Chapter 10: The Weekend

The house was very quiet without them.

I stood in the kitchen at nine o'clock on Wednesday night and listened to the clock.

My mother had gone to Big Bay with two overnight bags, a bag of apples and a look.

I had eaten crackers over the sink.

I had read the same page of a medical journal four times.

At nine-fifteen I took out my phone and typed a text to a number I had not saved in six years and knew by heart.

It said, Come to the house. Rule one is off for tonight.

He wrote back in under a minute.

I'm already in the truck.

"You were not," I said aloud, to the phone.

He was.

He was on the porch before I had finished brushing my hair.

I opened the door.

He stood there in the cold with a thermos in his bandaged hand.

There was snow in his beard from the first flurry of the year.

"Soup," he said. "I didn't know what else to bring."

"You brought soup."

"It's pea. It's my mother's recipe, and I'm sorry about that." He held it out. "I can leave it on the step."

I took the thermos out of his hand and set it on the hall table.

Then I took hold of his jacket and pulled him inside.

"Rule one," Tuomas said, against my mouth.

"Shut up," I said.

"Rule three."

"I'm going to break your other hand."

He laughed, a real one, hoarse and shaken, and then he stopped laughing.

He kissed me up against my mother's coat rack.

It was not the careful kiss from the porch.

It was six years of wanting, with his hands in my hair and my back against the wall and my coat sliding off one shoulder.

I got his jacket off.

I got my hands under his flannel shirt and found his stomach, hard and warm and trembling.

"Upstairs," I said.

"Sanna, if you want to stop-"

"I don't. Move."

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