OCR Text |
Show ALASKA-12 TRAINING FOR ALASKA As if from a space under the floor of a boathouse, she lay listening to his heartbeat overhead. What if she were to pound on the boards? What if he heard? She sat up and switched on the light. "Wake up," she said, "I need you." "What?" he said and turned into the pillow. "Why? Sleep." She twisted away from him because she was thirty-five, had been since midnight. This is what love came to: soles of the feet that itch the more you scratch. Love is impossible. A three a.m. truth. Later, a cup of coffee and a smile from him, and he would say, "Of course I love you." He'd pet her chin with the back of his curled hand and she would accept the reprieve. And yet, roundness was no longer the right shape. At thirty-five, she needed angles, edges, points. It would not do any longer to whimper, to beg, "Ian, hold me." Instead, she curled up away from him, her hands cupping her shoulders tightly, elbows jutted out in front, and finally she slept. When she woke up again, he handed her a cup of coffee in bed and said, "Happy birthday," already making the three a.m. revelation feel unreal. His thick chest hair showed in the vee of his bathrobe so that she wanted to press the insides of her fingers against the dark curls. At the kitchen table over the second cup, he held the bathrobe shut at the throat with his fist and said, "I have news. We got the permit to make the |