I had started reading Breville’s letter the way I usually did, walking the gravel road back to the cabin. But when I got to that part, I stopped. My body heated up and I felt light-headed. I felt like I could hear Breville saying the words to me, as if I could see his face as he said them. I stood on the edge of the road until I finished the letter.
Once I got inside the cabin, I took off my clothes and dug through the bathroom drawer for all my pink razors. I felt like I was shaking, and I was still light-headed. I couldn’t explain it. Other men had talked about it before, but I always told them off — I didn’t like the bare, little-girl idea of it. Yet here I was, nicking my fingers for Breville.
Breville.
I propped the mirror against the dresser, but it was still hard for me to see what I was doing. I started with the scissors, but I was up to the razor part now, pulling the skin taut with one hand and scraping with the other. My neck ached from bending over, so I stopped for a second and wished he could see how much trouble I was going to. As soon as I thought of him, though, I got the hot, quick feeling all over again, and I kept on.
When I finished the job, my skin felt tender— no doubt from all the scraping, but also because my protection was gone. I felt raw inside my panties, and my jeans seemed like armor when I pulled them back on. Even inside my clothes, I felt too present in the world. I walked around for a while, trying to get used to the feeling, but after a bit I gave up. I took off my clothes again and put on my softest nightgown. The cotton was a comfort. But I understood what Breville meant about how soft the skin was. It was softer than anything I’d ever touched.
It’ll grow back, I told myself. And I let myself sleep.
The sun was low in the sky by the time I walked down to the dock to swim. For a second I wondered if the water would make the shaved place between my legs burn, but nothing hurt when I slid down into the water. After a few moments, I realized what I should have known all along: lake water never stung or burned, not even when I opened my eyes underwater and looked up to the sky. There wasn’t anything in it to burn. The water was clean enough to drink, though I never had, except for the stray mouthful I swallowed when a boat wake hit me or I stuttered through a swimming stroke. If anything, the lake water soothed me. So I swam out until I was over the deepest part— eighty feet down to the bottom, if the maps were to be believed— and then I turned to float.
There were no boats, or at least none that I heard when I tilted my head back and let water fill my ears. I kept my back straight and held my arms out at my sides at first, but then I let my body go limp. My arms and legs drifted down slightly, and it seemed like I was half sitting and half lying in the water. When I floated like that I couldn’t ever get over the feeling that the whole lake was holding me up— all five and a half billion gallons of it. Even though I’d gone through the trouble to look up the size of the lake and calculate the gallons, the number didn’t get at the feeling I had when I floated, which was the sensation of being held up by a great, dark thing, something that went on for a long, long time. It was like floating in the night sky and the Milky Way galaxy.
When I came back from the dock that evening, I peeled off my wet suit and stood looking at myself in the bedroom dresser mirror. The mirror was big and low, and I could see my bare vulva, which looked both familiar and disturbing. Familiar because it reminded me of what that triangular patch looked like when I was in fifth grade, and disturbing because I wasn’t a ten-year-old girl. It was an unusual sensation to be ten years old and thirty-three at the same time, and I had to walk away from the mirror and pull on my cotton nightgown again.
I thought Breville might call that night at nine— his usual time— but he didn’t. The silence made me feel foolish, like I was all dressed up with no place to go. But I did not feel so foolish that I couldn’t lie on the sofa and play with my newly bare and lake-damp self for a few moments. And in another few moments I knew I had to go into the bedroom, to where my vibrator was, plugged in and ready.
Before I lay down, though, I got two clips from the bathroom. They weren’t real nipple clamps, just two flowered hair clips from Target. But I figured they’d work. And they did. Their light pinch made everything more urgent, and between those sensations and the feeling I got when I touched my own skin, I came hard— once, twice, a third time. I thought the shaving might change how things felt, but it didn’t. Yes, there was more air surrounding my orgasms, and a new sharpness, like someone had music on too loud, but the contractions and feeling of falling were the same. If anything, the experience of the orgasms was stronger, but I didn’t know if that was a result of my bare skin or the chilly tightness I felt in my nipples.
But the main change was the one in my head. I felt vulnerable and exposed just as I knew I would, and I didn’t like seeing my ten-year-old self when I looked in the mirror. But I also felt other things. Blatant. Straightforward. Even to me the silkiness was be-witching. The whole thing seemed to be some kind of declaration. But what exactly was I declaring? That I was willing to be seen? That I was willing to do something that someone asked? I didn’t know. But it was a declaration I made on my own body.
On my skin.
34
WHEN BREVILLE CALLED the next night, I still wasn’t over the bare sensation of my vulva, but the thrill I’d felt when I first read his letter came back. I could barely wait for the “This is a call from an inmate at a Minnesota correctional facility” message to play through.
“So, did you get it?”
“Your letter?” I said. “I just got it yesterday.”
“No, did you get the job?”
“Oh, I did. I did get it. And I accepted it.”
“I knew you would.” “I know, I know. And I guess I’m going to rent my neighbor’s house when he goes away for the winter.”
“Why can’t you stay where you’re at?”
“It’s just a cabin. But I’m going to rent Merle’s house.”
“That’s a good deal for him.”
“It’s a good deal for me.”
“So you have it all worked out already,” Breville went. “See? I told you. I’m happy for you.”
But he sounded anything but happy. His voice was tight and quiet. So I said, “Well, I did get your letter. And do you want me to cheer you up?”
“Cheer me up?”
“Yeah, do you want me to tell you something good?”
“Sure. Tell me something good.”
“Well, the letter came yesterday, and I already did it.”
“Did what?”
I didn’t want to come out and say it. I thought he should be able to figure it out, plus I knew the phone call was recorded. So I said, “You know. The thing you talked about in your letter. The thing you apologized about asking for? I did it.”
Breville waited awhile and then he asked, “What did you go and do that for?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you’d be happy.”
“Happy? Why would I be happy when you’re out there and I’m in here?”
I felt defensive then. Embarrassed. “I guess I wanted to try it,” I said. “I wanted to see how it felt.”
Again there was silence on the line. I wondered if something had happened in between the time Breville had written me the letter and now, or if I had entirely misunderstood.
“Well, you have to at least let me see it,” Breville told me. He sounded tired as he said it, though, and I began to wonder why I’d gone through the trouble.
“The next time you visit,” he said. “You can give me a little show.”
“A show?”
“When are you coming down?”
“I was thinking about tomorrow, but I don’t know.”
“Come on Monday. It won’t be as crowded. I’ll lean over and tie a shoelace. Like I did last time.”
“Don’t worry,” Breville said. “Plenty of women do it.”
“Well, maybe you should ask one of them for a show.”
“I’m j
ust saying plenty of women flash their husbands. Their boyfriends. That’s all I meant.”
I didn’t know why I was surprised. Of course Breville wouldn’t want to just hear about it. Of course he’d want to see it.
“Maybe,” I said. Yet even as I was saying it, I was figuring out which dress was heavy enough so it wouldn’t cling to my ass. Dark enough so it wouldn’t show damp.
After I got off the phone with Breville, I felt unsettled, and I kept on feeling that way even after I went for a long swim. I knew it was from the phone conversation and the plan Breville had cooked up, but I also felt odd because I kept feeling like I was being watched. That’s how that four-inch bare patch made me feel— and I felt it even with clothes on. Most of the summer I hadn’t missed the distractions of the Cities, but just then I wished I could go somewhere for a cup of coffee, or wander in a store that was open late— anything to get out of the cabin. I knew there would be nothing open in town, but I thought I should go anyway. Even walking around the grocery store would be better than not doing anything.
So I drove to town and went grocery shopping. It was calming to walk through the aisles, putting things into my cart. But it wasn’t until I was headed home and passing the Royal that I realized the real reason I’d been willing to get in the car. Before I could even really think about what I was doing, I slowed down and began to look for the truck. I didn’t remember the license plate number, but it didn’t matter: I was looking for a blue Ford with Wyoming plates.
I circled the block and even drove down some of the side streets, but the cowboy wasn’t there. For a second I thought about going into the Royal to see with my own eyes that he wasn’t there, but I didn’t want to walk in the place. I was lonely, but there was nothing to do for it— at least I knew that. So I told myself, Just go home. Just go home and call Julian.
But it was not that simple. You could not have the amount of wanting I had inside me and be out in the world and not have the world send you something back. Or so it seemed to me, because when I pulled up to the cabin, I saw that someone had been there while I was gone. Not because of a garage door left ajar and or a note quickly penned— I knew it because someone had left a half-empty beer bottle on the stoop of the cabin, tucked beside the door.
35
HE, HIM, GABRIEL— though I never called him by his full name— came to the cabin around midnight. I was waiting.
“You didn’t even wait until the bar closed this time,” I said. “I’m flattered.”
“Jesus Christ, I was here earlier. You were the one who wasn’t here.”
“Did you ever think of calling? Do you ever just call people?”
“I’m here now.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw the bottle. I looked for you in town.”
“Why? Why would you look for me there?”
“Because I can feel you out there,” I said. “Don’t you get it? I can feel you out there somewhere.”
“I’m in between places. Can we leave it at that?”
This time I was the one who took a step toward him. I rubbed my fingertips and then my hand over the fly of his jeans and over his cock.
“What places are you between?” I said. “Here and Blackduck? Here and Thief River?”
All I got for an answer were his hands on my breasts and between my legs. We were done talking for the time.
A little later, though, after we’d made it into the bedroom and were stripping down, he saw my bare patch of skin and said, “Jesus Christ, what did you do?”
I didn’t answer. I knew what he was thinking: he wondered if he was the only one I was fucking. But there was no answer for that. I wasn’t fucking anyone else, but I would never tell the cow-boy about Breville. It was none of his business anyway.
“Do you like it?” I said.
For an answer the cowboy shook his head and kept looking at me. I still didn’t explain anything. Let him go on looking.
When we got on the bed, he made me lie back and spread my legs wide. He ran his fingers over the skin.
“It’s like you want to play or something,” he said, and his voice sounded far away and a little angry— not so different from Breville’s on the telephone.
“Do you like it?” I said again, but this time I had my palm around the base of his cock.
“What do you think?”
“Do you want to play with me?” I said.
“What do you think?”
I couldn’t get anything else out of him, but when we were fucking, he kept saying, “I want to see it, I want to see it.” So even though it was still easier for him to stand beside the bed and fuck me as I knelt, I kept having to turn over so he could look at my cunt. He wanted to get so far inside me with his hands and his face and his cock that it seemed like there wasn’t enough of my body. As for me, the thing I wanted most was his mouth. When we kissed I rubbed my tongue hard over his teeth so I could feel their edges, and I kept my fingers by our lips so I could feel us kiss. I bit his lips and I sucked his tongue and I drank his spit. And no matter how we fucked or where he came, the cowboy howled. But no matter how much the cowboy howled, he never did get to the end of me.
Sometime in the night I got up from the bed and went down to the dock to swim, and again he didn’t stir, just as he hadn’t the first time we were together. But when I got back into bed, he reached over to the back of my neck and wrapped his hand with my wet hair.
“Do you have to go and wash it away?” he said in the darkness.
“It’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“It cools me,” I said.
He didn’t say anything else, but I got the feeling he wasn’t asleep. I kept myself awake, listening to his breathing, to the way he moved on the bed, but then I must have fallen asleep, too, because the next time I opened my eyes the room was blue and I knew I’d had some kind of dream and his hand wasn’t in my hair anymore.
This time when the cowboy was leaving, he didn’t say, I’ll call you in a couple days, or I’ll see you soon, or We’ll make some plans— we were done with the pretense. Instead we just lay down on the bed and he sucked my pussy one last time. Then he was gone.
36
THE NEXT DAY WAS MONDAY and I was supposed to be driving down to Stillwater, but when I woke up, I didn’t want to go. Even though I spent most of Sunday napping after the cowboy left, my head was tired and I felt achy— from not enough sleep, I knew, but also from everything that had gone on in the last few days. I was on overload, and it reminded me a little of the mixed-up way I used to feel when I was in my teens and early twenties and always seemed to be tee-tering on the edge of one crisis or another. It had taken me a long time to understand most people didn’t live like that, with constant drama in their lives, and I wondered at myself now. It seemed clear I was doing the same old thing all over again with Breville and the cowboy.
There was a quieter way to live, I knew— it was why I’d come north and it was what I pursued half the time. It was why I went on long swims, why I spent afternoons reading and napping on the dock, why I bought a red Huff y three-speed bike with coaster brakes at the Ace Hardware in town. I didn’t think you could still get a bike with coaster brakes, and now I had one. I even bought one of those tacky plastic baskets with flowers on it for the handle-bars, and the whole thing made me happy. But dozens of things had made me happy this summer: the painted turtle that floated into me one day, listening to Merle tell me his recipe for boiling up the jewelweed that grew along the lakeshore to make a tincture for poison ivy, or the way everyone in one town diner reminded me of a Thoreau essay from 1860 that talked about “men who are not above their business, whose coats are not too black, whose shoes do not shine very much.” They were small things— some of them just moments— but they were real, and I trusted them, so much that I’d staked the next year of my life on them. Because even though I said I was taking the new job because I wanted a change, it mattered to me what kind of change it was. If I didn’t t
hink I could make a different kind of life up here for myself, and a better one somehow, I never would have accepted the offer.
But along with believing in smaller bits of happiness, I also believed in my own strong emotions, and the way I felt when I was in the thick of something vivid. And that was how I felt now. What-ever and whoever Breville and the cowboy were, my experiences with them were real. What I felt was real, and I could not walk away from the intensity of my feelings for either of them, no matter how unwise my emotions were. And I could not walk away from feeling itself.
But on this particular day I’d had enough. I wanted the day to myself. I knew Breville was waiting to see me down in Stillwater, but after fretting about it for a moment, I decided it would be good for him to wait a day to see me. Not because I wanted to punish him for his reaction to me on the phone the other night, and not because I wanted to pay him back for the wasted trip I’d made when he was on lockdown. Rather, I thought it would be good for him to wait a day to see me because he was the one who told me I did not need to do his time with him. On this particular day my life— my real life, not the artificial one I shared with him in the visiting room at Stillwater— had intervened. I was tired from fucking the cowboy. I didn’t want to drive four hours to the Cities. That was all.
I didn’t owe anyone anything, I told myself. Not the cowboy and not Breville. Especially not Breville.
After I napped most of the afternoon on the dock, I rode my bike partway around the lake. I went past the place Merle called “the scar,” which was a steep lake lot where the owners had cut away all the trees between their house and the lake so they could have a view and a big sand beach. If Merle was really riled up, he called it “the goddamn scar upon the land” and couldn’t stop cursing.
“They took out every living thing,” Merle said when he explained the history of the place to me. “Except that all those trees and all the brush they chopped out were holding the slope in place. Now it’s falling into the lake. Goddamn fools.”
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