Three Days, No Signal

The coals had been going orange for an hour. She hadn't fed them. She'd watched them instead, from the floor with her back against the couch, the thermal rucked to mid-thigh, both wool-socked feet flat on the hearthrug. Watching the fire die was something she was allowing herself to do. She was allowing herself a lot of things, today. That was the word she kept using, internally, with a precision that told her she'd been building a case.

The wand was on the cushion behind her left shoulder. She'd put it there after she found it in her bag — not hidden, not forgotten, just waiting in the interior pocket where she'd placed it six months ago with the same deliberate casualness she was performing right now. She knew what she was doing. She had always known what she was doing. That was the texture of it, the specific quality of want she had — not surprise, not permission-seeking, but the patient accumulation of conditions until the conditions were exactly right and she could say, without lying to herself, that she had simply arrived here.

Outside, the wind moved through the pines in a low continuous sound, not dramatic, just present. Snow on the roof, snow in the yard, snow making the afternoon into its own sealed room. Three days of it. She had cooked. She had read. She had let the wanting build the way you let a fire build — not by forcing it, by leaving it alone.

The coals threw a low flat light across her thighs. She could see the waffle texture of the thermal where it lay against her skin, the fabric pressing a faint grid into the inside of her left knee. That knee was turned slightly out. She noticed that. She let it stay.

Her right hand rested on her thigh, palm down, not moving. The thermal was warm from her skin and from the fire's last heat together — she couldn't have said where one ended. Her left hand was behind her, two fingers touching the wand's handle without gripping it. Not yet. She was in the moment before, and she knew it, and she was in no hurry to leave it.

The thing about this kind of wanting — her kind — was that she understood it completely and still couldn't stop it. Didn't want to. The understanding was part of it. Knowing exactly what her body was doing, exactly what she'd been setting up since she packed that bag, exactly what the snow and the empty cabin and the dying afternoon were for.

She exhaled. The sound came out longer than she'd intended, open in the quiet room, and she didn't try to take it back.

Her right hand moved one inch up her thigh. The thermal shifted with it, hem rising, and the cooler air of the room reached the skin at the inside of her knee — a thin stripe of cold against all that warmth.

The coals glowed. She watched them, her knees not quite together anymore, her hand still.