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Kate, who had weaseled the story out of him one leg at a time, was surprised that her hair hadn’t turned white in the telling. Before she had time to formulate a plan, Jane had showed up in the Park, looking for Joh
“Whatever,” Joh
Not that he seemed overly worried about it.
He squinted at Stephan’s writing. “Who’s Woody Guthrie, Kate?”
Kate didn’t want to look up, but she felt it would be cowardly not to. Ethan nodded at the door, his mouth set in a determined line. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Joh
“Yeah,” he said again. He picked up the guitar, leaving fingerprints in the dust. He sneezed once, and a second time, and got up to dampen a dishcloth in the sink.
She shrugged into her parka and followed Ethan outdoors. His snow machine was parked to one side of the clearing, next to Joh
She gave a craven thought to saying, How long is what going to go on? but then thought better of it. Ethan’s expression was very clear in the moonlight. “I’m just-I’m a little-I don’t know, uncertain.”
“What’s this uncertain? You want me; I want you. I’m here, so are you. Jesus, Kate, this is just like college all over again.”
Her head came up. “ ‘Just like college?” Who you going to sleep with instead of me this time, Ethan?“
He blew out an explosive breath. “That’s not what I meant.”
Anger was a good refuge. She thought about ducking into it for maybe ten seconds. “I know,” she managed to say.
“We’ve been dancing around sleeping together for, what, three months now?”
“No,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve been dancing around it.”
“Well,” he said. “Okay.” His smile flashed again.
She smiled in return, relieved. “I’m sorry, Ethan. It just hasn’t felt right. I’m not ready. I don’t jump into these things.”
“Jack must have been one hell of a guy in the sack.”
“It’s not that,” she snapped.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m a little edgy around you.”
She shoved her hands into the parka’s pockets. “I’d better get inside.”
“Hold it.” He stepped forward to pull her into his arms and kiss her. He raised his head. “Feel that?”
Her response was instinctive, her legs opening a little to cradle him between diem. “Who wouldn’t?”
He kissed her again, this time with enough force to press her up against the cabin wall. He kneed her legs apart and rubbed himself between them. “I’ve wanted you for nearly twenty years. Jack is dead. Margaret left me. There’s no reason not to. Unless you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that. I-oh.” His hand had worked its way inside her parka, and she arched into his hand. This was Ethan, high school heartthrob, very nearly her first lover. He was smart, he was fu
No one was.
He kissed her again. But he sure as hell could kiss. When he raised his head, her lips were swollen, her head was buzzing, and her knees were weak. And the smug grin on his face told her that he knew it. “More of that where it came from,” he said, straddling his snow machine. “One bedroom over.”
She stayed where she was, leaning up against the cabin for support, as he raised a hand and roared off into the night.
Back inside, she hung up her parka and worked the pump to fill up a pitcher of cold, clear water from the well located directly beneath the cabin. The well, fed by the water table created by the creek out back. Yet another example of her father’s foresight and ability on this property he had homesteaded before she was born, like the handmade cabin and outbuildings, made of logs carefully fitted together, and as carefully chinked with moss and mud. Stephan Shugak had finished the inside of the cabin the same way, working a winter in Ahtna for a builders’ supply company in exchange for insulation, Sheetrock, and nails, and the hammer to pound them in with. He had sanded the wall paneling by hand after cutting the planks from carefully selected trunks of Sitka spruce that he had felled himself on Mary Balashoff’s setnet site on Alaganik Bay.
It had taken him six years to finish the job; in the process, he had sweated out the last of the memories from the months he had spent in the Aleutians as one of Castner’s Cutthroats. When the last nightmare of the hand-to-hand combat on the beaches of Attu had faded into an uneasy memory, he had judged himself able to take a wife. He chose Zoya Swensen, a lithe woman of his own age, whose family came from Cordova, but like his had originated in the Aleutians, relocated first to Old Harbor on Kodiak Island and from there to Cordova where, it must be said, the first generation of expatriates complained bitterly of the warm climate.
Zoya and Stephan had wanted a house full of children, and instead they got Kate, just about the time they had given up hope of any children at all. This might have explained why first Zoya and then Stephan began drinking. Or it might not. They died so early in Kate’s life that there was much she didn’t know about them. She remembered her father more than she did her mother. He’d taught her to hunt, to use tools to construct and repair buildings and machinery, to chop wood, and to fish. They had built a wooden skiff together, more or less, in the garage the winter she turned five. He’d gotten two bears that winter, too, and they’d ta
He hadn’t taught her anything about love. Neither had Abel, Ethan’s father, her guardian after Stephan died. That, she was still struggling to figure out on her own.
A mirror hung on the wall over the sink, and the grave woman reflected there, with the narrow, tilted hazel eyes and the very short dark hair begi
A discordant jangle interrupted her reverie, and she looked over at the couch to see a frustrated expression on Joh
The guitar was in serious need of tuning, and she got out the tuning fork. It was a tedious process, but Joh
“Okay, enough,” Kate said at nine o’clock. “You going to Ethan’s or you bunking here?”