"No, it's pretty good."
"So I'll be back in a few minutes."
I really couldn't argue with his reasons for wanting me to stay behind. It made sense.
I waited in the cold cabin while Tolliver worked his way down the ice-slick stairs and began a slow progress across the front yard of our cabin and over to the Hamiltons' place. I poked the fire and added a log, and then I pulled a chair over to the window and wrapped myself in a blanket.
Half of me was intent on following the light held in Tolliver's hand, while the other half was standing a little distance apart screaming, "You just slept with Tolliver! You just slept with Tolliver!" in tones of mingled horror and delight. Only time would tell if we'd just (literally) fucked up the best relationship we'd ever had - or if we'd opened the door to greater happiness.
Even thinking that felt sappy. But God, it might all be okay. I snapped out of this incoherent internal babbling to realize that Tolliver was having a hard time getting to the door of the Hamilton house because of the tree branches.
I opened the window, with a lot of effort. One-handed, it was a bitch.
"You need me to come help?" I called. My voice was startling.
I felt Tolliver was restraining himself from saying that was the last thing in the world he needed. "No, thanks," he called back, with wonderful restraint. Even hearing his voice made me catch my breath. There was something different about it, there was. Some tension that had kept him taut and stretched had snapped. I was as moony and dreamy as a girl who'd had her first French kiss, and I made myself enter the here and now.
The Hamiltons' door was opening, and I could see Ted Hamilton. He was wearing a hat, which looked ridiculous but actually was pretty smart, considering how much of your body heat you lose through your head. He and Tolliver exchanged a few words, and then Tolliver began making his way back over to our temporary home.
I opened the door when he reached the top of the steps, and he propelled himself inside.
"Oh, God, it's cold out there," he said, and he made a beeline to the fire. He piled on a couple more pieces of wood and stood there for a moment, his face as close to the fire as he could get it without actually singeing his mustache. He closed his eyes with the bliss of the warmth.
"Were they okay?"
"Yeah. Mad. Ted said a few words I think he'd been saving up since the Korean War. I was glad I'm not a member of the McGraw-Cotton family. He actually said he was gonna sue."
"Wonder if he'd have a chance in court."
Tolliver held out a hand, tipped it one way then another. "I want to say that would be ridiculous, but you know how the justice system can be."
We fell silent, looked at each other.
"Are you sorry?" he asked.
"No. You?"
"We should have done it a long time ago. You kept saying I should leave you. I didn't know if that was what you wanted or not. I finally decided to sink or swim. You were thinking what?"
"I was thinking I loved you so much that I shouldn't keep you around me, because you must not find out I felt that way. I thought you might think it was gross or sick. Or...you might feel kind of sorry and responsible for me, which would be worse."
"As far as I'm concerned, you're the original lemons-into-lemonade girl," he said. "You get struck by lightning, and instead of wailing and moaning about it and applying for disability, you discover a usable skill and figure out a way to make it work for you. You've got the brains and the charisma to make it in your very own business."
"Charisma," I said scornfully.
"You do, or hadn't you noticed the way men like you?"
"Adolescent boys like me," I said. "That's not exactly a big plus."
"Not just adolescents," Tolliver said. "They just don't know how to hide it."
"You're saying I'm a guy magnet? Get real."
"Not in the sense that someone like, I don't know, Shakira or Beyonce is. You're not a blond shake-your-booty kind of girl, but you've got your very own attraction, and believe me, men feel it."
"As long as this man feels it," I said. I looked up into his face.
"You made me stop breathing there for a minute," he said.
I looked down and smiled. "At least you know everything bad about me already."
"I didn't know you made that sound when you came," he said, and I did a little not-breathing all my own.
"I didn't know you had that slight curve in your dick," I countered.
"Yeah...ah, how does that...I mean, is that okay?"
"Oh, yeah," I assured him. "Touches something wonderful inside me."
"Oh? Hmmm."
"And I wondered, if you were up for it..."
"Yeah?"
"You'd maybe touch it again?"
"I think you could persuade me. If you went to great lengths."
"Would you like me to go down on you?"
By the light of the flickering fire, I could see his pupils dilate. "Oh," he said.
"Lick you? Like this?" I extended my tongue and did a little flickering of my own.
"That would do the trick," he said hoarsely. "Jesus, Harper, I don't understand why we don't have guys following us from town to town just to watch you do that."
"Because I've never done it for anyone but you," I said. "You don't think I'd say something like that to anyone else, do you?"
"Please," he said. "Please do that for me. And no one else."
I knelt before him carefully, and pulled down his sweats and the long underwear he'd pulled on before his excursion to the Hamiltons'. Somehow, him still having clothes on seemed to make what I was doing even naughtier.
I looked up to make sure he was looking as I made good on my promise. Oh, yeah. He watched my every move as if I'd hypnotized him.
"Oh, my God," he said. He reacted in a very gratifying way.
In my limited experience, men were always so glad to get sex, they were pleased with it no matter how inexperienced their partner was. They weren't there to run a critique group. They were there to have an orgasm. Provided you put their penis in the correct hole and made enthusiastic noises, they went away happy. It was like signing up for basic cable. That was what you'd sign up for if you were getting it for a person you didn't know well.
"For you, baby, HBO," I said, and made him moan.
I woke the next morning to brilliant clear light coming through the bare windows. I blinked and shuddered. I burrowed deeper under the covers, closer to the other body in the bed. Tolliver! I was in bed with Tolliver and we were naked. I sighed with bliss and kissed his neck, which was the easiest thing to reach.
"I guess I have to stop calling you 'sis' now," he said, his voice heavy with sleep.
"Uh-huh."
"I guess Manfred is shit out of luck."
"Uh-huh."
"I guess the chainsaws we hear mean that there are people outside the cabin cutting up the tree, and we don't have any clothes on."
"Oh...no."
"Yeah, hear 'em?"
I did. Wouldn't you know that even though there were fifty empty cabins and houses around this lake, we'd be in the one that had neighbors? And I was going to have to get out of the warm bed to go to the bathroom, and I'd have to flush it by pouring water in. Yuck. And I definitely needed a sponge bath, for which I'd have to stand naked in the freezing bathroom, since there weren't any curtains on the windows and the stupid Hamiltons were out there trying to free their car from the clutches of the tree.
"I hope their car is a pancake," I said.
"You don't mean it."
"No. Yes. Sort of." I laughed. "I just don't want to get out of the bed."
"Do you think they'll stomp up the steps and look in?"
"Oh, yes, any minute." His hand found mine under the huge pile of blankets and he gripped my fingers tightly.
"I don't want to leave this bed, either," he said and kissed me. His hand released mine to skim across my ribs. "But I'm exhausted, too."
"Oh, poor thing. Did I wear you out?"
"I'm a shadow of myself."
"That's funny, you feel substantial enough," I said, rubbing my hand across his (okay, flat and muscular) belly.
"Woman, I need fuel," he said. "If I'm going to keep up with your insatiable demands."
"You haven't even met insatiable yet," I said. Then I dropped the smile. "I can't believe we did it, Tolliver. This is all I ever wanted."
"Me, too. But my metabolism is telling me to eat first and talk later."
I kissed him. "So shall it be." I slid my sweatpants back on and made a dash for the bathroom. Fifteen excruciatingly cold minutes later, I was more or less clean, and I was wearing several layers of clean clothes. I had on two pairs of socks and some rubber boots that Tolliver had pulled off the shelf at Wal-Mart the day before. While Tolliver took his turn in the bathroom, I looked on the shelves above the stove to find a cheap metal pan. I put some water in it and set it on a level place in the large fire. When there was a chance the water was fairly warm, I used Tolliver's folded-over sweatshirt to get the pan off the fire and I poured the hot water into two mugs with powdered hot chocolate in them. We had some Pop-Tarts. Sugar would help restore our energy.
Tolliver smiled when he saw a little steam coming up from the mugs. "Aw, that's great," he said. "Wonder Woman." We sat in the two chairs closest to the fire and drank and ate while we listened to the battery-powered radio. The roads were in terrible condition, and though the temperature would rise above freezing by the midafternoon, roads wouldn't be clear until the next morning. Even then, they'd be patched with ice. Power crews were out repairing downed power lines, which should be reported, and checking on isolated farms. Citizens were urged to check on their elderly neighbors. I glanced out the window. "The Hamiltons are okay, Tolliver," I said.
"Have you tried your cell phone?" he asked.
When I turned it on, I had a few messages.
The first one was from Manfred.
"Hey, Harper, my grandmother got real sick late yesterday, and she's in the hospital here in Doraville," Manfred said. The second message was from Twyla, hoping we were okay out there at the cabin. The third message was from Manfred. "It would be great if you and Tolliver would stop by; there are some issues about Grandmother I'd like to talk about," he said, very much as though he were trying to sound adult but not quite achieving it.
"That sounds bad," I said. "That sounds like turning-off-the-machines bad."
"Do you think we can make it into town?" Tolliver said. "I'm not even sure we can make it up the driveway."
"Did you not notice that I moved the car before the storm hit? It's up by the road."
"Where anyone trying to drive on that narrow road can bash it?"
"Where we won't have to get up an icy slope in it and possibly end up in the lake." Apparently, happy sex and our altered relationship didn't preclude our occasional squabble.
"Okay, that was a good idea," he said. "We'll see if we can get into town around noon, when whatever's going to melt has melted."
Somehow we never got around to talking further about what had happened between us, and somehow that was okay. Tolliver got restless, which I'd expected, and he bundled up and went outside to help Ted Hamilton for an hour or two. When he came back up the stairs, I could hear him stomping snow and ice off his boots. I was reading by the fire, and I was getting a little stir-crazy. I looked up expectantly, and he came over and bent to give me a casual kiss on the cheek, just as if we'd been married for years.
"Your face is freezing," I said.
"My face is frozen," he corrected me. "Did you call Manfred? We saw a car go by while we were out there working, and they made it okay."
"I'll call him now," I said, and found I had to leave a message on Manfred's voice mail.
"Probably has it turned off while he's inside the hospital," Tolliver said.
I opened my mouth to ask a few questions about our new relationship, and once again I saw the wisdom of closing it. After all, why would Tolliver know any more about it than me?
I relaxed and let the tension drain away. We would make this up as we went along. We didn't have to send out announcements. I did have a sudden awful thought. "Ah, this new thing we've got may be a little confusing for our sisters," I said.
I could tell from the expression on Tolliver's face that this hadn't occurred to him. "Yeah," he said. "You know...you're right about that. Mariella and Gracie...oh, God. Iona."
Our aunt Iona - well, strictly speaking, my aunt Iona - had gotten guardianship of our two half sisters, who were much younger than us. Iona and her husband were raising the girls in as different a way as possible from the life they'd led with my parents. And in a way, they were absolutely right. It was much better to be brought up as a fundamentalist Christian than as a kid who didn't know what a real meal was, a kid at the mercy of whatever scum our parents let into the trailer. Because that was the way I'd been brought up after my preteen years. Mariella and Gracie were well clothed, well fed, and clean. They had a stable home to come back to every day, and they had rules to follow. These were great things, and if their early years led them to rebel against this regimen now and then, well, so be it. We were trying to build bridges to the girls, but it was uphill work.
