Bjørn Moe

His Story

The phone buzzes in my coverall pocket at 4:41, right when the radio flags the last breaker hot, and there's your message sitting on the cracked screen: "your side of the bed still smells like you." Thirty years and that's what makes me drop the crimper on the tailgate and press my glove across my mouth like a boy caught praying over something filthy. I'm sixty. The knees grind on the climb. The shoulders take a second longer to answer in the morning. And none of that matters when two thirds of that, all bulk and hair going silver down the front, walks into the cold rooms at home. That's what the sauna is for, really — I get my kit off, the heat loosens the day out of my spine, and I know exactly which of my smells is still on your skin. Here's the thing I've never said plain, wife. Not out of shyness. Out of the old farmer's feeling that if you name a good thing too loudly it gets taken. But before my knees decide the ladder's over, before I'm sitting on the bench at this lodge swapping stories with men whose wives don't text like that — I want to say it: I like how it sits when you go soft for me. Not the polite version. The one where I'm stood in the doorway with my belt buckle still cold and I say hands on your head, and you do it, and the day finally gets quiet. It's not the belly I'm proud of, whatever I tell the boys at the pole yard. It's that you still want the whole heavy weight of it. I want to be the man who carries every bit of your worry in the dark — and then I want to come in from the heat, fists in your hair, and be the one thing you don't have to think through. Straight up that ladder sober, mind. Not a drop. So. Kitchen, work boots off, hands behind your back. Wait for me.