly. That really is childish, and not in a good way. She's herself. He's himself. He loves her so much he still thinks it might genuinely kill him, but he's not her appendage.
She would hate that.
"Read me somethin'," he whispers - just as he's close to slipping into a doze and he can tell she's in the same place - and she lets out a soft breath and disappears for a couple of minutes. When she comes back he hears a rustle of pages.
"You care what?"
"Surprise me."
"You don't know any of these. Any of 'em would surprise you."
"This ain't the same from before?"
"Same poet? No, this is different."
He smiles. It feels like it runs down the back of his throat and through his arteries and into all of him, warm and smooth as her skin. "Kinda takin' a risk, ain't you? Switchin' shit up on me?"
"Daryl." She laughs, so low he almost doesn't hear. "Hey. Remember the stuff about surprises? You'll like this. I promise."
He trusts her. Never a doubt. Not about this.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
She's quiet for a short time after. So is he. His throat is stuck, closed around itself, and the streaking rainlight is blurring away.
Little boy in the woods, the only true kind of running away he had. All bruised, scraped, fresh scabs and other things no one could see but he felt worse and more keenly than any of the others. But there he was in the trees, in the stillness, making his way down to the pond to look for frogs - not to catch or hurt them the way he's sure Merle would but just because they were interesting - hands smooth against the ferns and feet soft against the carpet of pine needles, heading for cool mud, and everything else went away. The sun and shadow, never the same twice. The mockingbirds and the tanagers. The woodpecker's rattle. The rustle and scurry of creatures skilled in the practice of keeping themselves out of sight. Green and brown and gold smells, rich and heady, filling him.
His secret places. Somehow he was never chased there. Somehow he was never found. He could do what he always wished he could do when things were so bad. He could disappear.
He could be nothing.
"How do you know?"
He says it in a thin breath. What she says back... He's not sure he really hears it. Not sure he really said what he said. It could have happened somewhere else. That tangent universe crashing in on this one, gentle and ruthless. Like her, tearing everything apart and emptying everything out to make room for itself.
How do you know?
Because I love you.
The rain doesn't stick around. By mid-morning on Wednesday it tapers off and by noon it's stopped entirely. The sun comes out, warm, and the puddles steam and the air feels saturated with water anyway, but everyone palpably relaxes.
The flooded end of the street is being repaired. The damage is bad but not as bad as people feared. They actually got pretty lucky. Daryl catches a quick thing about it in the local paper: work should be done in a month or so. By Thanksgiving for sure.
He'll be there to see it. Now that it's solidified in his mind as an actual decision, he stands on the sidewalk in the twilight and looks at the silent hulks of the construction equipment, and he thinks about a concrete, singular point in the future for which he'll be present. A line from A to B. Something to follow, something to fix his attention on.
The place where he almost lost her. Patched over and healed.
What will that mean?
He takes a look at the real estate listings. There are another couple of possibles. One of them comparable to the other two they've looked at and one a little high in terms of rent, but all the utilities are included in the latter, and it's less shitty, or it seems like it. Better part of town. Slightly, anyway. He knows the area; it's quieter. There are more trees.
Second floor of a house. There's a small black and white photo. Grainy, but it seems like a nice house. Victorian, or Victorian-ish. The windows, the ones visible, appear sizable.
He looks at it for a while.
He shows it to Merle. Merle looks at it too, looks up at him; his expression is dubious, which it has been through this entire process so far, but he nods. Guess it can't hurt. Some old lady on the ground floor, maybe. More space than she needs, looking to augment social security. Merle cracks a beer and mutters something about a hundred cats. Daryl allows himself a tiny smile and makes no attempt to hide it.
He likes cats.
They had this routine before, this method of operation: They have to minimize contact. They have to be very, very careful about when and how and how often they see each other, speak to each other, even look at each other. Nothing new. Except everything is, everything. Every time he catches her eye there's a new weight behind it, a new heat - a tether stretching between them, hooking, tugging. On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday their hands touch under the dining table - not even necessarily holding but just grazing, whisper of skin on skin, like what their bodies can do in miniature - and it's all he can do to keep from moaning aloud.
Late Wednesday afternoon he's coming back to the house from the barn, toolbox in one hand, and he's on the phone - Merle has called him about a food run, what exactly the fuck they need, like Merle is incapable of looking in the goddamn fridge and figuring it out - and his foot slides in a muddy patch. He doesn't fall but the phone does, and she's there, at it before he can get to it, and before she straightens up he sees right down the scoop neckline of her shirt: perfect little handfuls cupped in soft blue cotton.
She smiles at him as she holds out the phone. Her wide eyes are sparkling. He's sure she intended for him to see that. Sure it was a present and a tease both at once.
No one in earshot. "Girl," he whispers, and she flushes, licks her lips.
Eating dinner that night, she holds his hand as Hershel says the blessing - hot and small and curled against his - and he thinks about doing more under the table than a little grazing touch. He thinks about slipping his hand between her legs, pressing and moving just-so with his fingers, seeing how long and how well she can keep it together.
It would be fucking suicide.
But he can think about it.
Thursday: Cooler. Much cooler. Not yet cold, but he's back to long sleeves, at least until work heats him up. He's thinking again about the next few weeks, swinging back and forth between vagueness and vivid clarity. New place. Repaired road. He wonders what they'll do with the park. Those paths, the ones they walked, that stand of eucalyptus, those half-tended flowerbeds. The little bridge.
Some things probably can't be fixed. That's just an ugly fact of life. There are scars and they don't fade.
But there's a lot of beauty. There's a blue sky, crisp wind, and that morning he sees the first gray flocks of wintering juncos, fluttering and trilling, hopping around the ground near the henhouse. Peak won't be for another couple of weeks at least, but there are already little hints of red and gold and orange in a few of the trees. Promises of coming fire.
Less than two months until December.
He's not afraid.
Thursday night before he leaves she texts him. There's a ruined barn at the end of the south pasture and he meets her there. The moon is rising earlier now - waning gibbous - and it's just above the treeline, huge and golden, already bright enough to cast shadows. He could swear he sees it reflected in her eyes when he shoves her against the wooden planks of the half-fallen wall, obscured by him when he cups her face in his hands, thumbs against her jaw, tilts her head up to capture her mouth. It is like capture; she clutches at him, hand fisted in his shirt, and it might be mistaken as struggling for a few seconds before she surges into him with a soft moan.
She's wearing a skirt. He's sure she meant to. It's short and light and it's easy to drag up, get a hand under it and between her thighs, slip his fingers under the waistband of her panties and into her slick folds. He's so fucking hard with no condom - maybe he should just start carrying one around - but all his focus is locked on her anyway, how she's trying to hook her leg around his, knee pressing his hip, trying to hard to open herself wider as he slides a finger into her soaked cunt and fucks her slow and as deep as the angle allows.
No words this time. Just her whimpers, her gasps. Not even his name. There's something about that he likes, teeth closing lightly on her bottom lip. As if he's taken all her words away from her and left her only with her desperate incoherence and his hand. And he works her slowly, dangerously slowly but he wants so much to take his time, teasing her clit with his thumb until she's pulling his hair with both hands and whining through her clenched jaw, and only when she pulls hard enough to hurt him does he give her what she's begging for, sending her over with rapid circles of the pad of his thumb and finger as far in her as it'll go. She snaps her body forward and back, mouth open in a silent cry trapped in her throat, and falls shaking into his arms.
Like always he licks her off his fingers. She laughs against his neck, kisses him. Slips a hand between them and cups him, tracing him with her palm, but he shakes his head. He'll take care of it. Later.
And he doesn't want to yet. He wants this fire in him all the way home.
He waits for ten minutes after she leaves, then follows her.
One thing definitely hasn't changed: they love teasing. They love being teased.
Love to burn.
She can't get out of the pep rally on Friday. She's very annoyed. It does mean they'll be let go from school half an hour early, and she has no reason to go to the football game that night. But: she can use the football game as an excuse, can't she?
She can.
Warm weekend. Will it be warm enough for the swimming hole?
It will.
Note: poem is "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry.