For a time he lay thinking there was no need for words, that the last hour had flung off the shroud fallen over them, between them, during these days just passed, that they would rise up from here at some point and go on as they always had or not even that but in someway not yet known to them, and he lay believing this until enough time had passed and she had turned with the heat from her back to her stomach and he began to believe this long wordless gap was a point that neither could rise from and carry on as before, that the gap itself was all he needed to know about it. And then he lay for a time more, aware that once he spoke or even likely moved there would be an end to all this. He heard a ewe bleat for her lamb in the pasture above them. Beyond that the snipping worry of a chipmunk. The river. The sound of the river where he wanted to live. Over the surface of the far back pool of the riverbend a green damselfly moved, its wings a translucent blur against the brilliant body. He watched until it was out of sight in the shadow thrown down by the undercut bank. Then he stood and roughed his head with the towel, looking away from her although he could feel she’d sat up, was looking at him, at his back. He took a breath and let it out and took another, her eyes against him. He looked off at the far side of the river and said, “I’d marry you tomorrow, you wanted.”

His words hung out there and fell away and he’d already stepped down off the granite and was climbing the sharp bank to the sheepfence when her words came but he didn’t need them and didn’t want them, the wait long enough to tell him all he needed to know. Gripping the post and feeling the wire cut against the hard sole of his foot as he stepped up onto the fence to swing his leg over. Too late for that. She guessed. Walking alone, scattering the sheep, he wondered why she had to guess. Fucking women. Trying to be kind. Running through the woods toward the house, his sobs ratcheting for breath, wanting just to gain the house and clothes and leave from there, to be gone. Sure now her guess was a kindness, some gentle setting down of him. He wanted out of there. She’d been beaten before and he thought it likely she’d be again. But it wouldn’t be him. The morning’s fear of him in her eyes. It would not be him.