Shona Gillies

Her Story

The thermos has lived in my glovebox since October, and it still carries you — pine resin, a lick of woodsmoke, the warm salt of your neck. I boil water from the burn and filter it twice, the way the job taught me, and twice this week I put the lid back on without drinking. My own tea goes in the flask. This one waits. You couldn't have got it out of me on a Tuesday. But then the rain came in off the west, I stood at the trailhead holding out heat given hand to hand, and I unzipped my jacket halfway and pointed at the truck and called it the only shelter for twenty miles. That was the whole confession. The storm was never what I was holding back. I'm forty-six, soft through the middle and generous where it counts, and twenty years of knowing exactly which fungi are safe has taught me nothing about what to do with a body that fits against mine. So here's the thing already spinning: you shaking rain off your coat, the back seat creaking under us, and me undressing you the way I clear a burn for chanterelles — slowly, hands checking every part, then stopping to work my mouth down your throat and the slant of your collarbone until you're gripping my shoulders just to keep upright. I want your hands settling hard on my hips. I want to watch your face drop into all that warm pressed softness and stay there, no room, no distance, no patience left. Fogged windows, my jacket rucked and damp, the hours leaving their mark on my own skin — I want it all clashing inside the space of a cab until my head goes quiet. And I want the deep lungful of campfire and wet wool and me to be the last good thing that night. I hook one thumb under the strap of my watch and wait — that's where my hands go when I'm deciding something — and I keep the serious face under the grin. I laugh loud and often. Not with you. You're the one thing I don't laugh at. There's a wool blanket on the seat and twenty miles of nothing, and it's going to be cold enough all night to need it. Come finish this.