A Weekend to Surrender

The lodge sat at the end of a gravel road that the bureau plowed maybe twice a winter, and by the time Donny backed his truck up to the woodshed the sky was already going that deep gray that meant dark would come early and stay a long time. Lila got out and stood a minute with her clipboard hugged to her chest, just breathing. The air smelled like pine and cold stone and somebody's old woodsmoke, and it was so quiet she could hear her own coat rustle.

"Kinda eerie, ain't it," Donny said, coming around the tailgate with two duffels and that easy grin of his. "Whole place to ourselves. Forty rooms and nobody to holler at us."

"Forty rooms and one furnace," Lila said. "I read the maintenance file. If the pilot light goes out we're gonna be doing inventory in our parkas."

"Then I guess I better keep you warm," he said, and then he went kind of pink and busied himself with the duffels, and Lila pretended she hadn't heard it, or rather she pretended she hadn't liked hearing it as much as she did.

She was forty-four years old, and she had been a receptionist at the regional wildlife bureau for six years, which meant she had spent the last three of them answering phones three desks away from Donny Marek, forty-six, seasonal hunting guide and the only man in the building who brought her coffee without being asked. She had been divorced at thirty-eight after ten years of marriage to a man who mostly talked at her, and she had not let anybody touch her since, and if you had asked her why she'd volunteered for this weekend she'd have said it was for the overtime, which was even mostly true.

The truth was she'd watched Donny carry chairs around the break room for three years and thought about his hands.

Inside, the lodge smelled faintly of cedar and dust, and the great room had a stone fireplace big enough to stand in. Donny got a fire going the way he did everything, slow and unbothered, stacking the split birch and talking the whole time about nothing, the squirrel population, the new truck, the way Teller in accounting wore his tie. Lila unpacked the inventory binders on the long oak table and listened to him and watched the firelight start to move on his face, and she thought, well, here we are.

By seven it was fully dark and the temperature had dropped like it had somewhere to be. Donny found a bottle of rye in the caretaker's cabinet, marked for visiting officials, and held it up. "Technically this is inventory," he said. "I'm just gonna go ahead and inspect it."

"Inspect it right over here," Lila said, and dragged two of the huge leather chairs close to the fire, and that was how they ended up sitting knee to knee with the wind worrying the shutters and the whole black woods pressed up against the windows.

He poured two fingers each, no ice, and they touched glasses, and the rye went down warm and mean and settled in her chest like a second fire.

"Three years," Donny said, out of nowhere, looking into his glass. "You and me been working three years, and this is the first time we ever sat down and talked."

"We talk every day."

"We say good morning and we complain about the printer. That ain't talking." He took a sip. "My ma used to say you can work next to a person for a decade and never know if they're lonely or just quiet."

"Which one am I?" Lila asked, and she heard how the question came out softer than she meant it to.

"Both, I think," he said. "Same as me."

The fire popped and sent up a little storm of sparks. Lila turned her glass in her hands. "My ex-husband, Gary, he used to say I was quiet like it was a fault. Like quiet was something I was doing to him." She laughed, a short surprised sound. "Ten years. God. I was thirty-eight when it ended and now I'm forty-four and I keep thinking, that's a long time to be nobody's anything."

"You're somebody's something," Donny said. "You're the whole front office's somebody. Half those wardens would walk into traffic if you asked."

"That's different and you know it. That's being liked. That's not..." She trailed off and looked at the fire because looking at him was suddenly too much. "That's not being touched, Donny."

He was quiet a minute. The wind knocked something against the side of the lodge and settled. "I know it's not," he said finally. "I haven't been touched in, hell, eleven years. Had a couple of short things when I was younger, thirties, nothing that stuck. Never lived with anybody. Some guys aren't built for it I guess, or I just never met the right..." He stopped and rubbed his jaw and did not look at her and very carefully did not finish the sentence, and Lila felt her heart do something complicated.

"Never met the right what?" she asked, because she was going to be brave tonight or she was going to regret this weekend forever.

"Right person," he said, and then he did look at her, steady, the firelight in his eyes. "I was gonna say right person, Lila, and I've been looking at her for three years and never had the guts to say a word about it, because she's way out of my league and way too kind to tell me so."

"Oh," Lila said.

"Yeah," Donny said.

"Oh," Lila said again, brilliantly, and then she laughed and put her hand over her face. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm saying oh, I've been half in love with you since the Christmas party when you carried my crockpot to my car, and I have said nothing, absolutely nothing, for three years."

"The crockpot," Donny said, grinning now, leaning toward her. "I knew it. That dang crockpot."

"Shut up," she said, laughing, swatting at his shoulder, and he caught her hand, gently, and just held it, and neither of them moved for a long moment while the fire cracked and the dark pressed at the windows. His hand was rough across the palm and warm all the way through, and she looked at their hands and thought about those hands for three years and felt her face go hot.

"Can I tell you something kind of scary?" she said.

"I'd be honored."

"I've only ever been with Gary. One man, ten years, and he wasn't..." She shook her head. "He wasn't tender. I don't even know if I know what tender looks like. And I'm forty-four years old and I'm sitting here thinking I might like to find out, and it terrifies me, Donny, it really does."

Donny set his glass down on the floor slow, like he was giving himself time. "Can I say what I'd want, and you can just listen, and you don't have to say yes to any of it?" he asked.

"Okay," she said, barely.

"I'd want to take real good care of you," he said. "Slow, and gentle, and only as far as you want to go, tonight, and if you want it to stop at hand-holding by this fire, then that's a wonderful night too and I'll drive you home tomorrow and never once make it weird at the office. Nothing about the job rides on any of it, not the overtime, not your desk, nothing. This part is separate. Just till dawn. You set the line, honey, and I will not cross it."

Lila looked at him, this big quiet man with sawdust permanently in his hair, who had just handed her the whole thing like it was nothing, as if of course she got to choose. Her eyes went wet and she was glad the light was low.

"Come here," she said, "and kiss me, Donny. I'd like that," she added, because she wanted it said plain, out loud, both of them hearing it.

He leaned in slow enough that she could have moved away, and she didn't, and his mouth found hers soft and warm and tasting faintly of rye, and Lila made a small sound into it that embarrassed her completely and that she did not take back. His hand came up to her jaw, careful, like she was something that had waited a long time and deserved patience, and she thought, oh, there it is, there's tender, and kissed him back.

They kissed again, longer, and it was clumsy in the sweetest way, both of them out of practice, noses bumping and teeth clicking once and both of them laughing into each other's mouths, and Lila thought she could not remember the last time laughing and kissing had gone together so easy. Donny pulled back an inch and rested his forehead against hers, breathing a little hard, and his thumb moved along her jaw like he was memorizing it.

"Okay?" he asked, and it was almost funny, this big man whispering okay to her like she was made of glass, but it was not funny, it was the whole thing, it was everything.

"Okay," she said. "More than. Though I should warn you, I'm nervous. I haven't been with anybody since Gary, and even that, well, even that wasn't much to write home about toward the end. I keep waiting for my body to remember the rules and it's like the rules have all been thrown out."

"Good," Donny said, and she gave him a look and he held up his hands, grinning. "I mean, good that the old rules are gone. New rules. Ours. We write them tonight, and we can rewrite them anytime you want. And Lila, for what it's worth, I'm nervous too. It's been eleven years. I keep thinking any minute you're gonna notice I'm just a guy who fixes furnaces and shovels out outhouses."

"I noticed that about three years ago," Lila said. "It's part of the appeal, in case you were wondering. A man who can keep a furnace running." She reached over and took his hand again, and this time she was the one who did it, and that felt like a rule of the new kind. "So. We've got a fire, a bottle of somebody's rye, and forty empty rooms in this lodge, and I don't want to inventory another binder tonight. What I want is to go somewhere with a bed and find out if you're as gentle as you've been promising me."

Donny let out a breath that sounded like he had been holding it since seven o'clock. "There's a bed in the caretaker's quarters, down the hall, made up with clean sheets from last spring. It's not fancy."

"Donny Marek, I have spent three years watching you bring me coffee and I promise you I have never once thought about fancy," she said, and stood up, and her knees were a little unsteady and she let them be unsteady, because being nervous and doing it anyway was sort of the whole theme of the night.

He banked the fire first, because he was Donny and of course he banked the fire, and he took her hand in the dark hallway like two people walking into a dance, except he was forty-six and she was forty-four and the hallway smelled like pine and old wood, and her heart was loud enough she could hear it.

The caretaker's room was small and warm, one window, one bed with a heavy quilt, one lamp Donny turned low so the room went soft and amber. He stood in the middle of the floor and looked at her, and she looked back, and for a second they both just grinned like fools.

"So," he said. "Here's how I'd like to do this, if you like it. I'd like to undress you slow. One piece at a time. And before each one I'm gonna ask, and you can say yes or you can say not yet, and either answer is fine by me. How's that sound?"

"That sounds," Lila said, and had to stop and swallow, "like the best idea anybody has ever had in the history of ideas. Yes. Start."

"Boots first?" he asked, and she nodded, and he knelt down on the floor in front of her like it was nothing, as if kneeling were easy for him, and worked her boots off one at a time and set them by the door neatly, and then her socks, and his thumbs pressed into her arch through the wool and she nearly melted on the spot.

"Oh my lord," she said. "Do that again."

He laughed, low, and did it again, and then looked up at her from the floor with his eyes asking the question before his mouth did. "Sweater? You can keep your jeans a while yet if you want."

"Yes," she said, and lifted her arms as a child at a fair might, and he laughed at that too, warm, not mean, and pulled her sweater up slow over her head, and the air was cool on her skin and she flushed all over, standing there in her jeans and her plain white bra, forty-four years old and terrified and lit up like a lamp.

"You're beautiful," Donny said, and it did not sound like a line, it sounded as though a man was reporting a fact, and Lila had to look at the ceiling for a second because her eyes had gone wet again.

"You don't have to say that."

"I know I don't have to," he said. "I've been wanting to say it for three years and I finally got the chance, so I'm gonna say it some more, fair warning." He stood and touched her shoulders, light as anything, and turned her a half step toward the